Fifteen-year-old Tyrell, who is living in a Bronx homeless shelter with his spaced-out mother and his younger brother, tries to avoid temptation so he does not end up in jail like his father.

In jail after being charged with his father's murder, seventeen-year-old Antonio finds his love with sixteen-year-old Natasha tested and engages in a desperate ten-year correspondence with her from behind bars, during which both turn to each other at times of trial.

Sixteen-year-old Kid, who lives on the streets of Brooklyn, loves Felix, a guitarist and junkie who disappears, leaving Kid the prime suspect in an arson investigation, but a year later Scout arrives, giving Kid a second chance to be in a band and find true love.

The lives of a number of young people of different races, economic backgrounds, and family situations living in Brooklyn, New York, become intertwined over a seven year period.

Coming of age in the midst of the Bronx drug trade, nineteen-year-old Jessica, fourteen-year-old Coco, and their lovers experience budding sexuality, teen parenthood, and gang identity, in a social examination of the challenges of family life in the face of violence.

16-year-old Angel works the streets for Call to support her drug addiction. Other girls on her beat start disapperaing without a trace and the authorities don't care. But after her friend Serena disappears, and when Call brings home a girl who is even younger and more vulnerable than her to learn the trade, Angel knows that she and the new girl have got to find a way out.

Sixteen-year-old Marley Diego-Dylan's career as a DJ is skyrocketing, but his mother's heroin addiction keeps dragging him back to earth.

After a brawl with a rival gang, sixteen-year-old Azael wakes up in an unusual juvenile detention center where he is forced to watch another inmate -- a white girl -- through a one-way mirror. Watch her and try to remember.

Ali lives in Bed-Stuy, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for guns and drugs, but he and his sister, Jazz, and their neighbors, Needles and Noodles, stay out of trouble until they go to the wrong party, where one gets badly hurt and another leaves with a target on his back.

Julia DiVino tries hard not to get mixed up in the Bloods and the Crips at her high school, but when Eric Valiente enters her life everything changes. Lines are redrawn, and then they're crossed.