“It was the combination of many factors,” Dr. Hornicker said in his last report, written for no medical reason but just because he couldn’t get the girls out of his head. “With most people,” he said, “suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for

It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than

What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”

nothing shocked us more than the sight of a black person shopping on Kercheval. We couldn’t help but wonder if certain “improvements” in The Village hadn’t been made to scare black people off. The ghost in the window of the costume shop, for instance, had an awfully pointed, hooded head, and the restaurant, without explanation, took fried chicken

Self-expression can often be frustrated. More and more, doctors say, this frustration can lead to acts of violence whose reality the adolescent cannot separate from the intended drama.”

Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together.

And perhaps because of their lack of socializing, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon remembered the party as a successful event.

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.

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