Ft. Lauderdale, 1997: Sun-burned tourists buy cheap T-shirts, white-legged geriatrics clog the highways, frat boys prowl the A1A strip, and Mark Reynolds is trying to understand how everything turned into quicksand. Mark fronts a band that seems to get bigger with each successive show, he writes a column in an independent weekly, and spends his days as part of the Scene, where beer and good people are never in short supply. This is the destination Mark has aimed for, the place all velocity and trajectory have deposited him. But why then does he wake up every day feeling worse than the day before? As the summer rolls relentlessly on, his band, his friends, the hanging-out -- it all seem increasingly bleak, until Mark reaches for the one thing that will set it all right, or ruin everything completely. These are the three weeks in August that will define the rest of his life, and irrevocably change the lives of his two best friends.