Jordan Allen Wallace is anything but your typical NYU sophomore. A veteran, Jordan's obsessive focus on his academics, coupled with a physical appearance that often causes people to mistake him for a female, sets him apart from his fellow students. With the exception of his sister, Emma, he has no friends to speak of and little in the way of a social life. That changes when Jordan meets Emma's boyfriend, Conner, an FBI agent.

What starts out as a prank turns into something serious when Conner seizes upon Jordan's unique qualities to help him obtain information about a professor at NYU, who fought the Soviets with the Mujahideen before coming to America. Repeated failures to slip an informant into the professor's inner circle forces Conner's superiors at the FBI to resort to methods that are progressively more unusual.

In Jordan, Conner believes he has found a perfect, if somewhat novel, solution. That solution involves a practice popular among some of northern Afghanistan's ruling elite. Known as baccha, adolescent Afghani males dress as females in order to entertain their masters.

Step by step, Jordan goes from participating in some innocent fun to becoming an informer. In the process of adopting a lifestyle that is as foreign as it is challenging, Jordan finds he must come to terms with his own sexuality and gender. Doing so is difficult as he discovers time and time again that he has entered a world of shadows and lies, a place where neither friend nor lover can be trusted.