Content Warning: The guide and source material reference violence, including child abuse.

The year is 2024. Lauren, the narrator, speaks in the first person as if she’s writing in her dated journal. She begins this chapter by talking about a dream she had: She is learning to fly but runs into a fire. Describing the fire, she writes, “It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning. Darkness” (14).

Later, she is talking with her stepmother, Cory, about the stars as they hang laundry. Their neighborhood is surrounded by a wall that is a “massive, looming presence” (15). Cory says they couldn’t see stars when she was a child because the city lights obscured them—“lights, progress, growth, all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother with anymore” (15). Lauren says she’d rather have the stars. Cory, on the other hand, says she’d rather have the city lights back, but “the stars are free.” (16).

Lauren and her family go to a neighboring church run by the Reverend Robinson so that Lauren can be baptized; their own church, where her father is the minister, was burned down.