The chapter opens in a childhood memory. After a family stop at a Stonewall Jackson museum, Hai rides a push scooter with his younger cousin Sony through a McDonald’s parking lot while the women in the family laugh nearby. Hai tries to turn the ride into a game by calling the scooter a spaceship, but Sony rejects the idea because make-believe and lying make him feel unsteady; even as a child, Sony insists on facts, authority, and literal truth.

Sitting on the curb with Sony’s Stonewall Jackson coloring book, Hai mocks the museum’s Confederate mythology and teases Sony’s faith in the docent and in his father’s embellished war stories. As Sony talks, Hai studies an illustration of Jackson and his wife and feels a private, confusing surge of attraction and identification toward boys his age, an inarticulate desire that unsettles him. Hai then covers the illustrated faces with pebbles while the women’s laughter continues in the background, leaving the moment suspended between play, history, family myth, and Hai’s emerging inward life.

The scene shifts to a later time at a psychiatrist’s office, where Hai waits after work in his HomeMarket apron. Looking at a depression poster aimed at children, Hai wonders where childhood sadness ends and adult sadness begins, revealing his own uncertainty about illness and age. When the psychiatrist comes out, he mistakes Hai for Sony’s guardian, gives Hai a pamphlet titled Your Neuro-atypical Teen: The Next Five Years, and explains that Sony has been prescribed antipsychotics that may cause nausea.

Sony then exits the appointment still in his work uniform, carrying cornbread and sample pills. Hai jokes awkwardly because he does not know how else to respond, then realizes the seriousness of the visit when he connects it to Sony’s time in a group home. Sony admits he is afraid to take the medication, and Hai tries to reassure him by repeating that everything is normal and that the doctors know what they are doing, even though Hai himself distrusts the certainty of those words.

Outside, in the icy dark, Hai and Sony ride back toward East Gladness on Hai’s bike. Their silence gives way to a shared chant: instead of pretending the ride is a spaceship, they repeat that it is not a spaceship. The reversal turns their old childhood argument into a grounding ritual, showing Hai’s attempt to anchor Sony in reality and fear as they descend together into the dark valley toward home.