When twelve-year old Jesse Hawthorn moves to a rural community with her emotionally distant father and bratty younger sister, she has a hard time trying to adjust in her new town. For starters, she is boyish looking and takes great pleasure in collecting crickets and other assorted insects. Jesse has also attracted the unwanted attention of Brenda Richards, a girl whose personal mission seems to be to complete Jesse's misery by bullying and harassing her. To top it all off, she has just killed yet another one of her good "friends"; a woolly bear caterpillar that she had been keeping inside of a plastic bubble gum container in spite of the warnings from her science teacher, Mr. Jordan. When Jesse reluctantly accepts an invitation to join the lunch table of her sympathetic neighbor Jacob and his two friends Howie and Lucille, she begins her transformative path of self-discovery.