Tom Henderson languishes in the lower echelons of the pecking order at Hillmont High. He's a dork, as is his only friend, Sam Hellerman. Tom and Sam spend their lives trying to avoid the daily ritual humiliations meted out by their peers. It's not a great life. Tom's father, a cop, died in a mysterious car accident when Tom was just eight, and when Tom finds a dog-eared, annotated copy of The Catcher in the Rye that belonged to his father, it sets off a series of coincidences and conspiracies involving dead people, naked people, fake people, and above all, blow-jobs.