In the infinite high desert of Utah, a poignantly moving scene unfolds: 14-year-old Mark is in his sleeping bag, into which a soulmate he has found, and loves, creeps with stealth. This is not some idyllic hiking holiday, it is an extended boot camp – at once punitive and supposedly curative – to which Mark and the girl – Lainey, aged 17, with scarred wrists – have been dispatched by their parents, for behaviour considered beyond control; in Mark’s case striking a friend, then his mother. But this is a stolen moment of redemptive, subversive young love. “Until I met Lainey, I didn’t know that talking was another form of breathing,” Mark reflects.
But the moment is then cruelly shattered by a sudden flashback: Mark recognises the same skin condition as that of his uncle, and the instant is ambushed by something he had kept “far back in the dark” of his own mind. In a destructive – and self-destructive – consternation, he pushes Lainey away, and with her their mutual feelings for each other.
