A group of neighborhood boys from a wealthy suburb of Detroit narrate the story of the five Lisbon sisters and how, within the course of a single year, they all take their own lives. Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest, is the first to die by suicide. Her first attempt takes place when she cuts her wrists and then gets into the bath. Paul Baldino, the son of a wealthy mobster, is the one to find her—he makes his way into the Lisbon house through the neighborhood’s storm drains, though the other boys think Paul really uses underground tunnels his father built as a means of escaping the police.
Either way, Paul sneaks into the house in an attempt to upstage Peter Sissen, the only boy who has ever been invited into the house. Mr. Lisbon—a math teacher at the local high school—asked Peter over for dinner after Peter helped him hang a scale model of the universe in his classroom. Peter used this as an opportunity to snoop in the Lisbon sisters’ bathroom, finding a used Tampax and proudly telling the other boys about it afterwards. Hearing this, Paul bragged that he would get into the Lisbon house and see the girls showering. When he sneaks into the house and to the bathroom, though, what he finds is Cecilia lying in bloody bathwater and clutching a laminated card with a drawing of the Virgin Mary on it. Horrified, he calls the police.
Cecilia survives. What she needs, a psychiatrist tells her parents, is a more active social life. The Lisbons therefore decide to throw a party, and the neighborhood boys are delighted to find invitations in their mailboxes. When they file into the Lisbon house, they’re ushered to the basement, where they find the sisters waiting. It’s awkward at first, but eventually everyone starts socializing—except Cecilia, who sits quietly off to the side with her bandaged wrist. Before long, she asks her father if she can go upstairs, and though he’s disappointed, he says yes. Everyone falls silent as she climbs the stairs, walks on the first floor, and then ascends to the second floor. After a moment of silence there comes the sickening sound of a fence post impaling Cecilia’s body. Right away, everyone knows what happened: she jumped from her bedroom window onto the fence below. They rush outside and Mr. Lisbon tries to help Cecilia, but it’s clear she’s not going to make it.
Surely enough, Cecilia dies. Nobody in the neighborhood knows how to respond. Adults go over to give their condolences, but the Lisbons are distant and strange. When local fathers visit Mr. Lisbon, he distracts them by sitting them in front of a baseball game. Even Father Moody, the town priest, fails to engage Mr. Lisbon—when he tries to talk about what happened, Mr. Lisbon focuses on the game onscreen. Discouraged, Father Moody goes to look for Mrs. Lisbon. As he walks through the halls, he notices the dismal state of the house. Everything is dirty and falling into disrepair. What really strikes Father Moody, though, is when he sees the remaining Lisbon sisters huddled together in a bedroom: they look distraught, disheveled, unclean. Seeing their grief, he’s sure—in retrospect—that they didn’t have plans to kill themselves.
The boys don’t really see the Lisbon sisters for the rest of the summer. That fall, the girls stick together in the hallways, and though some of the boys make an effort to engage with them, they’re largely unsuccessful. Lux Lisbon, however, starts sneaking around with certain guys. She has to be careful, though, because her parents won’t let their daughters date. This becomes a problem for a boy named Trip Fontaine, who becomes infatuated with Lux. Trip isn’t used to pursuing romantic interests, since he’s a heartthrob. But it’s different with Lux, who hardly pays any attention to him until he follows her to an assembly, sits next to her, and whispers that he’s going to ask her father if he can take her out. She tells him there’s no chance, but he’s undeterred, simply saying that he’s first going to come over and watch television with the family.
Trip watches television for an entire evening with the Lisbon family, but Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon sit between him and Lux on the couch. Eventually, Mr. Lisbon tells him it’s time to leave, and Lux walks him to the door, looking at him apologetically as he realizes her parents will never let her go out with him. Dejected, he goes to his car and sits there for a moment, and then—out of nowhere—it’s as if there’s a divine being hovering over him and sucking his face. Lux, he realizes, snuck out of the house and is straddling him. She kisses him with such intensity it’s all he can do to keep his composure, reaching for her in a desperate, overwhelmed way until she abruptly leaves.
In the coming weeks, word reaches the boys that Lux has been grounded. Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon become even more strict, and their house looks worse. But Trip is determined, so he goes to Mr. Lisbon’s classroom and announces his intentions to take Lux to the homecoming dance. Mr. Lisbon implies that it’s really up to his wife—and plus, he says, it wouldn’t be fair to his other daughters if he made an exception for Lux. Trip, however, says he will round up a group of guys to take all of the Lisbon girls. Mr. Lisbon runs the idea by Mrs. Lisbon, and they agree that it’s acceptable, so Trip chooses three other boys.
