Inside Butchie's room -- where Butchie and Kai are not fucking, OK Cissy? -- Kai tells Butchie that she saw him out in the water this morning. "I got your boards outside," she adds. Butchie looks up from the hole that he's been staring in the floor to regard Kai with greater warmth than ever before. So intensive is his gaze that he doesn't pick up his ringing cell phone...

...To receive the call that Bill is placing. "Every call I make, afterwards, I got to use a cuticle scissors," Bill tells Shaunie, while waiting for Butchie to pick up. When he doesn't, Bill leaves a message: "Butchie? Message from Bill Jacks. Shaunie's over here with me. So you may just want to call or, you know, get over here." Bill hangs up. "Voicemail. Not there," he informs Shaun before picking up a book "that deals with anniversaries of people that are dead...there's various chapters, helping the bereaved be at ease." Sounds like light bedtime reading. Or possibly the source of night terrors. "What this has to do you with, thirteen years old," Bill says -- "Fourteen," Shaun corrects him -- "Fourteen years of age," Bill continues. "And thank God you've lost no one to feel grief over the anniversary of." On the downside, that's really going to affect Shaun's ability to write mopey poems about death to try and make girls think he's sensitive, not that I spent several months of my teenage years doing precisely that, no sir. Bill's point for trotting out his Necromonacon or whatever the heck his book of the dead is, is this: "People are sad for various reasons. And sometimes an outside source is required, even to help them know they feel sad. Or, if they know, offer them helpful hints, suggestions, ways to deal with the problem." And if you're looking for such a source, might I suggest Tedious, Out-of-Meter Poems About Death That Didn't Convince Girls To Make Out With Me, by Mr. Sobell, Age Sixteen, available for a very attractive price. I oughta get some return on my investment. Bill, who has become increasingly uncomfortable with this conversation, stashes his book under the couch mattress. "May I be frank with you?" he asks Shaun. "You reek of marijuana smoke." That is perhaps because he smoked a joint before coming here, Shaun confesses. "And you tell me that, without shyness or remorse," Bill fumes. There's the uptight, non-linear Bill I've grown to know and love.