Seventeen year old Ruby Winters is pretty, athletic, and a school prefect at Barnard High in Johannesburg, South Africa. But in a country divided by Apartheid, where blacks and whites cannot socialize together, she carries a dangerous secret about her life behind the walls of her well-to-do family home. Ruby's parents break all the rules by allowing a young black artist, Julian, to live covertly and illegally with them. But on the eve of the Soweto riots tragedy strikes, and Ruby's world is turned upside down forever...