The (insensitive) party at the end

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It was insensitive, and at the same time, part of the story's mystery hinged on the unlikelihood that all five of the teenaged sisters were depressed enough, i.e., clinically depressed, to be suicidal. The validity of their reason for suicide is called into question. For the sake of this post, a valid suicide is one that doesn't elicit contempt in people who sincerely believe that depression suppresses self-determination.

Cecilia's killing herself was relatively easy for the community to dismiss as an isolated incident, she had been the weird one the neighborhood boys stayed away from. The kook of the bunch, grieved for, and, given her life led in the shadow of her sisters, perhaps genuinely depressed.

The news clip that said adolescents cannot separate the reality from the intended drama had veracity. As a teenager, you may know something you're doing will be disapproved of as unwise, and it still doesn't completely register. You may not care enough because you've been sheltered from the full gamut of social interaction throughout childhood, leaving you with an incomplete grasp of how your actions may effect yourself and others. Behavior considered sociopathic if perpetrated by an adult is not a rarity for teenagers.

So, the sisters' group suicide could be interpreted as an obnoxious statement, rather than a response to crushing depression. Their isolation enforced by strict parents just wasn't going to be widely acceptable as grounds for a hopelessness that ends in all four of their suicides, it would imply an absolute in human behavior that nobody should feel comfortable with. It becomes a loose cannon of an affront. The narrator called it an outrage.

A book about the seventies said "Like divorce and orgasm, death became an experience..." If it seemed to you they committed suicide to propagate a fad, how infuriated would you be? Teenagers casting about for an identity can be unduly influenced by peer pressure, the Homecoming Queen's suicide is going to be a source of concern for parents.

The debutante party with its theme of asphyxiation made sense amidst the heavy miasma of an algae born of environmental pollution. How unfair to have to abandon a clever idea that would've been rendered irregardless of the Lisbons. Yes, the gas masks figuratively served to insulate them against the disease Ceel and Mary were exposed to the previous odd year, when Dominic Palazzolo jumped from a second floor window into the hedges, his symbolic gesture. That everyone wanted to forget about the Lisbons by then doesn't mean they were capable of it, the asphyxiation theme merely acknowledged this truth.

The drunk guy probably didn't weigh all this before mocking the high profile suicides in his community.

(I learned I'm into paragraphs with 3 sentences.)