"I don't normally talk like this. Plus, I'm feeling kind of lightheaded too." Amy explains he's talking like a total stoner because his "mind" is starting to open up, but also he's lightheaded because, like any good junkie, he's stopped eating. She pops a raw almond in his mouth and his eyes light up, mouth hanging open as he savors every bit. "These're crazy good!" he says, and she starts in with that shit: "That's why we gotta change the way you eat. Raw foods. Nothing processed. Because the cleaner the body, the cleaner the soul, the cleaner the experience." Last night was clean. The sun on the leaves of a forest that never ends. Sing the night that made you. He puts an almond in her mouth and kisses her, biting it in half. And back in the house, so afraid, hurting so badly he can't even sleep with the sun overhead, Eddie screams their names.

"He'll stop," she says. "He'll stop." Jason wonders -- because he's so busy hopping barrels he can't even hear what he's really thinking -- if somebody won't hear him, even as he goes on screaming. "We live in the middle of nowhere of the middle of nowhere," she scoffs, and he sits up, on the edge of a thought. "He isn't a person, Jason." Jason knows this is part of their world, now, this lie, so he spits at the idea that she should even have to tell him this basic, this obvious fact, and changes tactics: "My truck, for example. It ain't a person either. But I still fill it with gas and give it oil from time to time." Amy asks if they're supposed to feed him, then, offer up a vein and all the pain and fear that go with it, and he asks if Eddie won't die otherwise. "Who cares?" Jason doesn't have an answer for that, just another request for this nebulous "plan" he keeps asking for. All he ever wanted was somebody to tell him how to live, what to do, how to be a man. But once you let somebody do that for you, it's pretty much their job from that point on.

Here's Amy's plan: "Everything's gonna work out. Because it has to." Jason immediately discerns the logical problem there, but she's not troubled overmuch. "Because when I am with you, what I feel... I've never felt that with anybody else ever before." And to assume she's lying, or playing him, is I think to miss a great deal of the point of Amy Burley. I don't think she's told a single lie, I just think she's inordinately good at keeping the contradictions an arm's length apart, and here's how: "I'm a person that... That a lot of bad stuff has happened to in the past." Like Jason, like you and me: "And so I deserve this."