Nervous little 104-pound sophomore Michael Peck would like to join the wrestling team, but when he breeches the subject to his intellectual-snob parents after getting booted from band, they're unable to hear him and prepare a contract for him to join the Science Club instead (a parent-child agreement documented in legal terms which he is forced to sign and obligated to maintain). Skipping school with his best bud Geiger, they run across two senior girls, Emily and Becca, also skipping. Peck and Emily begin a tenuous relationship, mostly due to Peck's interest in her. They are worlds apart in savvy (she with much, he with none), but it's interactions with her and experiences in his classes that shape Peck's forced-upon science fair project, which, when presented, rocks the genuinely indifferent and platitude-numbed school system from its slumbering core.