Nora, a single mother raising two teenage daughters, Shade and Trudi, waits tables at a truck-stop diner in a small New Mexico town. The beautiful and rebellious Trudi drops out of school and gets a job alongside Nora, while the younger Shade whittles away her time at Spanish movie matinees. Their lives are turned upside down when Trudi becomes pregnant and the girls' absent father returns.

A Texas Ranger has to protect his two daughters as he investigates a serial killer who is attacking cheerleaders. Meanwhile he finds himself working with a safe cracker who claims to be innocent of the charges filed against him.

A highly respected and revered baseball coach has been accused by a female student of conducting some kind of research that borders on sexual molestation. When her parents decide to report him to the authorities. They are held in contempt, because the community can't believe that this wonderful man could do the things that they are accusing him of.

Michael Mikaele is a young man in a catatonic state living in a psychiatric ward where his doctor thinks her sympathies for him justify raping him. It's all part of his mad world, and we see what brought him there. He's an artist from a broken home, working for eight years at a job that he loathes, drawing pictures from sayings on sexually suggestive T-shirts. Mike's unsympathetic boss, Bill, plays bad motivational tapes over the P.A., makes Mike's girlfriend (another employee) handle him during office hours, which is espied by co-worker Joni, and refuses to let Mike have the rest of the day off even though he is clearly ill. He ties together T-shirts out the bathroom window to escape, and befriends a man, Rod, whom, unbeknownst to him, is his girlfriends father. He, however, hallucinates that the cinematographer is walking around the apartment in nothing but a towel...