Emanuel is a seventeen-year-old young woman who is still wracked with guilt over her late mother who died giving birth to her. On the train on her way to her job at a medical supply shop she meets a boy named Claude, with whom she becomes romantically involved. Emanuel lives at her small home in Los Angeles with her father and her stepmother, with whom she is anti-social because she is nothing like her mother, and who accuses her of thinking she is a lesbian, as per her name being Emanuel (since her parents believed she was going to be a boy), as a way to justify her bitterness to her stepmother.