Sometime in the 1970s, 15-year-old loner Agnes Marie "Mooney" Pottie dreams of escaping existence in New Waterford, a coastal Nova Scotia town on Cape Breton Island. She quietly scorns most of the people around her, including her large family, who don't share her sensibilities; her fiercely-Catholic family think she's weird. She thinks she's realized her dream when, with the help of her teacher Cecil Sweeney (who came to New Waterford to find himself and is still looking) she wins a scholarship to a New York art school. When her parents don't let her go, she devises a plan to escape New Waterford. Meanwhile, a bit of NYC comes to New Waterford when Lou Benzoa and her dance-instructor mother temporarily move in next door to the Potties to escape the Bronx until "the stink dies down." Lou becomes friends with Mooney and quickly gains a reputation as the female Equalizer, whose powers only work on the guilty.