"It’s safer to be feared than loved."
Camille wakes up next to Richard, he says he wants to see her again but she says she has plans to meet her former cheerleader teammates and that he’s going to need a better offer for her. After this, he goes on a mission to find out more about this woman he finds so mysterious. Driven by Adora’s comments about Camille’s situation, he eventually gets to the clinic where he learns what happened to her roommate and he even goes to Jackie for guidance.
"The more I know about you, the less I wanna know."
Adora seems to notice immediately that Camille is a little more chipper that morning but immediately kills her bliss with a quick conversation mixed with some ghosts of the past. Then Camille talks to Amma who seems to have no intention of slowing down with the partying and the drugs, she also makes a joke about two scratches from her run into the woods that with a little help could spell a C for Camille. I think, in her own way, she’s trying to have a nice gesture towards her sister, trying to normalize what Adora treats as monstrous, but Camille doesn’t find it funny and says she should never joke about it and should never follow in her footsteps, Amma says she was just joking but she thanks her for finding her in the shed.
"I get funny ideas sometimes."
Later, Camille goes to see Ashley and finds Amma and her posy in the pool, since Jodes is Ashley's sister, Amma is flirting with John but he’s telling her he’s got his eye on her. Ashley is trying her best to have her moment in the spotlight so she offers a new interview while trying to suck up to Camille but all she can provide is the theory that the killer was seeking popularity. She's useless but this does offer Camille an opportunity to see a bit of her ear has been bitten off, probably by Natalie.
"People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was."
The investigation speeds up when they find Ann’s bicycle in a lagoon of pig waste next to the hog farm which doesn't look good for John who used to work there. And since Adora is first on the scene but refuses to help Camille she gets furious and tells her off, which makes Adora decide she has overstayed her welcome and asks Alan to be her messenger. It looked like he had sympathy for her but he proves otherwise when he tells her she’s jealous of other’s people’s well being and that’s why she brings misery. He tells her that Joya, her grandmother, would enter Adora’s room in the middle of the night and pinch her, afraid that she would die in her sleep and that she should go easy on her mother, which only shows that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to just how screwed up this family is. Also, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought it was very suspicious when later Alan tells Adora she was always better at handling the girls.
"She just liked to hurt people."
Camille seems to be worried that they're only looking at men for the crime but that is not surprising given the number of little phrases about feminism thrown here and there, and it only gets worse at Camille's dinner, her former cheerleading friends are insufferable, and Camille sees there the kind of woman she could've been, though I don't think that could've even been in her future, perhaps it was was her mother would've wanted though. You would've thought they would want to catch up but at first, all they do is cry watching a movie and then complain about their lives while shaming any woman who's not a mother.
"Being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person."
Turns out the husband turns is Kirk Lacey, one of the guys that "had their way" with Camille, and when she goes to the bathroom he says he wanted to apologize for what they did to her in the woods, that now that he has daughters it haunts him. She just brushes it off and says it seems they both got fucked that day. She's a bit shaken up but alcohol helps, the only one of the women she can actually talk to is the one they bullied the most, she says she nice to her because Camille was the one who bothered her the least, which Camille herself calls a very low bar and then she confesses she felt sympathy, because of Marian and because she saw one of her cuts one day and she kinda got it, she says the word cherry made sense because they were all shiny lustrous on the outside but inside there was a dark, hard, heart.
Book quote: "My first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked. I woke up that morning, hot and bored, worried about the hours ahead. How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen."
Later that evening, Amma and her friends kidnap Camille saying they will drop her at the house but they take her to a party, they give her some oxi and convince her to dance a little. She's reluctant at first but she sees her kid sister so happy about her being there that she just goes along. Ashley and John make an appearance but they all call them baby killers and they start to leave, but before that Ashley tells Camille that if she wants to know about Natalie she should ask Adora. Then Amma and Camille, high as a kite, go home skating while flashbacks flash trough Camille’s mind in a mesmerizing sequence.
"Boys are easy, you just let them do stuff to you. When you let them do it to you, you’re really doing it to them, you have the control and they like you."
When they get home they have a very interesting conversations sitting on the grass where they bond, Amma opens up about being bored and she says she’s worried girls don’t like her, Camille seems to be worried her sister would cut herself too. Amma seems so taken with her older sister they start spinning holding hands and she tells her she's her soulmate and begs her to take her to St. Louis with her, Camille doesn't respond but she starts seeing the other dead girls in Amma's place and they fall. Camille is shaken but she agrees to let Amma sleep with her in her room after she insists quite a bit. Then, when they're in bed, in one of the most chilling moments, Marian’s ghost grabs Camille's hand and tells her it's not safe for her to stay.
"Do you ever feel like bad things are gonna happen to you and you can’t stop it?"
What did you think about the episode? What are your theories so far? Let me know in the comments.
