Speak

PART ONE (CHAPTERS 1-21)

Reading Check

1. A wounded zebra (Chapter 1)

2. In notes (Chapter 6)

3. Getting brother arrested (Chapter 12)

4. The Marthas (Chapter 21)

5. It keeps changing (Various chapters)

Short Answer

1. Anderson uses Melinda’s internal monologue to characterize her, since she seldom speaks. Through Melinda’s sarcastic, witty, and sometimes bitter observations that vividly describe the social scene around her in relatable images and analogies, readers understand that Melinda is someone holding a secret, since her guarded actions do not match up with the sharp opinions and emotional activity in her mind. (Chapter 1; Various chapters)

2. Melinda’s fondness for nicknames indicates a desire for detachment from the social scene and cements her role as an observer, not a participant. The degree to which she labels people corresponds with the level of closeness Melinda allows them and the level of respect she accords to each. Mr. Neck, reduced to a single body part, is someone she disdains and wants to avoid, while she is willing to attempt a professional relationship with Mr. Freeman. Similarly, the ambiguity with which she refers to peers signals her relationship with them. Rachel/Rachelle has two identities, because Melinda believes her former friend has become someone else, and Heather from Ohio remains geographically distant, indicating a person Melinda tolerates but with whom she will never be close. IT, her euphemistic name for Andy Evans, reduces him to less than human, suggesting that he has done something subhuman in her eyes. (Chapter 2; Various chapters)

3. She called the police during a party involving underage drinking and many of her peers got in trouble. (Chapter 12)

4. Readers may have trouble sympathizing with Melinda because her motivation for calling the police is unknown, she is callous toward Heather, and she has an extremely negative outlook. However, worrisome clues regarding the night of the party and Melinda’s admission that she used to be a different person indicate that her behaviors and outlook are a symptom of something deeper, which saves her from being a completely unlikable character. (Chapter 13; Various chapters)

5. The school board’s fixation on the identity of the mascot symbolizes the failure of institutions to adequately support students, as a board should ensure the students’ wellbeing and success but instead remains distracted by appearances and perceptions. The irony that students like Melinda lack emotional support at school while the board spends so much effort perfecting the school’s image shows its shallow commitment to students. (Chapter 19; Various chapters)

PART TWO (CHAPTERS 22-44)

Reading Check

1. Maya Angelou (Chapter 23)

2. Mr. Neck’s lecture (Chapter 30)

3. Shooting free-throws (Chapter 34)

4. Modeling (Chapter 38)

5. His painting (Chapter 44)

Short Answer

1. While Mr. Neck frames the topic as a debate, he is not seeking discourse but a platform for his own xenophobia and white supremacist views. In addition to establishing Mr. Neck as an antagonist and symptom of education’s failures, the incident exacerbates Melinda’s inner conflict by reinforcing Melinda’s belief that adults do not want students to speak up and that speaking up is unsafe. (Chapter 26)

2. Melinda sees the turkey carcass as a kind of metaphor for her feelings since starting high school and is inspired by the ugliness of the bones, which she brings to class to turn into a sculpture full of emotion. Like the turkey, she feels she has potential and despite her efforts, has been used, abused, and discarded. The turkey sculpture allows her to abstractly explore and express her pain without the danger of being caught in it. (Chapter 28)

3. In addition to her abstract exploration of her pain through her turkey bone sculpture, she helps Heather create Thanksgiving decorations in the lounge and posters for the canned food drive, gives Heather a Christmas gift, and even tries to be festive at Christmas by decorating and making snow angels. (Various chapters)

4. Melinda identifies with the helpless frog body in the same way she found something familiar in the turkey carcass, and the way they pin the body down to hold it still while they dissect it triggers memories of what happened to her at the party over the summer. This proves to Melinda that not acknowledging the incident is not the same as forgetting it. (Chapter 37)

5. Heather believes she is a good friend but is too self-centered and interested in increasing her popularity to be supportive. She takes advantage of Melinda’s passivity by first using her as a sounding board for her problems and then as a helper in her various projects to win over the Marthas; she is so concerned with impressing the Marthas that she does not even defend Melinda’s posters or express loyalty to her when they confront Heather at lunch. (Chapters 41, 43)

PART THREE (CHAPTERS 45-63)

