When thirteen-year-old Ellie reluctantly agrees to enter a beauty pageant with her best friend Coralee, the director seems determined to feature Ellie and her wheelchair, so she must find a way to participate on her own terms, all while saving her friendship and forming a better relationship with her divorced dad.

Told in blank verse, twelve-year-old Cass struggles to cope with her father's recurring cancers that have dominated her whole life, with the knowledge that he is likely to die soon because the latest recurrance is worse--and with the possibility that she may have inherited the genetic disease, Li Fraumeni's Syndrome, that causes the cancers.