It is 1973 and Watergate is on everyone's lips. Lucy Painter is a children's book illustrator and a single mother of two. She leaves New York and the married father of her children to live in a tightly knit Washington neighborhood in the house where she grew up and where she discovered her father's suicide. Lucy hopes for a fresh start, but her life is full of secrets: her children know nothing of her father's death or the identity of their own father....

When a family tragedy occurs, ten-year-old Alyssa "Blister" Reed changes schools, moves to an apartment with her depressed mother while her father gets his own place, and tries to believe her grandmother, who tells her she is "elastic" and can handle it all.

Julie MacNeil feels threatened both in the family and on the soccer field when her widower father begins to date the mother of her arch-rival Benji True.

Ben's troubles at school get progressively worse when he starts hanging around Trout, a new boy in his fifth grade class, who is also labeled as learning disabled.

Two sixth graders with a pretend psychiatry practice come upon a small mute child from an orphanage and determine they are going to use all their knowledge to help her to talk.