It's the 90s.  Girl is a tough street kid in San Francisco who speeds away on a red states road trip crime spree looking for love and a place to belong.  But  can she outrun her mother’s fate and live to see her 18th birthday.       This story is an Adaption of the 2005 novel Crashing America by Katia Noyes.

SYNOPSIS:

Girl is kicked out of her Granddad's house. Her street buddy Cara dies. When fellow street hustler Angus heads for Memphis, Girl hits the road herself. With $200 from her estranged father, Girl hops a Greyhound for Nebraska to follow farm girl, Randa, an earlier love interest. Girl is torn between her yearnings for freedom, and her need for a solid connection to anyone. Her 18th birthday approaches, the age at which her mother committed suicide. Does she follow? Where does she belong?

At a roadside bus stop she meets Jessika, a stripper, and her boyfriend, Joey, a Christian punk rock drummer and decides to join them. Their mosh pit at a warehouse gig turns into a prayer circle. In Salt Lake City, Girl reconnects with Meredith, a one-night stand she met in San Francisco whose husband tries for a kinky threesome. It does not go well. Girl steals a car from behind the strip club where Jessika is working and heads for Randa’s promise of idyllic cornfields.

Girl finds Randa is engaged to a farmer-not the refuge she expected but she does work hard in the fields and likes it. When local police find the stolen car, Girl steals Randa’s motorcycle and escapes to South Dakota. Randa decides to leave the fiancé to be with Girl. Their relationship explodes quickly and Randa’s parting gift is a handgun ... and a beating.

Girl finds the boarded up small town where her people were from and carves her mother’s name in collapsed bleachers behind the school. She befriends Pammy, a teenager with internet and shoots off an email to her flamboyant friend Angus who invites her to join him and his new “Daddy”, Jim in Memphis.

On her birthday, Girl gets drunk and plays with the handgun, with a vague plan to kill herself but is stopped by Pammy and enjoys a simple celebration, something no one has ever done for her. To get to Memphis, though, she steals a pickup, and impulsively, the family cat.

Girl runs out of gas and money. Desperate, she holds up a gas station, gets arrested for shoplifting and beaten in the Louisville police station. In the jail cell, she prays. Angus and Jim rescue her but back at the stolen pickup left in the parking lot the cat has died in the heat. She is broken, mentally and physically.

Angus & Jim nurse her back to health and on the way back to Memphis they talk about having babies and creating a family together. But Angus ditches Jim for a modeling gig in Atlanta and the family fantasy collapses. So much for prayers.

Back in San Francisco, Girl reconciles with Grandad. She has survived her birthday, learned the value of hard physical work and gained a quiet, if lonely, self-reliance. The big blue sky can be found back in San Francisco, too. For better or worse, she’s home.