Sixteen-year-old Alice Carroll is a self-illustrated girl. Always ready with her pen, she grieves her mother's death, hates her father for abandoning her, resents her grandmother's low expectations and armors herself with ink before entering a new high school after moving to a privileged neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Her entry into that La La Land of sculptured landscaping and SUVs is complicated by her summer flirtation with Matthew, a college boy who comes by her work at Comikaze Coffee, a coffee and comics shop, to walk her home most nights. The flirtation becomes more the night before she starts at her new school and he goes away to college, with Alice's expectations of a relationship low. She's had too many losses to believe that anyone stays. More losses than anyone knows. When Alice's father reappears and wants to see her, she's shocked that he expects her to welcome him back, the man driving the car that killed her mother. Or that her grandmother, Birdie, would let him come, since she's no fan of her father's. Furious, Alice reaches out to Matthew, who suggests she come to see him at college. When things fall apart, Alice vows to never forget that no one ever stays and draws her feelings on her skin to keep herself safe, and others at a distance. But some people ignore the warnings, finding a way to get inside Alice's illustrated walls, and she's torn between trusting in friendship and holding on tight to grief.