Synopsis of At the Slaughter

When you're born into nothing, you're bound by nothing.

Foster O'Reilly is the anti-Jersey girl, a punk rock priestess submerged in and seduced by any trace of desperation. With her dyed black hair, tanned skin and underfed frame, Foster looks like a gypsy urchin as she cuts her Bohemian trek across the cul-de-sacs and clean-swept streets of suburbia.

Abandoned by her parents at the age of seven, Foster is raised by a resentful aunt and her subjugated husband. Foster's cousin Brian is her only companion in the lower middle class subtopia. But Brian is more than friend to Foster: she looks on him as salvation, even as their relationship crawls past pathos and into obsession in her early adolescence.

Brian isn't Foster's only addiction. Foster is equally fascinated by her best friend, Shannon Marion, a self-possessed suburban debutante who wants for nothing.

When Brian is incarcerated in a juvenile detention center, Foster's welcome in her aunt's household is worn through and Shannon's family, the Marions, open their door to the wandering girl. Foster indulges in the seeming sublimity of the unbroken Marion household, imagining herself a member of the clan. But Shannon's soft blond beauty masks a domineering intensity that only Foster is truly privy to. Foster is a science project for the cool princess, a charge she begrudgingly accepts.

As Foster stumbles undaunted through a Dickensian life, her schoolmate, wilting wallflower John Orton, watches from any advantageous corner close to the girl. John, a meek but intelligent boy, is intrigued by Foster's indifference to the social norms that he feels shackled to. John lavishes an endless supply of attention on Foster, flattering and exasperating her.

Foster moves out of the Marions' home and into a rundown apartment, and encourages a relationship between Shannon and John, finally gaining a measure of respite and independence in her world.

Chain-smoking outside her high school one day with a shoddy circle of delinquents, Foster sees Roger Marion, Shannon's school teacher father, drive off with a promiscuous female coworker. When he returns several hours later, a shattered Foster is there waiting for him. After a violent outburst, Foster breaks down in his arms in the school parking lot and resolves to keep the incident from Shannon.

Nevertheless, Roger's wife discovers the affair and, when confronted, Roger lets slip that Foster knew of the infidelity. After she and her mother move out of the family home, Shannon resolves to cut both Foster and Roger out of her life completely.

Startled by the vacuum left in Shannon's wake, Foster drags herself back to the family home to search out Roger. The odd pair's friendship is forged in cheap beer and loneliness. However, the relationship barely lasts the summer before Foster's volatile behavior leads to their estrangement.

Increasingly isolated, Foster spends her nights steering a beat up car along the Jersey Shore's dying highways and reflecting on the years that have built up on her shoulders. As the winter holidays crawl up on Foster, she reaches out to her father, to Brian, to Roger, searching answers to questions she hasn't fully formed. Each man increasingly disappoints her. Sitting on the hood of her car in a country road near Roger's house, watching the death rattle of the night's violent hail storm, Foster finds comfort in the chaos. With the storm over, Foster peels out into the damp street, radio vibrating the metal doors, a manic, unrestrained teenage joy coursing through her for the first time in months. But Foster's speeding vehicle doesn't make it safely down the straightaway.

Quiet John Orton is emboldened by Foster's death. He determines to search out the truth of her life amid his fantasies. As his investigation leads to encounters with Foster's friends and family, John becomes increasingly unhinged, taking extreme measures to gain insight into Foster. At the Slaughter is Foster O'Reilly's life as narrated by John Orton. But where does John's perception of Foster's world end and the reality of her short, troubled existence begin?