The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Bump, Gabriel. Everywhere You Don’t Belong. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020.

Claude’s story begins on the South Shore of Chicago, where he lives with his grandmother and her friend Paul after being abandoned by his parents. Claude changes schools frequently, making and losing friends as he does so. Paul loses his lover, who he calls Teeth, to suicide, prompting Claude’s school to send a guidance counselor for support. A boy named Jonah, who is a talented basketball player, moves in down the street. Both Claude and Paul admire Jonah for his basketball skills, to the point that Paul begins to attribute any positive event to his influence. Jonah eventually moves away.

The Redbelters, a gang in the neighborhood that deals drugs and causes trouble, tries to recruit Claude and his classmates at school, much to Grandma’s chagrin. At school, Claude meets a new friend named Janice, whose parents come to his house to socialize with Grandma and Paul. While they are watching a football game, they learn that the police killed a black child nearby. An angry crowd, led by the leader of the Redbelters, Big Columbus, starts a riot, and violence ensues on the part of both the police and the gang. Janice’s father, Jimmy, dies in the violence, and her mother, Annette, moves away to escape the grief.

Claude joins the school newspaper, and decides to try college in Missouri. Janice decides not to follow him, telling Grandma that she wants to work in the service industry. When Grandma and Paul ask Claude why he would ever want to leave, he responds that he does not belong in Chicago, but Grandma tells him that he does not belong anywhere. Despite Grandma and Paul’s protestations, Claude leaves for Missouri.

Once at school, Claude joins the school newspaper, where the demanding editor, Connie Stove, immediately assigns him and the other black writer, Simone, to a project on diversity. Simone is upset because she thinks that they are being defined by their race. After working at the newspaper one day, Claude returns home to find Janice sitting on his bed. She does not initially tell him why she is there, but insists that they go to a safer place. Once at a motel, she tells Claude that she had reported one of the Redbelters to the police, and was afraid that they would come after her. Claude decides that he will do whatever Janice asks and protect her.

A group of six white men come into the motel and scream racist insults at the motel manager and Claude. Claude goes upstairs to find Janice, and when they return downstairs later, they find a banner with a racial slur plastered on it. At the motel manager’s insistence, Claude and Janice run away to the outskirts of the city. Grandma calls Claude to tell him that men came looking for him and threatened them, and he wonders if he will ever see her and Paul again. Claude and Janice return to the motel and hide in the storage room. When the Redbelters come after them, he finally has the opportunity to shoot Big Columbus, but decides not to, and runs away with Janice.