One afternoon after Kelly Thorndike moves back to his hometown, an African-American man he doesn't recognize calls out to him. To Kelly's shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, one of his closest friends in high school--and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he's had a plastic surgeon perform 'racial reassignment surgery' and is living a new life.