Brent Bishop, the new kid in eleventh grade, has just committed social suicide at the party he counted on to make him cool. Drunk, enraged and humiliated, he decides real suicide is the only future he wants. When it's over, Brent just has bruises, but Lea, a loving, eighteen-year-old honor student, the driver who hit him, is killed. Her mother wants Brent to keep the girl's spirit alive by making four whirligigs with her face and her name and planting one in each corner of the country. With a bus pass, a book and a photograph, Brent takes on her task. As he spreads Lea's spirit, she gives him his own, and by the time he is done, he has discovered his own capacity to face the future. The world is a whirligig, its parts invisibly linked, and his whirligigs will affect other lives in ways...