For Ahkeem

In the course of two years, teenager Daje Shelton is placed in an alternative high school, attends the funerals of friends shot in the streets of North St. Louis, falls in love, becomes pregnant, struggles towards her uncertain graduation, watches the Ferguson protests — just four miles away — on television and gives birth to a boy, grappling with the reality that her son may fall into the cycle of violence and incarceration in which black men in Missouri have been trapped for decades.