The narrative flashes back to Buffy’s Fourth of July party. Among the guests Kelly knows are Ray Annick and Stacey Miles, a former Brown University suitemate. New acquaintances include Felicia Ch’en, a science journalist and Buffy’s friend, and Lucius, a Trinidadian plasma physics research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whom Kelly has met before and knows is attracted to her. Since her negative prior experience with G——, she has dreaded parties and social scrutiny, but Lucius makes her feel welcome. Shortly after two o’clock, a black Toyota pulls into the drive, and a murmur passes through the crowd as The Senator arrives.

Kelly reflects that she believes in neither astrology nor the Anglican God of her childhood confirmation. She recalls her dying grandfather Ross sharing a quiet conviction that God is the love one puts into one’s life.

Kelly is alone, disoriented, and severely injured—her skull, ribs, kneecap, and shoulder are all damaged. She imagines The Senator reassuring her and trusts that he will return, though she can’t yet recall his name. Her immediate goal is to keep her head above the cold, reeking water. She realizes that she’s clutching his shoe, left behind when he frantically kicked to escape, using her body as leverage to force his way out through the door now overhead. She holds onto his kiss and a childhood memory of being praised as brave.

The narrative reveals Kelly’s volunteer work: She drives twice weekly from Beacon Hill to Roxbury to teach literacy to Black adults. Her enthusiasm for the work is mixed with racial self-consciousness and a private fear of the neighborhood. At the party, she withheld this work from The Senator entirely, not wanting to appear like a stereotypical earnest volunteer.

When she arrived at Buffy’s, Kelly had put her things in the guest room, where she would stay. After The Senator arrived and the group gathered on the terrace, he shook Kelly’s hand and repeated her name; she was thrilled. Now, she begins mentally rehearsing the story she will one day tell about meeting him—and about surviving the accident.

A collage of disconnected text fragments mimics women’s magazine content: beauty and health advice, clothing descriptions, and public-health cautions. Brief, mutual notes of desire are embedded among the tips. The chapter ends with a Scorpio horoscope foretelling the sign’s evolution to a reborn Phoenix.

Kelly conserves oxygen and calls out steadily, believing that The Senator is somewhere above the surface diving toward the sound of her voice. She recalls his frantic exit from the car and decides that it was just panic rather than deliberate abandonment. She now remembers that he’s The Senator. At the party, she had entertained him with a story about a bitter dispute over paving dirt roads in her hometown. When The Senator implied that she’s too young to grasp human nature, Kelly pushed back fiercely.

Kelly discovers that the car has fully overturned under the current. Working in darkness, she tries to locate the driver’s door, fearing that the current may have forced it shut after The Senator escaped. Her right foot is numb and possibly trapped; she refuses to consider whether it’s severed, calling herself an optimist. A flashback recalls her mother’s counsel at 16—after Kelly’s first painful sexual experience—that intense feelings don’t last.

Kelly locates a shrinking air pocket faintly lit by moonlight and treats it as proof that she’s still alive. She recalls The Senator’s promise that they would arrive on time, and she blames herself for not speaking up when she sensed they were lost, constrained by her mother’s warning that men can’t bear to be made to look foolish.

The narrative flashes back to the party. The Senator argues that the Gulf War gave Kelly’s generation a false confidence that military action is easy and diplomacy optional. Kelly disputes the premise, arguing that no coherent generation exists—people are divided by race, class, education, and politics, linked only by their separateness. The Senator, visibly impressed, concedes with a smile.

Kelly forces her mouth into a shrinking air pocket as she hears her name being called from all directions. The narrative declares that the black water has filled her lungs and that she has died.

The narrative returns to the party, where Kelly watches The Senator and Ray lose a doubles tennis match. She slips away before the final set to spare The Senator from knowing she witnessed his defeat.

In a second flashback, Kelly and The Senator walk the beach. He asks about her work, asks whether she has a boyfriend, and floats the idea of a Washington staff position. They discuss Adlai Stevenson and Aristotle; Kelly challenges whether women qualify as “political animals.” He touches the goosebumps on her arm and then kisses her. The narrative again declares that the “black water fill[s] her lungs, and she die[s]” (109).

