This book is simply about a boy who is being abused, but does not realize it. He does something that his father tells him never to do, and that’s going outside. His father forces him to live in the basement for most of his life. Each and every day he sits down there, waiting for his father to say, “Okay Charlie, punishments over. You can come upstairs now.” But it never happens. Charlie is forced to sneak outside every single night to go to the bathroom, when his father is asleep. But this one particular time he goes outside, he accidentally gets locked out of the house and is afraid that his father will really punish him if he finds out what he did.
Charlie wonders out in the street and passes out. When he awakes, he finds himself in a hospital. These people scare him because he has never been in the outside world before. He is so afraid that father will come to get him and force him back in the basement. He is told he is very sick and they nurse him back to health. Then he is sent to a foster home and is told he can’t be with his parents anymore, because they are bad people. His father is then sent to a mental institution. Charlie soon gets over his fears and lives the life he never had.