Laurel Daneau is still reeling from the losses she endured during Hurricane Katrina. When her new boyfriend introduces her to meth, she spirals into addiction. But as she slowly becomes a shell of her former self, she longs to become whole again.

What's the line that separates childhood from the "real world"? And what happens when the "real world" is nothing you imagined it would be? Six award-winning authors --- M. T. Anderson, K. L. Going, Beth Kephart, Chris Lynch, An Na and Jacqueline Woodson --- tackle the subject of the "real world" in this collection of pieces about graduation, suicide, pregnancy, death, pain, love and loss.

The day D Foster enters Neeka and her best friend’s lives, the world opens up for them. D comes from a world vastly different from their safe Queens neighborhood, and through her, the girls see another side of life that includes loss, foster families and an amount of freedom that makes the girls envious. Although all of them are crazy about Tupac Shakur’s rap music, D is the one who truly understands the place where he’s coming from, and through knowing D, Tupac’s lyrics become more personal for all of them.

Miah and Ellie meet at a private school in New York and fall in love. Theirs is a rare and special first love, but the people around them don't see it that way. They can only see black and white: Miah is black, Ellie is white and Jewish. And their love, no matter how real, is too strange and scary for the world they live in.