Reading Check

1. A scared bunny (Chapter 46)

2. As code-breaking (Chapter 48)

3. David Petrakis/Heather (Chapter 52)

4. Cubism (Chapter 56)

5. New clothing (Chapter 57)

Short Answer

1. In both stories, female protagonists—Hester and Melinda—suffer the social burden of a crime and carry public and private shame while the male counterpart escapes judgment. Further, like Hawthorne, Anderson’s style employs imagery and symbolism to represent the protagonist’s development. (Chapter 48)

2. Melinda was hoping to receive an expression of friendship or love on Valentine’s Day. Instead, she received a card with a message from Heather, which included the half of the friendship necklace Melinda gifted her. This further underscores Melinda’s friendlessness. (Chapter 52)

3. When discussing the ongoing failure of Melinda’s various trees, Mr. Freeman tells Melinda that art is about making mistakes and learning from them. While Mr. Freeman is talking about her trees, he understands that her struggles are about more than her art and the advice can be applied to other areas of her life, like her shame for what happened over the summer and her struggle to cope afterward. Like the trees, Melinda has tried all sorts of ways to move forward, but none have worked yet. Mr. Freeman reminds her that art, and life, are trial-and-error processes, not products. (Chapter 57)

4. Melinda learns that seeds are a miracle of survival, because conditions must be right for them to germinate, grow, and reproduce. Plants must produce a great number of seeds to ensure that a few will survive to pass on their genes. Melinda identifies with the promise that despite hardship, survival is possible, even if the conditions for it are impossible. Like the seed, Melinda can survive if she finds the right conditions for growth. (Chapter 59)

5. Melinda’s blurred, incomplete memory in her flashback indicates she may have been drugged or was otherwise intoxicated. In either case, consent was not possible. Though Melinda has internalized her inability to speak up as a sign of personal failure, the fault lies with Andy Evans, who took advantage of her obvious impairment and assaulted her. (Chapter 63)    

PART FOUR (CHAPTERS 64-89)

Reading Check

1. Like an obedient dog (Chapter 65)

2. Mandatory presentation (Chapter 71)

3. A tennis demonstration (Chapter 78)

4. Speak to Rachel (Chapter 83)

5. Speak up/scream (Chapter 88)

Short Answer

1. Though she feels that Rachel betrayed their friendship, Melinda is alarmed to learn she is now dating Andy Evans and must decide how to warn her without dredging up past grievances or, worse, making Andy seem more attractive to Rachel. (Chapter 69)

2. Melinda uses the suffragettes to defend her right to remain silent, but David argues that the suffragettes were the ones being silenced. Their protest represented a refusal to remain quiet, so her protest is inaccurate and even disrespectful since he views silence as complicity with the “bad guys.” (Chapter 72)

3. Andy is a habitual boundary-crosser and predatory manipulator. Melinda often refers to him as a wolf to her bunny. Not only does he ignore rules and authority and violate personal space under the guise of flirtation, he also blatantly disregards social boundaries and others’ property, doing things like flipping lights off on people in public rooms and casually destroying others’ art because it is in his way. He ignores Greta-Ingrid’s body language and draws Rachel/Rachelle in by stealing her property and leveraging it for a kiss in return. (Various chapters)

4. After Ivy validates Melinda’s experience of Andy Evans, she decides to leave a message thread on the wall identifying boys at school to avoid, putting Andy at the top. Rather than using the space to drag down other girls’ reputations or to facilitate bullying, Melinda uses the format to start a dialogue and warn others. Later, seeing other writers agree with her reveals she is not alone. (Chapter 81)

5. The climax is Andy’s second assault on Melinda in the storage closet. Narratively, this scene is positioned as a kind of rematch, or second chance for Melinda to recast herself as victor rather than victim, and to right the upended justice plaguing her since the assault. Her hard work processing the trauma in silence has taught her that she must speak up, and the lessons learned listening to people like Mr. Freeman, David, and Ivy allow her a triumph after a long period of adversity. Not only does Melinda speak up for herself, but she also eventually reverses their roles by holding the broken shards of the mirror to his throat and scaring him into silence. She takes his power as he once took hers, a role reversal that rights the inverted sense of justice in the story. This clear and powerful triumph creates a hopeful message that recovery and justice are possible when survivors of trauma speak up. (Chapter 88)