The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.”

“What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”

The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecilia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).

her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.

to protect us from the contamination of tragedy.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.

“She was the still point of the turning world,”

“Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it,”