Speak

This story is about a young girl named Melinda, who experiences something terrible. Her reaction is the very real feeling that she will not be believed. She is not wrong about that.

She cannot seem to speak the truth to anyone about what really happened. Hidden behind her silence, she becomes a young woman strangled by fear of attack; a woman who needs a safe space to hide while she struggles to find her voice again.

This journey takes place in a high school that seems like a hostile world for Melinda. There is a shunning as she is set up as an outcast. Suddenly not belonging to any group, she starts the year feeling those social sanctions she has drawn for ruining a party that summer. Though no one else knows why she did it yet.

At school she must endure a number of small physical humiliations like people bumping up against her in the hall or trying to push her books out of her hands as they walk by her. Over the course of the year she endures silence, shunning, and direct bullying for her summer indiscretion.

The story follows Melinda’s retreat into herself, and her slow turnaround. The reader gets to follow Melinda on her path back to finding her voice through a series of written notes about the incident.

At first she even wants to hide it from herself, then she finds that she can’t run from it. Then she slowly begins to face her demon down in order to help someone else, even when she thinks she cant help herself, she find the strength to Speak.

Her parents are not absent, but they are extremely distant and caught up in their own ideas about what is going on with their daughter. Mr. Freeman, the one…