Apart

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