Charlie Timeline & Summary

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• Coping with his best friend's suicide, Charlie starts high school. 
• After a few weeks of school, he makes friends with Patrick and Sam at the school football game. This is a big deal for our little wallflower.
• At the end of October, Charlie has a couple of firsts. He goes to his first party and (unintentionally) eats his first pot brownie.
• One of the girls from the party, Mary Elizabeth, enlists Charlie to help with her Rocky Horror fanzine, Punk Rocky. Charlie starts attending the fan-participation nights of Rocky Horror.
• Around New Year's Eve, Charlie does LSD for the first time. It takes him almost two weeks to get over the effects. Don't worry, he realizes it was a bad idea.
• At the Sadie Hawkins dance, Charlie discovers that his sister is pregnant. He takes her to a clinic a few days later to have an abortion.
• Charlie and Mary Elizabeth's relationship is rocky almost from the get-go. The whole thing crumbles when Charlie kisses Sam instead of Mary Elizabeth during a game of truth or dare. Oops.
• Charlie's friends get angry with him, and he retreats into a haze of marijuana smoke.
• As Charlie's friends, who are older, start making prom and graduation plans, Charlie is pretty lonely.
• Before Sam leaves for Penn State's summer program, she has a heart-to-heart chat with Charlie. 
• They start putting other body parts together, too, but when she touches Charlie, some long-repressed memories bubble to the surface.
• Charlie suddenly remembers that he was molested by his Aunt Helen. He spirals into a deep depression and has to be hospitalized.
• Writing his last letter from the hospital, Charlie tells his reader that he is optimistic about the future. And he says his reader (us, perhaps?) should be, too.