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1. When baby-sitting at Mrs. Larsen´s place somebody trips Alice by putting acid on the chocolate covered peanuts she eats. On her trip she´s screaming and halluzinating that her dead Gramps calls her and tries to help her, but his body is dripping with blazing multicoloured worms and maggots that fall on the floor behind him and want to eat her up. On her ride she hurts herself really seriously and is taken to some kind of hospital jail.
2. Alice´s parents aren´t disappointed but believe in her. They look after her while she has to stay in this kind of hospital jail. Her mum writes Joel that Alice is in hospital by telling him that she had had kind of a nervous breakdown. Her dad takes care of her jurisdiction and promises her to help her to get out of the "crazy house" as soon as possible and put her into the hands of a proper psychiatrist.
3. Joel doesn´t split up with Alice but the other way round. He continues writing letters to her while she´s in treatment. And after her dad has told him the truth about his girlfriend he writes her a ten pages letter. That´s the way he supports his partner.
4. Alice is very scared when she´s sent to a State Mental Hospital. She calls it an insane asylum, a loony bin, a crazy house, a freak wharf, where she can wander around with all the other lunatics and idiots. At Boobie Hatch she´s registered, catalogued and questioned. They take her down a smelly, ugly, dingy, paintpeeling, old hallway and through a locked door which is locked again behind her. When she sees the people there she knows that she doesn´t belong to them and it seems to her that the whole world is full of crazy people.
5. On July 25 she´s taken to the Youth Center. If she wants the privilege of going to school she will have to go and see Doctor Miller and sign a commitment that she´s ready to live according to all the other rules and regulations.
6. Doctor Miller tells her that the hospital can´t help her, and the staff can´t help her, and the teachers can´t help her, and the program which had proved very successful can´t help her, unless she wanted help! He also insists her to admit that she has a problem, but she is sure she hasn´t. She doesn´t open her mouth once when she´s at Dr. Miller´s practise because he´s so frightened.
7. Babbie is the girl living in the room next to Alice´s. He´s just 13 and she seems constantly on the verge of tears. She has been on drugs for two years. Her parents were divorced when she was ten and she was sent to live with her father who´s a contractor and who´s remarried. She was jealous of her new mother´s children and felt like an outsider, so she began spending more and more time away from home. Although she was going to school only half of the time she was bringing home good grades and so her parents didn´t seem to be interested. Babbie was introduced to drugs and to life in general by a 32 year old man. So at 12 she became a BP, a baby prostitute. After about a year her parents became suspicious, so she robbed the next man she found and took a bus to LA, where BP´s are never in trouble to bet by. There a "friend" offered her she could live with her and go to school if she worked for her two hours daily. After a few weeks Babbie ran away and hitch-hiked to San Francisco where she was beaten up and raped. Some time later she wandered off with a guy who had set up his own lab to make LSD. That´s why she got mixed up in some communical shit and landed in the Youth Center. Now her parents don´t want her any more.
8. Alice finds it very interesting to listen to the other kids at the group therapy. Talking about their problems makes them understand themselves a little better she thinks and they aren´t "feeding their problems" then. She hopes that the time she is spending at the Youth Center will make her a more capable person and perhaps she´ll get something out of this place instead of being broken by it.
9. Tom is a handsome, likesable, extremely articulate 15-year-old guy, the kind of person people automatically feel comfortable around. So Alice asks him why he was in the Youth Center. He answers that he came from a solid, comfortable, unbroken home and that he was popular with great many people. One day he and his buddies heard about sniffling glue and because it sounded exciting they tried it. He started taking pills like tranquilizers, cold remedies and sleeping pills. Because he didn´t have any more any more he applied at the most logical place - a drugstore. Tom was laid off when they found out about Tom´s taking pills. After that a friend introduced him to Smack and he started pushing. Alice thinks that he´s still freaked out, for even now he almost has a contact high just talking about drugs.
10. Alice is allowed to go home on August 9 because her dad got Jan to sign an affidavit saying that Alice wasn´t pushing at the school and both tried to get Marcie to retract her statement. Alice is happy to be in her own room again and to feel the love of her family. It´s load off her mind that her family doesn´t hate her, because in a lot of ways she hates herself.
11. Fawn invites her to come over tonight and go swimming in their pool. Maybe Alice can get back in with the straight kids. But she´s unsure, insecure and afraid of being expelled because of being not smart enough or because of the stories that went around about her. Finally her premotions about Fawn´s party are ridiculous. It is great, the kids are nice and she´s accepted very well. But she is still afraid that someone starts talking about her being picked up and she´s uncertain about whether to tell her friends the truth.
12. When Alice notices that summer is almost gone although it doesn´t seem as though it´s been here at all she starts to think about her life. She doesn´t want to get old and she has this silly fear that one day she will be old, without ever having really been young. She wonders if it could happen that quickly or if she has ruined her life already. It seems to her as if her life gets by her without ever seeing it. Time flies, she thinks. It seems only yesterday she was a child.
13. On her 16th birthday Joel comes to see her, and that´s the most beautiful gift for her. Her family told her to take a bath and set her hair and not to come down until she was the most beautiful creature in the world. And when she came down there was her boyfriend in the living room. Joel gives her a white enameled friendship ring with little flowers all over it and she should wear it until she dies.
14. Alice won´t keep a diary or a journal through her whole life because when a person gets older she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people instead of just with another part of herself as her diary has been to her.
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