"Rumors." Things have just taken a turn for the worse. 'Evil' Lain has spied on Alice the other day, quite invasively, and now innocent Lain is the school's outcast. Crying her eyes out on a porch (top-left image), we find Lain, along with words "Although I must be innocent, now I am punished." This text, and all other phrases, are lyric fragments of the series' (Japanese) end-song, A Distant Cry.

Lain, who deeply loves her one-and-only true friend, Alice, decides to undo what she's done. While she knows she didn't set this whole thing in motion, she nonetheless resolves to erase people's memory of these events (and thus, effectively, it is as if they never took place at all). And she does. The very next day, Lain is being greeted again, cheerfully, by Alice, Reika, and Juli. A pivotal moment in the series. "Lain begins to believe," as one might say in The Matrix.

N.B. Every image used, down to the last wire, is actually a carefully timed screengrab from the series itself, including the little 'sun-light' above Lain's school friends. All done in Photoshop CS3.