Shannon is a former fashion model who recently suffered a devastating gunshot wound to her face. The injury destroys her lower jaw, leaving her unable to speak clearly and abruptly ending her lucrative career. Feeling abandoned by her fiancé and best friend while recovering in the hospital, she isolates herself until she crosses paths with Brandy Alexander. Under Brandy's guidance, Shannon learns to obscure her scars with veils, abandons her past, and begins a transient, anonymous life on the road.

Brandy is a glamorous woman preparing for gender confirmation surgery. She encounters Shannon in a speech therapist's office and takes an immediate interest in her, teaching the former model how to make and wear veils to hide her facial injuries. Brandy operates by her own unconventional rules, frequently touring open houses to steal prescription hormones from medicine cabinets. She firmly believes individuals must actively erase their pasts to create entirely new futures.

Evie is a highly successful model who trained and worked alongside Shannon for years. Dramatic and outgoing, she enjoys the privileges of her beauty and prefers being the center of attention. Early in their careers, she and Shannon performed improvised dramas in department store furniture displays and posed for fashion shoots in junkyards. When Shannon suffers her catastrophic injury, Evie invites her to stay at her country house but immediately leaves for a modeling job in Cancun, exposing the superficial limits of their friendship.

Manus is a former police detective who met Shannon while investigating an accident at her parents' house, prompting them to run away together. He previously worked as an undercover vice cop, wearing increasingly small speedos in attempts to entrap men paying for sex. After a gunshot wound destroys Shannon's face, Manus abruptly breaks off their engagement while she recovers in the hospital. He later becomes entangled in a chaotic cross-country road trip with Shannon and Brandy.

Shane is Shannon's older brother, who passed away from complications related to AIDS years before the main events of the story. During his youth, he suffered severe burns from an exploding hairspray can in a burn barrel. His memory casts a long shadow over Shannon's life, as she continually feels unable to secure the affection her parents lavish on his idealized memory.

Mr. and Mrs. McFarland are Shannon's parents, who live in a state of performative grief over their deceased son, Shane. They heavily favor his memory, completely overlooking Shannon's ongoing presence and needs. In a darkly comic display of hypocrisy, they proudly align themselves with PFLAG organizations, tape their windows shut, and hide their car in the garage, bizarrely hoping to become targets of a hate crime—despite having disowned their son when they first suspected he was gay.

Gon Rhea, Die Rhea, and Pie Rhea are a trio of drag queens who made their fortune inventing a speaking doll. They serve as a protective surrogate family to Brandy, adopting her when she had nowhere else to go. They fund her medical procedures and fiercely encourage her complete separation from her biological family.

Mrs. Cottrell is Evie's mother, working as a real estate agent in Los Angeles. She unwittingly crosses paths with Shannon, Brandy, and Manus when the trio targets one of her open houses to scavenge for prescription medications in the bathroom cabinets.