Apart

Plot

Jessica, a serious, bookish 16-year-old from New Brunswick, places a personal ad to try to find her father, a drug-dealing philanderer who has run off with another woman, leaving her mother distraught and Jessica responsible for her autistic brother, Timmy. Sween, a 17-year-old rebel from Saskatchewan, responds to Jessica’s ad, and the two begin an intense long-distance relationship. Each needs the other's support, as Jessica finds herself drawn to one of her father’s biker friends, and Sween suffers a meltdown that lands him alone in a remote cabin. Eventually, he fixes up an old motorbike and travels east to help his friend prevent her father from institutionalizing Timmy. The resulting encounter surprises them both along with the reader as they struggle to reconcile their images of each other with a very different reality