On the night of the homecoming dance, Trip goes to the Lisbon house with Kevin Head, Joe Hill Conley, and Parkie Denton (whose father lent his Cadillac for the occasion). The sisters are genuinely happy and excited, and they seem to really enjoy the night—especially Lux and Bonnie, who sneak beneath the bleachers with Trip and Joe Hill Conley to drink peach schnapps and kiss with the sweet flavor still on their lips. At the end of the night, though, Trip and Lux slip away, and the others have to return without them. Years later, the neighborhood boys learn that Trip and Lux had sex on the football field. And though Trip genuinely cared for Lux, for some reason he suddenly wanted to be away from her after they had sex, so he left her on the field. She took a cab home.
Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon become even more strict after the homecoming dance, hardly allowing the girls to leave the house. They even take them out of school. Around this time, Mr. Lisbon resigns as a teacher, though most people understand that he was forced to leave—none of the local parents think he’s fit to teach their children, since he can’t even “run his own family.” Even more scandalous (for the boys, at least), is the fact that Lux starts having sex with strange men on the roof of the Lisbon house. The boys have no idea who these men are, but they spy on Lux’s sexual activity from across the street, noticing that Lux is becoming alarmingly skinny. During this period, Lux fakes abdominal pain so she can go to the hospital to get a secret pregnancy test, convincing the doctor not to tell her parents. She learns that she isn’t pregnant, but she does have HPV. The boys get hold of her gynecological exam, which includes a close-up photograph of her cervix. They consider this picture their “prized possession.”
As winter passes, the Lisbon house looks worse and worse, with leaks dripping through roof. By spring, the boys stop focusing quite so much on the sisters—it’s baseball seasons, after all, and they haven’t seen the girls for so long other than brief glimpses. At one point, the Parks Department shows up to cut down a diseased tree in the Lisbons’ front yard, since the majority of the town’s elm trees have been infected with a fungus and need to be removed. But the Lisbon sisters stop them from cutting it down, since it was Cecilia’s favorite tree.
In late spring, the boys become convinced that the sisters are communicating with them in cryptic ways (flashing lights, leaving Virgin Mary cards in strange places). They’re right: the sisters are communicating with them, as evidenced by the notes they leave in mailboxes: “Remember us?” one reads. Finally, the boys decide to call the girls. At first, Mr. Lisbon picks up, but they stay on the line because they can tell the girls are listening. Finally, after Mr. Lisbon hangs up, they hear one of the sisters say hello in a weak, defeated voice before hanging up. These calls continue, but the boys decide to hold the phone to a stereo instead of talking. They play a song, and then the Lisbon sisters respond with their own selection, and they keep rotating like this for a while, with the boys playing overtly romantic songs and the sisters encouraging them while also remaining somewhat evasive. In the end, though, the sisters play “Make It With You” by Bread, and the boys go crazy with excitement.
Shortly after this exchange, the Lisbons send a note telling the boys to watch for their “signal” the following night. The boys are elated, thinking the sisters want to be saved from their depressing life. After drinking beer in their communal treehouse and waiting for the Lisbon sisters to wave at them through a window, the boys sneak over and enter the Lisbon house through the backdoor. They find Lux waiting, and they’re transfixed by her revealing top. They decide with her that they’ll drive to Florida, their minds running wild with fantasy. But Lux says they just have to wait for her sisters to finish packing. As she says this, she begins to unbuckle Chase Buell’s belt, but then she hears a thump upstairs and says they’ll have to wait. She says she’s going to wait in the car, which is parked in the garage. Alone again, the boys wait for the other sisters, eventually wandering into the basement to discover that the decorations from Cecilia’s party are still up. Then, in a shock, they see that Bonnie has hanged herself from the ceiling. They run from the basement and out of the house.
Later, the boys piece it all together. Lux only unbuckled Chase’s belt to stall for time, waiting to hear her sister kick over the trunk she was standing on. Then, she went to the garage and turned on the car, asphyxiating herself in her parents’ car. Meanwhile, Mary put her head in the oven. Therese was probably already dead, having swallowed a bunch of pills. Mary ends up surviving her suicide attempt, but she doesn’t stay alive for long. That summer, as the boys are coming home from a party (having spent the night drinking and making out with girls), they see paramedics loading Mary’s lifeless body onto a stretcher. They later learn that she, like Therese, died by taking pills.
In the aftermath of the Lisbon suicides, the Parks Department cuts down Cecilia’s elm tree. The neighborhood now seems harsh and strange, and everyone feels like the entire country is in decline. People begin to associate this decline with the Lisbon sisters, suspecting that the girls somehow sensed that things would get worse and decided they didn’t want to live in such a dismal world. The boys, for their part, never stop thinking about the sisters, though they’ll never know for sure why the girls decided to die.
