Five children meet on their first day of school, one bright September morning. Gabby, Billy, Izzie, Andy and Sean - each bursting with their own personality, all with strikingly different looks and diverse talents - soon become an inseparable group, known to everyone else as the Big Five. As they grow up, their seemingly perfect lives are altered by families falling apart, and losses and victories great and small. As they emerge from school, their futures seem neither safe nor clear, and the challenges and risks they face become greater, the losses sharper. It becomes much harder to know the right path to choose.