Keith has a dream in which he is looking through the pornographic magazines at Burt’s house again. He notices a presence in the bathtub and pulls back the curtain to find Chris sitting naked in the dark water. Tadpoles swim around her body. Chris tells him to “Gowah.”

Keith gets up from bed late, having stayed up the night before. Part of his morning routine now includes wrapping a bandage around his midsection. He puts on professional clothes and proceeds through the rain to the McCrosky residence. Keith is reluctant to learn what has happened to it. It is revealed that the camp residents are now living in the house and have neglected to clean up after themselves. Keith finds some of the camp residents in the living room watching an old movie. He doesn’t recognize some of the people in the room. Keith considers telling them to leave but ultimately decides not to. Keith finds someone sleeping outside the door to the room Keith has allocated for Chris. He cannot go inside, as Chris has locked the door. Instead, Keith starts cleaning up after his guests, but the mess is too overwhelming, and he finds graffiti mocking him. Keith retreats to the garage, where he has enough privacy to smoke a marijuana joint. He considers stealing the McCroskys’ car and driving south. 

As he looks at the rain through the window, he remembers Chris the night he took her to the house and rebukes himself for taking so long to realize that she wasn’t meant for him. When Chris passed out, Keith tried to comfort her on the bed. Chris ended up calling out for Rob, which caused Keith to realize that she was in love with Rob. The following day, Keith revisited the house to check up on Chris. When she didn’t respond, he searched until he found her in the bathroom, which was filled with the smell of alcohol. Keith found Chris in the bathtub, her skin in a state of great distress. The sight terrified Keith, and Chris told him to go away.

Keith reminisces about his crush on Chris and how much he wanted to be with her whenever he saw her in biology class. He also remembers the movies they watched in class and how the bodily diagrams made the reproductive system feel simple to understand. He contrasts this with the reality of sex and his relationship with Eliza. It is revealed that a week after they had sex, bumps started growing out of Keith’s midsection. He tried to remove them, but they only grew longer, like tadpole tails. They reminded him of a time in his childhood when he caught tadpoles with his cousins, hoping to watch them grow into frogs. Instead, neglect caused the tadpoles to die and decay. When Keith and his cousins were forced to throw them out, Keith felt sorry for their fate.

Keith hears popping noises coming from inside the house but attributes the sound to firecrackers. He continues to smoke his joint and recalls a recent experience at work. Keith was stocking the grocery shelves when Eliza bumped into him, startling him. Eliza looked different—healthier and wearing new clothes. Keith accidentally cut his hand with a box cutter, prompting Eliza to help him clean the wound. Keith was transfixed by how much better Eliza looked now that she had moved out of Burt’s house. Eliza gave Keith her new phone number, which motivated him to improve his life. Soon after, however, he returned to the McCrosky residence and discovered that Chris had invited the other camp residents to the house. The camp residents helped themselves to the kitchen; Chris, meanwhile, was despondent. It was the last time Keith saw her.

Keith finishes his joint and proceeds back to the main house. On the way, he sees that Chris’s window is open. He starts to panic and runs into the house, which is warmer than he left it. He finds that several of the camp residents have been shot dead. In total denial of what he is seeing, Keith tries to wake them up. He stares into a gunshot wound and hears someone crying in the distance.

At a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dave orders a bucket of original recipe chicken. The customer behind Dave tells him to leave because his face is scaring the worker at the counter. Dave insists on getting his order, and when the customer threatens him, Dave pulls a gun on the customer and tells him to get on his knees. When the customer refuses, Dave hits him with the pistol, forcing him down. He orders him to open his mouth and then spits inside, telling the customer that he now has the Bug. The customer’s girlfriend tearfully begs him to leave. Dave threatens to take her to the woods so that she can have a real reason to cry. He takes the chicken bucket and leaves.