Kelly hallucinates rescue, with emergency workers pumping water from her lungs and restarting her heart. She remembers when she found a classmate unconscious after a barbiturate overdose and ran for help. The girls later learned that Lisa and her twin sister had previously made a pact to die by suicide. When Lisa returned for a visit, she argued that being a twin had taught her that there’s little difference or purpose among people. Kelly silently and completely rejects this view.

Kelly hears a siren in her mind. She remembers Buffy urging her not to leave so hastily, but Kelly had thought that hesitating meant losing the chance entirely. On the beach, she had experienced the man’s desire rather than her own, followed by familiar guilt. Up close, The Senator had looked unhealthy—skin flushed, eyes bloodshot—and had alluded to his motel room in Boothbay Harbor. She imagines her parents’ reactions: her father broadly forgiving, her mother devastated.

Now, she calls for her mother and sees her parents at the scene, startlingly young. The thought that her death would destroy her family washes over her; she finds slight comfort in the fact that Grandpa Ross is already gone and will be spared.

Earlier, at the party, Kelly absentmindedly strokes the wild rosehips while watching a tennis match. The Senator recalls his grandmother making rosehip tea and jam. In the kitchen, Buffy smiles knowingly at Kelly’s rapport with The Senator and then adds a pointed warning, reminding Kelly that he voted to fund the Contras.

Now, Kelly hears The Senator calling her name and feels the vehicle rock as he pulls at the driver’s door from above. Her head throbs badly, and the air pocket has drifted away. She feels acute shame at the memory of clutching his shoe as he kicked her in his frantic escape.

The narrative then shifts back in time, asserting that the accident has not yet occurred. Buffy photographs the party, capturing Kelly and The Senator in a pose that makes him guarded, aware of what such an image could mean publicly. The chapter closes on the recurring image of him limping away, with one shoe on and one off.

Kelly’s thoughts replay the article about capital punishment that she wrote for Citizens’ Inquiry. The chapter cycles through the five methods still in use—hanging, firing squad, electric chair, gas chamber, and lethal injection—with pro-death-penalty arguments that echo her quarrels with her father. Her conclusion: The push for humane methods serves society’s need for self-absolution rather than the condemned’s welfare. The Senator told her that he read the piece; he’s publicly opposed to capital punishment because state killing is morally wrong and because the risk of executing the innocent makes it the most irreversible of injustices.

Kelly hastily repacks in the guest room, planning to leave with The Senator for the ferry to Boothbay Harbor. At the earlier feast, The Senator had eaten with appetite, while Kelly was too nervous; he confided about the loneliness of public life and his frustration at repeating his principles until they feel hollow. They miss the 7:30 ferry and target the 8:20; he grows impatient and asks Kelly to carry a second drink in the car for him, which she agrees to after a brief hesitation. Buffy whispers for her to call the next day.

On the road, Kelly confesses that she wrote her Brown senior thesis about The Senator, who’s delighted. She praises his policy proposals warmly.

Kelly envisions herself as a small child being lifted by her grandfather. She insists to a gathering of indistinct faces that The Senator has gone for help, not abandoned her.

The perspective shifts to follow The Senator after the crash: He recovers on the bank and flees on foot, limping with one shoe missing, through two miles of marshland road. When he sees people, he hides. At a phone booth, he calls Buffy’s house under a false name and asks for Ray. When Ray comes on the line, The Senator tells him about the accident and says that the girl is dead. He begins constructing a false account, claiming that Kelly was drunk and upset and that she grabbed the wheel, but Ray cuts him off, tells him to stop talking, and promises to come.

The narrative returns to Kelly. She re-experiences turning onto the dark road and thinks she glimpses a headless doll in a roadside ditch. She swims up into moonlit air and sees her parents on the bank, now old and stricken with grief. Her childhood memory of running with arms raised to be lifted merges with the repeated line that “the black water fill[s] her lungs, and she die[s]” (154).