Tara realizes how lucky she is compared to her friend Janet, whose unstable home life forces her to beg for money in the streets and sleep at an abandoned building called Hell's Hotel, but a series of setbacks show Tara that disaster is never far away, and she joins Janet in trying to make some needed changes.
A week after a crazy old man in the woods takes Josh's dirt bike, Josh decides to retrieve his bike from the old man he suspects is the hermit of Loggerman Creek.
Cody begins to realize there is more to life than running with a tough group of friends and beating people up when he starts drumming with a new band, but he is unsure if his old friends will let him leave that way of life behind.
Carson, a sixteen-year-old at an expensive private academy for students who have flunked out of other schools, hates everything in the world, including himself, until he meets Christine, who lives alone in a trailer, abandoned by her parents.
Teenage runaways Melanie and Trent try to stay in school after they leave home and try to stay off the streets by getting part-time jobs, but it becomes difficult to balance the demands of school with their low-paying jobs.
After sixteen-year-old Michael Grove is convicted for the murder of his girlfriend Lisa Conroy, tried as an adult, and sent to prison, the true murderer confesses; after his release, Michael has trouble escaping the stigma of criminality and decides to take suprising recourse to set things right.
Seventeen-year-old Brandon, having survived a fall from a tree, decides to take his luck and buy a lottery ticket, but, after he wins three million dollars and the money begins causing stress in his life and problems with his friends and family, he begins to question if he is lucky at all.