Dave returns to the woods, where he finds the man who killed Rob. He is also the same person who has been assembling the sculptures in the woods. It is revealed that the killer is Richard “Rick The Dick” Halstrom, the person whose tent Dee and Todd destroyed earlier in the novel. Dave gives Rick the chicken. Rick is thankful, as he was running out of food and was nervous about not having heard from Dave for some time. Rick asks if Dave’s plan at the house worked out and if he came to an agreement with Chris. Dave brushes the topic aside and invites Rick to play chess with him. Rick enthusiastically accepts, remembering his days in the school chess club. While Rick is distracted, Dave kills him with the gun. Dave then sits down and tells himself that his life was destined to go this way from the moment he was born. He talks himself into dying by suicide with the gun.

Eliza sits naked on a towel, sketching as her tail draws fan shapes in the dirt. The sight makes Keith happy, and he acknowledges that Eliza is “the one.” He convinced her to come with him at the very last moment, which he didn’t think would be possible.

The novel flashes back to reveal that Keith rescued Doug and Carla, two survivors from the attack at the house, and invited Eliza to join him in bringing them out of town. According to Carla, Dave had attempted to barge into Chris’s room after asking her to let him in. Soon afterward, he killed their fellow camp residents. Carla knew that Dave had a crush on Chris and implied that his murder spree may have been related to his crush somehow. Keith worried about what the McCroskys would think once they returned to their house and found it full of dead bodies.

Keith and Eliza took Carla and Doug to Carla’s sister in Olympia. Once alone, Keith and Eliza kissed and drove away from home. When Eliza fell asleep, Keith wept from exhaustion, thinking of his parents noticing his absence and his friends failing to account for his whereabouts. He imagined that the other surviving camp residents would scatter and die out in isolation. He wondered what had become of Chris and hoped that she was well. When Keith was too tired to drive any further, he and Eliza stopped the car and camped on a hill where they could watch the sun rise.

In the present, Eliza invites Keith to join her on the towel for a marijuana joint. Keith hates the blazing heat of the sun. Eliza is comfortable because it makes her feel that she is where she belongs. She shows Keith her work-in-progress: It depicts Keith floating away from several large bugs and humanoid creatures. Eliza worries that the sketch is corny, but Keith reassures her that he loves all of her work. He wonders why she got rid of her other art. This prompts Eliza to share the story of her time at Burt’s house.

Eliza met Burt and her friends at the park back when she still lived with her stepfather, whom she wanted to move away from. She had attempted to run away from him in the past, taking refuge in the woods, but she witnessed too many things that terrified her, including a man left naked and bound to a tree. Eliza initially didn’t consider Burt and his friends a threat because of how “nerdy” they were. At first, she found space to focus on her art. She braced herself for the possibility that Burt and his friends would request sexual favors in return for her residence. One night, there was a house party at which Eliza became inebriated. The other guests started to sexually harass her with lewd comments and then came into her room and vandalized her artwork. When she scratched one of the vandals, he punched her and knocked her out. She woke up naked and sore, having apparently been raped, and with insults written all over her body. Eliza was so sickened that she threw everything but her sketchbooks away.

Keith expresses sympathy for Eliza, who invites Keith back to the shade of the nearby tree.

Keith has a dream that begins with a slit opening up to reveal himself. He is straddling a person who is half-human, half-frog. Keith is frustrated that things must happen this way. Todd and Dee call for Keith’s attention. They show him a yearbook that is filled with pictures of Keith’s “friends.” All the pictures show people with mutations resulting from the Bug. One picture shows the first camp resident Keith encountered in Chapter 2, though Todd identifies the picture as Keith himself. Upset, Keith walks away from them, despite their warnings not to go where he is headed.

Keith enters a desolate valley filled with garbage, the ruins of structures, and the remains of organisms. Keith identifies it as the “bad place” that he always returns to in dreams. Chris sits there naked and acknowledges that Keith is watching her. Keith apologizes for making her feel bad and explains that he thought he could make her like him. Chris answers that it does not matter. She shows him something in her sole wound: a scroll of a lizard near a desert mesa. She tells him that things occasionally work out.

