I Was Fifteen
- This section begins with the caption, "August 27, 3 pm." It's the exact date and time David's life began to change for the better.
- His mom drops him off at therapy, telling him "it's like throwing money down a hole" (4.6).
- We see David go into the therapist's office, but we don't see the therapist yet. Instead, we hear him offstage (which, in comics, means he's represented by speech balloons without being present in the panels).
- David guesses the therapist will give him drugs or hypnotize him or something, but the therapist says they're just going to talk.
- Finally, we see him: He's the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.
- Dr. White Rabbit tells David he's not crazy at all; he's a kid in really messed-up circumstances whose mother lied to him because she doesn't love him.
- You might think this would be where David runs from the room, but instead he crawls across the floor and hugs his therapist's ankles.
- Zoom in: a tear falls from David's eye. The next panel takes up the whole page, and it could be tears, or it could be rain.
- It's rain, and it continues for seven wordless pages. Some panels show rain falling in different environments; some are close-ups of raindrops and puddles. At any rate, David's doing some hardcore crying.
- The therapist says all the things David's mom doesn't: He praises David's drawings; he asks if David's getting enough to eat.
- One day, David comes home early, and catches his mom in bed with Mrs. Dillon.
- His mom gives him a look that says she knew this was coming, probably for years.
- Then there's news from Indiana: Scary Grandma set the house on fire with Papa John inside.
- A neighbor saw it all go down and called the cops, who saved Papa John and carted Grandma off to the state insane asylum.
- But wait, there's more: Dad comes home one night and asks David to go out to dinner with him.
- Unsurprisingly, they don't talk over dinner; his dad just drinks and chain-smokes.
- Afterward, they go for a walk, which is where David's dad finally—finally—admits that the X-ray treatments gave David cancer.
- At sixteen, David moves out of his parents' house (yay) and into a dilapidated boarding house with no heat (not so yay). The other residents are downtrodden and bizarre, but they're better than David's parents.
- Fast-forward to David at age thirty: He's teaching art at a college in upstate New York when his dad calls to say his mom's dying.
- David hops in his Volkswagen Bug, screaming all the way back to Michigan—not because he's angry or sad, but because screaming thickens his remaining vocal cord.
- When he arrives at the hospital, his mom has a tube down her throat, and her nurse tells David she can't talk.
- David can't talk either, because he's been screaming so much.
- He touches her face, there's a close-up panel of a tear in her eye, and then she dies.
- Before he leaves the hospital, David pays a visit to the fetus in the jar. It doesn't open its eyes.