At the record store the next day, Honey anxiously waits for the right time to call Michael Ellis. At 10:05, Honey dials his office and leaves a message, but she and Gina are discouraged by their lack of interest in actually getting Honey's phone number.

Back at the Centah, Honey teaches her dance class, which is interrupted by a stray basketball and Chaz's ensuing flirtations. After class, Honey mops forlornly while Raymond (Benny's younger brother) expresses gladness that Honey and her class are around. Honey says lucky for him, she's not going anywhere.

Raymond wanders to a storefront on 156th street, where he finds Benny hanging with some neighborhood thugs. Benny immediately urges his brother to play elsewhere: "You can't be here right now." Just then, a stranger in a fancy convertible pulls up and several boys run out to sell him drugs.

That night, Honey arrives home to find a message on her answering machine from Michael Ellis, informing her that the music video he mentioned starts shooting the day after tomorrow.

This clip, barely longer than three and half minutes, represents the last vestiges of pre-fame struggle Honey will have to face. As she looks nervously as the clock, we assume Honey is aiming for just the right moment to call Michael Ellis, as her whole future may depend on this one phone call; upon further viewing, however, we realize that Honey has actually noticed that her rise to fame is taking place too quickly, and is anxiously calculating how much many minutes of runtime to burn off before catapulting to instant success.

In a valiant attempt to conjure some narrative tension, Honey goes about the business of sabotaging herself and pretending to be discouraged, so the viewer isn't sure if she'll make it on her own terms or not. For example, Honey slows it down by sitting on hold with someone at Michael Ellis Productions, then giving her phone number without an area code, even using one of those "555-" numbers to ensure that no one will ever get back to her.

Meanwhile, Honey arranges for Chaz to hurl a basketball at her head in the hopes of landing in the hospital for a few scenes, to further prolong her inevitable fame and provide some more adversity to overcome. Unfortunately, Chaz is so infatuated with Honey that he takes the opportunity to flirt with her instead; Honey's irritation at his advances are clearly the result of his deviation from their arrangement. Surely, Bille Woodruff is not thrilled with Chaz's behavior either, as he checks his watch and pulls his hands apart in the international signal for "Stretch it out!"

This clip also introduces Benny's fledgling involvement with the local drug dealers, to remind us what kinds of activities take place in the hood outside of Centahs and music video auditions. Though we imagine drug dealing in the Bronx is anything but a recent phenomenon, these particular drug dealers appear unacquainted with the finer points of their craft, as they shout "How's your stash?" and "Yo, you wanna smoke?" across the street in broad daylight to every car pulling up. On the other hand, perhaps they can afford to be ballsy when their weed is so good, an upper-class white man in a convertible Mini Cooper would rather come to the Bronx for it instead of buying from a friend or someone at work like everyone else.

Eventually, Michael Ellis finds a way to reach Honey despite her clever attempts to throw him off her trail; as she arrives home to a strangely gorgeous apartment, Honey disregards messages from her dad and Gina before Michael's message has her beaming once again. Honey even gazes upward and thanks God, presumably for granting her the strength to stall the movie's only plot point for three more minutes. To be sure, Honey's dad and Gina pitched in to waste some time with useless messages reciting character traits established in earlier scenes; thus, we see that community is a paramount theme in Honey.