As Lily and Rosaleen sleep in the woods the night before they reach Tiburon, Lily has a deeply unsettling nightmare. She uses visual and auditory imagery and hyperbole to show how fear follows her as she slips into unconsciousness:

I plopped onto the mossy dirt. We stared across the water at each other. In the dark she looked like a boulder shaped by five hundred years of storms. […] In my dream I was back on the peach farm […] I could see a huge, round moon in the sky. […] Next I heard a sound like ice breaking, and, looking up, I saw the moon crack apart and start to fall. I had to run for my life.

Lily and Rosaleen sit on opposite sides of the stream from one another, and as Lily falls asleep shapes and colors start to distort. The imagery here slips quickly from reality into dream logic. Rosaleen stops looking like a human sleeping and begins to resemble an ancient boulder “shaped by five hundred years of storms.” When Lily is fully asleep, she dreams of a perfectly round moon hanging over T. Ray’s peach farm. The odd sound of “ice breaking” on a South Carolina peach farm makes her look up, at which point the moon threatens to fall on her. Although they’re clearly fantastical, these sensory details give the dream a sharp, almost solid quality for the reader. 

When Lily describes how the moon “crack[s] apart and start[s] to fall,” it’s as though her dreaming mind is engaging in hyperbole because of the stress and anxiety of leaving home. The falling moon exaggerates the scale of her fears. She’s so afraid of what might happen next that she’s literally picturing the sky falling on her head.