Young Selena, who would rather twirl than walk, begins to study ballet and, after years of practice and a great deal of encouragement from Miss Tutu, finally makes her stage debut.
Relates, from various points of view, events from the night of October 6, 1998, when twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was lured out of a Wyoming bar, savagely beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die.