Keith hears someone crying in the distance and wakes up in a motel room. He wakes Eliza up and reassures her that she is safe. Eliza shares her nightmare of being back “there” again, where “he” was. She was unable to move in her dream. She asks Keith to reassure her that things will be okay. Keith tells her that things will be okay because they are together, reiterating something she said earlier that morning. In a fantasy sequence, Keith predicts that they will drive up to Monument Valley, which was the mesa he saw in his dream. They will continue driving around until they run out of money and then settle in a town where Keith can get a job and Eliza can focus on her artwork. He predicts that they will get a kachina doll, just like the one her biological father gave her when she was a child, and hang it over their bed. This reassures Eliza. As they cuddle and prepare to sleep, Eliza asks if Keith loves her. Keith tells her that he does and that his love will never end. She reciprocates. Keith falls asleep imagining Eliza entering him through her scent. 

The novel shifts to Chris’s dream. She dreams of a flurry of objects in the water, recalling her earlier dream where she was sinking below the surface. Something reaches up for her, causing her to wake up. It is revealed that Chris is hitchhiking and that her driver, an older man, is informing her that he is about to divert from her route. The man offers Chris a place to stay, considering that no other cars will pass that way until the next day. Chris declines, to the man’s chagrin.

Chris drinks from what is left of her vodka bottle and proceeds into the woods. A flashback reveals that she left the McCrosky residence one day when it was raining and searched for her campsite so that she could retrieve her gun and diary. She found the tent destroyed and was approached by Dave, who offered to give her shelter from the rain. Present-day Chris describes this as the moment she fell into his trap.

Dave made Chris a cup of hot chocolate and offered to let her stay with him. Chris declined and explained where she was staying. Soon, the other camp residents arrived at the McCrosky residence. Chris felt that she couldn’t refuse them and figured Keith would understand. She nevertheless sequestered herself in her room and started figuring out plans to leave town. During this time, Dave started to get close to Chris, allowing her to talk about books and movies. Eventually, she started confiding in him about her wishes to return to her life before she got the Bug. Dave said that he would never want to go back to all the things he went through, especially since he experienced bullying at school and resented everybody. Chris was the exception because she was the only person who treated him decently. Privately, Chris remembered him as a creepy person who belonged with the other people she considered “losers” at school. She knew, however, that those people had friends with whom they shared genuine interests.

Shortly before Chris went hitchhiking, Dave showed up at her room with a bottle of vodka. He drank heavily to embolden himself so that he could confess his feelings for Chris. When Chris agreed to hold him, Dave started kissing Chris without her consent. She politely rejected him and asked him to leave. Later that day, Dave asked if he could talk to Chris again, but this time he was armed with her gun. He reiterated his feelings and expressed his desire to possess Chris exclusively. This made Chris realize that Dave was involved in Rob’s disappearance. She told him that she would talk to him again in the morning and then promptly escaped from the McCrosky residence.

Chris reaches the beach she visited with Rob. She thinks about her ritual of running to the rock arch and feels that she cannot run to it on this occasion. She sets out her sleeping bag and recovers from her exhaustion. While looking at the arch, she wonders about abruptly returning home and trying to resume her life as if nothing happened. She predicts that her parents would be happy and that she could take a long bath before having all of her favorite food for dinner. She considers her hunger and sees that she has no money left in her wallet to buy food. Inside the wallet, she finds the yearbook photo of Rob.

Chris is shocked to see the photo, realizing that it doesn’t even match her memory of Rob’s appearance. She wishes Rob could be with her again but knows that he is gone. She knows that her memory of him is fading, which means that she cannot take him with her into the next part of her life. She digs a hole in the beach and buries the photo there. She promises that while she may forget the details of him, she will always remember the day they went to that beach. 

Later that day, an older woman approaches Chris and invites her to join her party for dinner. Chris thanks the woman for her offer but is reluctant to join them. The woman leaves the invitation open.

Night falls over the beach. Chris wonders how much longer she can stay there. She imagines what it would have been like to accept the woman’s offer and imagines finding Dave at the woman’s party. This causes her to declare that she isn’t “ready yet.” Chris takes off her clothes and enters the water. She reflects that while she wants her life to end, she also cannot give up the beauty she now sees. She swims out into the cold water and floats on her back, feeling the warmth inside her. She stares at the starry sky and wishes she could stay there forever.