Will Holloman, the narrator, is a fifteen-year-old boy growing up in a violent neighborhood. At the time when the story takes place, his elder brother, Shawn, has just been shot. Will warns the reader that they will not believe the story he is about to relate, but he swears that it is true.

After Shawn’s death, Will goes back to the bedroom they shared, thinks about his brother, and tries to avoid crying. He finds the gun that Shawn kept hidden in their room, and immediately thinks of it as a tool with which he can avenge his brother’s death. Shawn has taught him the “Rules” of masculine conduct: never cry, never snitch, and always seek revenge for a wrong. Will is certain that he knows the identity of the murderer: Shawn’s former friend, Carlson Riggs, now a member of the Black Suns gang. The morning after he finds the gun, Will sneaks past his mother and leaves the apartment, seeking revenge.

Will’s apartment is on the eighth floor of the building. He enters the elevator to go down to the lobby, but it only goes as far as the seventh floor before a man joins him. He recognizes the man as Buck, an older friend of Shawn’s, who once was like a brother to him. Will is terrified, because he knows that Buck is dead. Buck admits that he is dead but does not explain how he came to be in the elevator. He simply says that he has come to check on the gun he gave to Shawn. When Will says that he is going to use the gun to shoot Riggs, Buck does not believe he is capable of doing so.

On the sixth floor, a beautiful teenage girl enters the elevator. It takes Will some moments to realize that this is Dani, a childhood friend of his who, like Buck, is dead. Dani was shot at the age of eight, when the two of them were playing together. Will cried for her all night, but in the morning, Shawn told him that men do not cry. Dani asks Will why he has a gun. When he describes his plan for revenge, she asks him what will happen if he misses his target.

The next figure to enter, from the fifth floor, shrouded in Buck and Dani’s cigarette smoke, is Uncle Mark. Mark was killed by a drug dealer when Will was a young child, but Will recognizes him from the pictures his parents have kept and from his mother’s stories. Uncle Mark asks him to describe his revenge plan like the plot of a film. When he does so, Will is unable to say what happens after he draws the gun. After Buck helps him to finish his sentence, Will says that he will shoot Riggs, and that will be the end, but Mark tells him that this is impossible. There is never an end.

When the elevator stops on the fourth floor, Will sees and immediately recognizes his father, though they have not seen one another since Will was three years old. Will feels awkward, making small talk with his father as though he were a stranger. His father, whom he calls “Pop,” tells him about his own attempt to avenge Uncle Mark’s murder, in which he shot the wrong man. When Will hugs Pop, Pop seizes the gun from Will’s waistband, and points it at his head, terrifying him.

On the third floor, a man Will does not recognize enters the elevator. This is Frick, whom Will has never seen before but who is...