Cecilia is found barely alive in her bathtub, wearing a white dress and holding a Virgin Mary photograph on her chest.

At the hospital, Cecilia explains her suicide attempt by saying she is simply 'a thirteen-year-old girl.'

The Lisbon parents invite neighborhood boys to a party at their home, meant to cheer up Cecilia.

Cecilia excuses herself from the party, goes upstairs, and throws herself out the window onto the spiked fence below.

Mr. Lisbon holds Cecilia's impaled body on the fence as paramedics slowly arrive, clearly already knowing she is dead.

The boys analyze Cecilia's diary extensively but find no clear explanation for why she died by suicide.

Trip Fontaine convinces Mr. Lisbon to allow all five sisters to attend the Homecoming dance as a group.

Lux and Trip sneak away from the Homecoming dance to make love on the football field, after which Trip loses all interest in her.

Lux arrives home two hours late from the dance, and Mrs. Lisbon locks all the girls inside the house permanently.

The girls are pulled out of school and the Lisbon house falls into total isolation and visible deterioration.

Lux fakes appendicitis to escape the house, and the doctor diagnoses her with HPV and determines all the sisters have PTSD.

The girls burst out of the house to surround Cecilia's favorite elm tree and stop workers from cutting it down.

The boys and girls exchange songs over the phone, and a final Virgin Mary card instructs the boys to wait for a midnight signal.

The boys enter the Lisbon house and find Bonnie hanging in the basement, realizing each girl has died by suicide.

Mary is found dead from a drug overdose after returning home from the hospital; only her parents attend her funeral.

The Virgin Suicides follows five sisters in a quiet Michigan suburb whose lives unravel after the youngest, Cecilia, attempts and then succeeds at dying by suicide. Her death traumatizes the family and sets off a slow, terrible chain of events that the neighborhood boys watch helplessly from the outside. Trip Fontaine briefly pulls the surviving girls into the world by securing them a night at the Homecoming dance, but Lux's late return gives Mrs. Lisbon the justification she needs to lock the family inside permanently. The house decays around the girls as they lose all connection to school, friends, and the outside world, and their despair deepens without intervention. When the boys finally receive a midnight signal and enter the house, they find the girls have each chosen their own way to die, using the boys only as witnesses. Mary survives briefly but is found dead from an overdose shortly after returning home, leaving the boys with questions they will spend the rest of their lives unable to answer.

The five Lisbon sisters and the events that led to their deaths.

A cemetery workers' strike means Cecilia cannot be buried locally, and her casket is taken to a small city cemetery.

After her first attempt, Cecilia recovers and sits on the front lawn each day staring at the sky while a sister watches over her.

The spiked fence where Cecilia died is declared a neighborhood hazard and removed from the Lisbon property.

Father Moody visits the Lisbon home to offer comfort but quickly gives up after finding the family in complete disarray.

The boys try to approach the Lisbon girls at school, but the girls reject their attention, assuming it is only pity.

Trip Fontaine becomes obsessed with Lux after noticing her in a classroom filled with warm orange autumn light.

Trip visits the Lisbons to formally ask about dating Lux, and Lux surprises him by running after his car to kiss him as he leaves.

A newspaper runs a story on Cecilia's death months after she died, sparking a wave of media coverage on teen suicide.

A school counselor later revealed to be a fraud begins meeting with the Lisbon girls and briefly brightens their moods.

The Lisbon girls arrive at the Homecoming dance wearing unflattering frontier-style dresses sewn by their mother.

Lux and Bonnie sneak under the bleachers with their dates and secretly drink schnapps during the Homecoming dance.

Mrs. Lisbon forces Lux to feed her rock records into a fire one by one, destroying the entire collection.

Lux has sex with a different boy or man on the roof of the Lisbon house each night as the neighborhood boys watch.

Bonnie is seen every morning before dawn praying on the porch over the exact spot where Cecilia died.

Now middle-aged, the boys still sit in their treehouse calling out to the Lisbon girls, knowing they will never find all the answers.

Behind the headline events of the Lisbon story lies a series of smaller but equally significant moments that illuminate how each character coped and failed to cope with loss. From the mundane fact of a cemetery workers' strike preventing Cecilia's local burial to the nightly ritual of Bonnie praying over her sister's death spot, these events reveal a family and a neighborhood quietly falling apart. Trip Fontaine's obsession with Lux follows its own arc, from a chance glance in an autumn classroom to a single electric moment outside the Lisbon house that changes both their lives. The Homecoming dance offers the girls one brief, almost normal night before Mrs. Lisbon uses Lux's mistake as justification for absolute isolation. The boys watch Lux deteriorate on the rooftop each night, helpless and transfixed, never choosing to intervene or call for help. By the novel's end, the boys are middle-aged men still sitting in their treehouse, still unable to let go of the girls they never truly knew.

The hidden details and quieter moments behind the Lisbons' tragic year.

Neighbor boy Peter Sissen visits the Lisbon home and discovers the girls' underwear, hidden makeup, and other intimate belongings upstairs.

Shaken by Cecilia's first suicide attempt, the Lisbon parents begin allowing their daughters more social freedom than before.

The boys notice that Cecilia's diary almost never refers to her individually, always describing what she and her sisters did as 'we.'

Trip Fontaine talks his way into the Lisbon home on a pretext and spends an evening watching television with the family.

The fish flies that had darkened the suburb finally clear after Cecilia's death, bringing temporary relief to the neighborhood.

In the months after Cecilia's death, Lux secretly begins dating several boys without her mother's knowledge.

The school holds a 'Day of Grieving' that never mentions Cecilia by name, and the Lisbon girls refuse to participate in any of it.

Mr. Lisbon wanders his house at night after Cecilia's death and mistakes Bonnie standing at a window for Cecilia's ghost.

Boys who enter the Lisbon house to visit Lux find rotting food, foul smells, and Lux visibly thin with cold sores and bald patches.

The Lisbon house begins to emit a distinct odor that drifts down the street, signaling the family's complete deterioration.

Photographs of the Virgin Mary identical to the one Cecilia held begin appearing in neighbors' yards and on car windshields.

The girls begin leaving one-sentence letters for the neighborhood boys in the middle of the night, asking things like 'Remember us?'

Lux greets the boys calmly when they enter the house, distracts one by undoing his belt, then slips away claiming her sisters are still packing.

Mary returns from the hospital after surviving her suicide attempt to find the house gutted and only a sleeping bag left for her.

Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon eventually divorce, and Mrs. Lisbon gazes back at the street with her daughters' icy blue eyes before leaving for good.

The tragedy of the Lisbon sisters is built from a series of turning points that quietly close off every possible escape route. A neighbor boy's accidental glimpse of the girls' private belongings sparks an obsession that will last decades, and Cecilia's first attempt loosens parental restrictions just long enough for the seeds of future disaster to be planted. As the family deteriorates after Cecilia's death, small revelations accumulate: a diary written always in 'we,' a father who can no longer recognize his own children, a house that begins to smell of grief. The girls make increasingly desperate attempts to reach the boys outside, sending letters and Mary cards, but the boys mistake these signals for romantic overtures rather than cries for help. On the final night, Lux's cool, deliberate distraction of the arriving boys confirms that the girls orchestrated the whole encounter as a final statement. The novel closes not with resolution but with the haunting image of the boys still reaching backward into a past that never fully belonged to them.