When a 12-year-old California boy’s attempt to run away from his abusive home is thwarted, he defies the police, and wages a war of words against his father. At first he escapes by jumping onto a freight train bound for San Francisco. He wants to start an imaginary baseball team, go to an imaginary school, and become a real writer. But when cornered by the police and angered by the lies his father tells to the newspaper, he uses his wit and humor to fight back and he publishes his own truth for his teammates, his girlfriend, and his father to read. He’s a polio survivor and a Mexican adopted by a white family in the 1950s, so his fight for his truth becomes more than a struggle to survive life on the street—it becomes a struggle to find his own identity.