Blair picks Clay up from the airport after his first semester away at Camden College in New Hampshire.

Clay attends Kim's party, buys cocaine from his dealer Rip, and briefly spots Julian before Julian walks away.

Clay visits Muriel in the hospital, where she is being treated for anorexia and watching MTV.

At Kim's New Year's Eve party, Muriel locks herself in the bathroom and injects heroin as a photographer takes pictures.

Julian meets Clay at a restaurant and asks for cash, claiming it is needed to pay for an abortion.

Clay sees graffiti in a club bathroom stall that suggests Julian may be dead.

Blair drives drunk after a concert and hits and kills a coyote on the road home.

Clay calls his psychiatrist and ends their sessions, deciding the man is not helping him.

Clay finds Julian at an arcade on Westwood Boulevard and learns he must retrieve money from a man named Finn.

Clay accompanies Julian to a hotel penthouse and watches Julian service an older male client.

Finn beats Julian in a club bathroom, forces heroin into his arm, and makes him perform a sex act for another client.

Clay and his friends find a dead teenager with blood on his lip overdosed in the alley behind the Roxy.

Rip brings Clay to his bedroom, where a drugged and naked twelve-year-old girl is tied to his bed.

Clay tells Blair at lunch that he never loved her; she says it was hard to love someone who was never really there.

Clay drives alone to Topanga Canyon on his last night in LA, resolved to return to New Hampshire.

Clay returns from his first semester of college to a Los Angeles consumed by drugs, parties, and emotional emptiness. He reconnects with old friends, buys cocaine from his dealer Rip, and visits his friend Muriel in the hospital where she is being treated for anorexia. As his vacation progresses, Clay grows increasingly disturbed by the disappearance of his childhood friend Julian and the escalating violence around him. He eventually discovers that Julian has been forced into sex work by a pimp named Finn, and witnesses the brutal degradation Julian suffers. The novel reaches its darkest point when Clay's friend Rip reveals a drugged child tied to his bed, and Clay finally confronts the moral bankruptcy of his world before resolving to return to college and leave Los Angeles behind.

The headline events of Clay's disintegrating winter break in Los Angeles.

Clay has lunch with his mother after arriving home; she tells him he looks unhappy.

Clay goes Christmas shopping in Beverly Hills with his sisters, who use their father's charge card freely.

Clay wakes up before dawn at Griffin's house after an implied sexual encounter and leaves quietly.

Clay has lunch with his father, who asks if Clay wants to join him in Palm Springs for Christmas.

Clay runs into Julian outside a Westwood cafe; Julian apologizes for ignoring him and says he has dropped out of USC.

Clay takes Blair to Daniel's party and the two have sex at Blair's house afterward.

Daniel calls Clay on Christmas Eve to say a college girl named Vanden may be pregnant with his child.

Clay goes to the beach with Rip, Griffin, Alana, and Kim on a day when Julian could not come.

Clay, Blair, and Kim go to a movie about teenage girls being murdered and run into a couple they want to avoid.

Clay and Rip have lunch at a cafe; a woman collapses from heat across the street and neither of them reacts.

Clay attends Blair's father's party celebrating the potential casting of an expensive Australian actor.

Clay visits his former elementary school and feels panic when he sits down and plays a few notes on the old auditorium piano.

Clay accompanies Julian to Finn's penthouse apartment on Wilshire Boulevard for the first time and feels sickened by their exchange.

Rip drives Clay aimlessly and stops the car on a highway above dozens of wrecked cars lying in the canyon below.

Blair calls Clay the day before his departure and asks him not to leave for New Hampshire.

While Clay drifts through his four-week vacation, the smaller moments of his daily life accumulate into a portrait of privilege, disconnection, and moral drift. His family interactions are perfunctory and cold, his friendships are built entirely around drugs and parties, and his encounters with the wider world go largely unprocessed. He spends his days shuttling between expensive restaurants, the homes of absent parents, and clubs where nothing meaningful is ever said. The trip to Finn's penthouse marks the point where Clay's passive drifting collides with something genuinely sinister. By the end of his vacation, even the people closest to him — like Blair — have accepted his emotional absence as simply the cost of knowing him.

The quieter moments and social encounters that reveal the hollowness of Clay's world.

Clay visits his psychiatrist, who spends the session talking about plans to remodel his own home in Tahoe.

Clay notices a billboard reading 'Disappear Here' on Sunset Boulevard and cannot explain why it disturbs him.

Clay's separated parents come together for a silent Christmas dinner at Chasen's before his father is dropped at his penthouse.

Clay goes to the Chinese Theater to meet Julian after Rip's call, but Julian never shows up.

Clay visits Julian's Bel Air home and a woman by the pool tells him Julian owes her money for cocaine.

Clay delivers an envelope of cash to Julian, who sits watching MTV and barely acknowledges him.

Clay picks up a sixteen-year-old girl from a club and sleeps with her; he returns to his car to find a note from Blair.

Clay sneezes blood at a psychiatrist appointment from cocaine use and begins to cry unexpectedly.

At Spago with Trent and Blair, Clay tells Trent that he and Blair are no longer together.

Clay and Blair have a passionate sexual encounter at Kim's party the night after the coyote incident.

Walking out of Finn's penthouse, Julian tells Clay that he assumed Clay simply would not care about his situation.

Clay visits Daniel and learns Daniel has decided not to return to college, preferring to write a violent screenplay instead.

Clay asks Rip why he is raping a preteen girl; Rip says he has nothing to lose and the right to take what he wants.

Clay finds his sister's cat dead in the yard, killed by a coyote.

Clay spots Finn in a grocery store and tries to avoid him, but Finn follows Clay down the aisle and smiles at him.

Beneath the surface of parties and drug use, a series of quiet and jarring revelations shape Clay's experience of his vacation. From the moment a billboard reading 'Disappear Here' unsettles him without explanation, Clay is dimly aware that something is pulling him toward a reckoning. His relationships crumble as he grows detached from Blair, discards his psychiatrist, and watches his friend Daniel abandon any ambition beyond a violent screenplay. The revelation that Julian has been forced into sex work, followed by Clay's horrified confrontation with Rip over the abuse of a child, forces Clay to voice a moral judgment for the first time. These moments of recognition accumulate into Clay's decision to leave — though the darkness of LA lingers in the form of Finn's unsettling smile in a grocery store and the sight of his sisters playing dead by the pool.

The discoveries, decisions, and emotional fractures that define Clay's slow moral reckoning.