How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
Someone fell in, was rescued, and laid on the pier. "I've had it," he said, laughing. "Good-bye, cruel world!" He tried to roll into the lake again, but his friends stopped him.
"You don't understand me," he said. "I'm a teenager. I've got problems!"
"Be quiet," a woman's voice scolded. "They'll hear you." (5.23-25)
The Lisbon girls' suicides are impossible to explain, but the closest thing we have to an explanation is Cecilia's declaration that being a thirteen-year-old girl is difficult. The thing that's hard for everyone to understand, then, is why all teenagers don't kill themselves. For this drunken boy, the trials of adolescence are a joke.