Coming of Age

Coming of Age is the journey of several groups of teenagers as they live with sex, love, drugs, crime, and mental illness in Barclay, a town in the Pacific Northwest. While Barclay’s natural landscape is stunningly beautiful, the city is ripe with poverty, drugs, and common crime. Tearing into the lives of the story’s characters is a dangerous underbelly that offers little hope for those who get caught up in it.

At the center of the story is Ryan, a seventeen year old drug dealer struggling to find himself. By junior year of high school, Ryan is on top of the world. He has transitioned from a creative introvert who preferred being alone and into a strong, confident leader. He is a star wrestler for his high school’s Varsity team and is immensely popular amongst his peers. But one cruel summer night, the love of Ryan’s life, Cindy, is assaulted. It awakens an old wound Ryan never knew existed… or maybe has been ignoring. After getting away with murdering Cindy’s attacker, Ryan goes through a spiral of opioid dependency, violent confrontations with rival drug dealers, and questioning his own morality. He begins to be haunted in his dreams by a Monster that slowly starts to manifest in his real life. Ryan’s emotions become increasingly unstable as he begins to lose the people closest to him and his own grip on reality. An unhinged drug dealer, Kenny, refuses to let go of a grudge he holds against Ryan. The conflict between the two may prove to be deadly.