Kyle drops Liz off at home. She frets that she told Max how she really feels about how he hurt her, but Kyle nice-guys that she has to take care of herself. Up in her bedroom, Maria runs in and puts a hand on her, saying, "I'm here." Here on a park bench, where we illogically cut to next, Maria repeatedly apologizing for not being around for her whole glowing green episode. Maria tells her, "We're best friends, Liz Parker, so don't even." Liz tells her not to let "this music thing go," and Maria tells her, "I'm not a sellout." Liz recycles the inspirational words by buoying her spirits, telling her, "You have more talent in your little finger than anyone else in this town." Maria agrees to go to New York, asking, "Can life be anymore complicated right now?" Honey? Wait 'til you get to New York. I'm just saying.

Max skulks on Liz's balcony, and Liz comes in to find him. She tells him that he can't be there, and he guilts her that he's "been calling." She's been out. He thought something happened. He leans in to tell her they can drive to L.A. (lose my number, children), but she actually recoils from him and says they won't be going anywhere together. He wants to talk about it. She wants to fake-cry poorly. And so she does, closing the window on him as The Mandolin Of Sadness takes the soundtrack by storm. He makes his way off the balcony and a light rain falls because people are sad. Downstairs, Liz approaches her father and finally finds herself in a moment of clarity: "My life is out of control. I want to go to boarding school." Because it is often in that bastion of normalcy where teenage girls in cloistered seclusion adjust perfectly to all of life's experiences.

"Dear Max," a dictated letter to Max begins over a montage of Liz packing, "What's so great about normal? Do you remember when you asked me that? Back then, the answer was, 'Nothing.' Because of you, Max. Because of how much you loved me." And around and around it goes, Liz telling him that she needs reclaim normal by being away from Roswell. And as romantic a notion it is to see the open road of the desert stretching before a relieved-looking Liz, she's gonna be bumming somewhere around the Kansas/Nebraska border when she's suddenly all, "Why the living fuck wouldn't they just let me take a plane?"