Seventeen-year-old Malik Kaplan has a cross to bear, or maybe it’s a Star of David; being the black teenaged son of a Catholic mother and Jewish father frequently makes life confusing. His grandfather, uncle, and older brother all ruled as the top guys at high school. Only his father is a “forgotten Kaplan” and seems disinterested in his only surviving son. Malik is determined to be the worst of the worst and not repeat his father’s mistakes; even if that costs him the people he cares about. At least he can drink. 

Alcohol keeps him going; alcohol is destroying his life. But he doesn’t see any problem, not even after he finds himself in court, shouldering the blame for someone else’s crime.

He’s faced with court-ordered community service shepherding an angry ten-year-old who hates the world, an “offer he can’t refuse” from the boy’s gang leader brother, and an opponent he can’t crush: Barney, a fourteen-year-old girl who watched her alcoholic father abuse and murder her mother. She wants nothing to do with any bad boy, especially not one who thinks drinking is the way to forget his sins. Now Malik has to decide if her problems are bigger than his own, or if they should both go out “in a blaze of glory.”