Jessica: "Hey. I'm sorry this happened to you. If you didn't want it to."

She's so comfortable now, in her skin, in the limits and how to test them, you can forget where she came from. Locked in a car trunk after the sun went down; pulled out and murdered, screaming, under the harsh Magister lights. Dead before she lived. "I'm sorry this happened," Jessica says, "If you didn't want it to."

Jessica: "I know how awful, and scary, and lonely it can be... The hardest part is that nobody gets you. Like Pam, and Eric and Bill, they're all just so ... old. And then humans, even if they love you, or... I mean, if they try..."

When you surrender up your sight to see the new world, whether it's a religious conversion or a sexual revelation or this, born out of blood, it feels like dying. That's true; change feels like dying because it is. And there's a way in which the old world will never come back around, and you will always been out of step with its easy rhythms. And then, too, there's the rest of the world still has to mourn you, the idea, the future of you. To put their dreams for you back on the shelf without damaging them, so they can see you as you are and not through the fuzzy dream.

There, too, you have a perspective that's hard to share: That watching people do this, forget about the future they were imagining for you, can show you the ways you, we, do this to everybody else. You don't meet boys, let's say, as they really are: You meet them through the haze of what you want from them, or what you're afraid they'll do, or what they're going to want from you. You meet your best friend's parents through a double-haze of future disappointment, terror, teenage shame. We spend very little time looking at one another, even those of us who have been through this one before.

It's all Jessica's really saying: You see me as a human child, below you, or you see me as an elder vampire, above you, either way I want you to see me. I want you to look at me, right now, and what I'm trying to tell you, which is that we have so much more in common than otherwise. Which is of course true of every person and every other person, but that wall's so tall so much of the time we tend to forget altogether that it's possible to scale. Which is what makes friendship such a powerful kind of magic.

Tara: "I've been feeling ... fresh out of friends lately."
Jessica: "I get on one level that you dumped your two closest friends for turning you into a monster, but I spent the last four episodes at the most unendingly boring frat party ever devised. I have never had friends. I have had Hoyt and I've had Bill, but they needed things from me. I am learning to be friends with Jason Stackhouse, but that is an incredibly delicate proposition even when he's not having three separate identity crises at once. Compared to Jason -- and how many times in your life could anybody say your name in the same sentence as this word -- you're pretty easy, Tara Thornton."