- Mary Lisbon is the last Lisbon sister to kill herself, and the ambulance comes to pick her up.
- Flashback to where it all begins: Mary's youngest sister, Cecilia, slits her wrists at age thirteen and is discovered in a bathtub full of her blood.
- Paramedics come and take Cecilia to the hospital.
- The narrators, a "we" made up of neighborhood boys, explain that they've tried to recreate the sequence of events that day.
- Peter Sissen had been invited to eat dinner at the Lisbon house and he reports back on the girlie wonders of the sisters' bathroom.
- Paul Baldino, another boy in the group, decides to enter the Lisbon house via sewer tunnel (say what?) and spy on the girls while they're showering.
- He's the one who discovers Cecilia bleeding in the tub and calls the police.
- The paramedics find a laminated picture of the Virgin Mary in Cecilia's hands and give it to her distraught parents.
- After the suicide attempt, everyone pretends that it never even happened. On a psychiatrist's advice, the Lisbons begin to give their daughters more freedom.
- Two weeks after Cecilia comes home from the hospital, the girls throw a party, the first one in their whole lives.
- The boys go to the party, curious and excited, and are invited downstairs to the rec room.
- Cecilia's off by herself, and everyone ignores her. She wears bracelets taped on her wrists to hide her scars. She's also wearing a filthy wedding dress (the one she wore when she tried to kill herself).
- Everyone's happy when "Joe the Retard" (sorry, that's what the narrators call him) comes and takes some of the attention off of Cecilia.
- Cecilia asks to be excused from the party and goes upstairs. Everyone hears the noise of Cecilia falling and landing on a spike of the fence outside.
- Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon run upstairs. Everyone else goes out onto the porch and sees Mr. Lisbon trying to lift Cecilia, impaled and dead, off of the spike. Now there's an image you don't want to go to sleep with.