Cecilia Lisbon

"What we have here is a dreamer. Someone completely out of touch with reality."

Cecilia Lisbon was the first to go. Her sisters called her the "weird one of the family," but she most probably had a profound impact on them in the time soon before and long after her death. As with all of the Lisbon girls, it's impossible to pin down exactly why the youngest of them ran from her own party, climbed the stairs to her bedroom window, and jumped from life, falling peacefully onto the spikes of her house's own front gate.

However, Cecilia didn't die before the reader has the chance to collect a lot of strange evidence on her young life. In the mystery of the Lisbons, Cecilia is surely the most mysterious, and some may suspect she dragged the rest of her sisters down with her.

The first evidence of her depressed but eccentric nature is her obsession with the Virgin Mary. She displays a crucifix in her bedroom, and also intends to die with a laminated picture of the Virgin Mary held to her chest during her first suicide attempt. The next clue is the way she habitually wears an ill-fitting wedding dress.

After her attempted suicide, Cecilia starts to accessorize, but it's clear that she isn't trying to make a fashion statement. She wears a collection of all the girls' bracelets, taped to her wrist to cover her scars.

Perhaps the last thing that Cecilia ever loved (or maybe the last thing she could bear to tolerate) was taking "marathon baths."She sat submerged in the water, contemplating the sad existence of being a 13 year old girl, or maybe trying to clear her head of whatever made her depressed in the first place.

According to the neighborhood boys' narration, Cecilia didn't verbally express any discontent with her life other than to the doctor, after her first suicide attempt. This is one of my favorite quotes from the novel, because it exemplifies the dark humor that Eugenides injects into some elements of the girls' story.
Doctor: "What are you doing here honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
Cecilia: "Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl."

(photos from Sofia Coppola's 1999 film adaptation of The Virgin Suicides)