For sixteen-year-old Aaron (Kevin Hooks), all that really matters in life is playing basketball - at least until he meets and falls in love with Angela (Irene Cara), a fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl in Harlem. Knowing it would result in violent objections, Aaron and Angela keep their romance a secret from their parents. Amid all the secrecy, the affair still runs smoothly as the teenagers rendezvous in a room they have furnished in a deserted tenement building. However, their idyllic romance is interrupted when three drug dealers invade the building and end up killing each other in a shootout. When one of them gives Aaron $250,000 in cash and tells him to run, he does. And though Angela wants him to turn the money over to the police, Aaron drops the ill-gotten loot from an elevated subway platform onto the street below where the happy citizens of Harlem scramble to retrieve it.