Miss Barks picks Demon up after school for a long country drive and dinner. He hides his off-the-books job at Golly’s from her and worries about angering Ghost, but the spring day, music, and Miss Barks’s sense of freedom lift his mood. At the Cumberland bluffs, Demon fixates on the cliffs and imagines flight, even as he insists he wouldn’t jump.

There, Miss Barks shares big news: after his mother’s death, DSS secured Social Security survivor benefits for Demon—monthly checks to be held in an account until he ages out of foster care. She urges him to improve his grades and use the money for an away-college. Demon doubts that path and jokes about Elk Knob’s automatic promotions. When he asks about additional benefits from his deceased father, she explains none are available because his birth certificate lists no father, despite Demon knowing where the man is buried in Tennessee.

Over dinner at a Mexican restaurant, Miss Barks delivers harder news: she’s quitting DSS to take full-time summer classes, then student-teach in the fall, aiming to become an elementary teacher. Demon feels abandoned and angry at losing the only adult advocating for him. She drops him at the McCobbs’ before eight; Demon lies to Mr. McCobb about his absence from work, retreats to his “dog room,” punches the washing machine, and hides the baby monitor in a mop bucket so no one will see him cry.

In a reflective turn, Demon lays out what he later understands about money: education and serving wealthier people raise pay, while caring for poor kids is devalued. He contrasts DSS’s “peanut butter sandwich” wages with teachers’ chronic side hustles and cites a burned-out caseworker as emblematic. He frames kids’ later acting out as an unsurprising return on society’s neglect.