Two eight-year-old Little League teammates Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey both experience life-altering events in the summer of 1981 in Hutchinson, Kansas. Neil, the son of an irresponsible single mother and already discovering his homosexuality, is Child sexual abuse by the Little League coach, who leaves town after that summer. Brian, with a neglectful father and a mother who is often working, remembers it starting to rain during a game. The next thing he remembers is being in the crawl space of a house with a bloody nose, having no memory of the intervening five hours.