It's May 1970 and Tally Gigi McCall, a history scholar and former debutante in Hamper, Georgia, has been restless for a long time.
Weary of misperceptions about the South, tired of being dismissed as a pretty "sorority girl" and frustrated by Southern traditions that keep the status quo intact, Tally vents her fury, within the society norms that bind her, after learning of the murders of four students, her peers, at Kent State University.
Determined to stop being the ingenue, Tally navigates through landmines of decorum to honor these students, who were shot by the National Guard during a peaceful protest, at a Military Gala the night of the tragedy.
She struggles to win a History Award to study at Oxford while competing against a shrimper's son who is a brilliant, young Black man. She experiences a level of intimacy she's never known with her boyfriend from New York. She uses her awareness of Georgia's hidden history, as the only colony of the original thirteen to ban slavery in its royal charter, to take a stand against the military draft for Vietnam, her definition of modern-day slavery. Ultimately, as she is named the local Military Gala Queen, she must decide how to help a friend escape the draft at the risk of her social status, her own legal freedom and the wrath of her father who is a Federal Judge.
In her political coming-of-age journey, Tally must determine what she believes, how she can use her restlessness to provoke change, how her privileged "status" may be the most original way to disrupt the "status quo," and how she can find the truth she craves in the creed she trusts:
"The present has all the questions while the past has all the answers."