The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, a man-made body of water in the middle of California's Mojave Desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally disabled, but the boys' mother seems unwilling to do anything about it. The burden, then, is Ares' to shoulder, as he must protect his vulnerable brother from a world which sees him as strange, as "a retard." When this task becomes too great for Ares he moves into the sphere of an older boy named Kevin, an orphan who has been fostered by one of Malcolm's teachers. As their relationship arcs from dangerous to deadly, Ares comes to understand and embrace the uneasy relationship between selfhood and the responsibilities of familial love.

The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, a man-made body of water in the middle of California's Mojave Desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally disabled, but the boys' mother seems unwilling to do anything about it. The burden, then, is Ares' to shoulder, as he must protect his vulnerable brother from a world which sees him as strange, as "a retard." When this task becomes too great for Ares he moves into the sphere of an older boy named Kevin, an orphan who has been fostered by one of Malcolm's teachers. As their relationship arcs from dangerous to deadly, Ares comes to understand and embrace the uneasy relationship between selfhood and the responsibilities of familial love.