Lily Melissa Owens

Lily is a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother died when she was four years old, an accident that Lily feels she was responsible for. She dresses in clothes she made in home economics. She is not a popular person in school. She has jet-black hair that resembles a nest of cowlicks, no chin, Sophia Loren eyes and an inferiority complex. She takes to picking scabs on her body and biting the flesh around her fingernails until they bleed. Boys, even the hard-up ones, ignore her. Rosaleen makes Lily wear breeches in the cold, which are neither fashionable nor complimentary, especially under her dresses. Girls become quiet when she walks past, because she has no fashion sense and is a little bit strange. Lily likes to daydream that Rosaleen is her mother and that the two of them share a bond. She finds a photo of the mother...