Silas tortures Shane at length, sending him into a garbage bin and taunting him with beer. Shane offers him a garbage panini and Silas is like, "Maybe the money's under that dead bird!" Shane threatens to tell Nancy about Silas's college plans -- which Batkid has deduced based on the fact that Silas, of all people, is reading "Huck Finn." Silas defends himself that it's just a contingency, "in case mom decides to drive us in circles for the rest of our lives," and asks if Shane himself hasn't thought about a backup plan for the rest of their lives. If Clark Kent really is just a lie, for all of them.

"The road is my school now," Shane says, quoting Nance directly at this point. "This dumpster's my classroom. I'm learning from this wasted Panini!" Irresistible force. "You follow your path, I'll follow mine," Silas says, finally showing a little compassion, but then they still need gas, that was the point today, the "Soviet Beast" Awesome Love Shane's driving gets 4 MPG, and that's not Mark-Paul Gosselaar's, so now Shane's going to have to find some gas some other way. Same as the Seattle thing, essentially: When you're working so hard to live that it's work that starts killing you, check out how the other half lives. The ones who aren't so superspecial that dealing drugs is not even their fallback.

Like the thing that always drove me nuts -- with anxiety, not irritation -- about stuff like Amazing Race is how they made do in other countries. Dancing for pennies or whatever. And like, the whole reason I'm scared to travel is because what happens if something happens? I certainly couldn't put out a hat and do a little jig, I'd die of embarrassment. Just roll over and die rather than helping myself to succeed, because it's too weird. But if you're on a TV show and you know that secretly the hand of TV is going to catch you when you fall, it's okay to do those things you'd rather die usually than do. She would never be a hotel maid for money, but if Hotel Maid were just a costume she was putting on, over her drug dealer costume, then she could do anything. Because really nobody could see her at all.

Nobody can see Nancy at all, at the payphone, calling the Missing Persons number. Not from the paper that Andy wrote it down on, but a piece of paper she herself wrote it down on, because I think they both wrote down the number in secret. Because they didn't want to tell each other their contingency plans, or admit they might not be able to do this. That the moment back there in the waiting room didn't feel a whole lot like Wile E. Coyote standing on nothing, knowing he won't fall unless he looks down and admits it.