Meet Melinda, our narrator. She's riding the bus to her first day of high school. It's bad. Her old friends won't talk to her, much less sit with her on the bus. The school assembly is worse. Kids are laughing at her. Rachel is with them.
Melinda wishes she could tell Rachel, especially Rachel, her secret. Melinda reads Rachel's lips saying "I hate you" 1. She wants to cry.
The narrator misses biology class because she can't find it. English class is taught by a woman with "no face" 2. Social Studies class is taught by a teacher Melinda calls Mr. Lunch is bad. The problem of having nobody to sit with is solved when a guy called Basketball Pole hits Melinda with mashed potatoes, causing her to flee. Neck stops her, and since she can't tell him why she's leaving, she gets in trouble. Next stop: Art class.
Much better. Another old friend, Ivy, is here, but she and Melinda don't make eye contact. Freeman, the art teacher, says that they are in "the only class that will teach [them] how to survive" 4. Everybody pulls slips of paper from a broken globe Mr.
Freeman passes around. Whatever is on the paper is what they'll be working on for the year. Melinda's paper says "tree. School has been in session for two weeks and Melinda has been eating lunch with a girl named Heather and occasionally visiting Heather's home.
Heather talks a lot, and Melinda says little. Today Melinda is home after school ordering pizza, since Mom is at work at Effert's, a clothing store. When she hears Dad come home, she slips off to her room. In the mirror across from her bed, she sees she's not looking so good. Her lips are bitten — she can't help biting them — and her mouth doesn't seem like her mouth any more.
She puts the mirror in the closet. Melinda has gym with Heather and Nicole. Nicole used to be in her "clan," the Plain Janes, along with Rachel and Ivy. It's not clear whether Nicole is mad at Melinda, or just too absorbed in her own life to talk to her.
One day, Melinda encounters Rachel in the bathroom and tries to talk to her. Rachel, who is calling herself Rachelle, just brushes her off, leaving with a foreign exchange student Melinda calls Greta-Ingrid.
On another day, Melinda is running from Mr. Neck, and she happens on a janitor's closet that hasn't been used in a long time. Perfect hiding place. Sometime after, Heather talks Melinda into going to a pep rally. Some girls recognize her as Melinda Sordino, the girl who called the cops at Kyle Rodgers end-of-the-summer party.
She gets poked, kneed, hair-pulled, and pushed down the bleachers before it's all over. At dinner one night, Mom and Dad get on Melinda's case because they've seen her progress reports, and she can do better. They fight when Melinda leaves the table. Melinda decides to try. She's focusing in science class. Her teacher, Ms. Keen, is pretty brilliant.
So is Melinda's lab partner, David Petrakis. Stetman, Melinda's algebra teacher, is also very smart, but he can't seem to convince the class of why they need algebra. Heather joins the Marthas, a group dedicated to charity and decorating. Heather convinces Melinda to help her. When Siobhan and Emily come into the lounge to check it out, they aren't pleased to see Melinda.
Heather says Melinda is the first person at school to talk to her. Siobhan says, "She's creepy. What's wrong with her lips? She looks like she's got a disease or something" Melinda escapes to the bathroom, crying.
She tries to wash away her facial features. Sometime after this, Melinda sees a guy she calls "IT. Melinda would vomit, except her "lips are sewn together" The first section ends with Melinda's report card. When Mom and Dad see Melinda's report card, they demand that she stay after school for tutoring.
She does stay after school, but she tutors herself inside the supply closet she's made her own. Over the mirror, she tapes up a poster of writer Maya Angelou. Melinda's been having trouble talking lately. She really, really wants to tell her secret, "to hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to somebody else" But that won't get rid of the horrible memory. Better she stays in the closet and keeps the awful thing to herself. One day, Mr. Neck comes to social studies class mad because his son didn't get a job as a firefighter.
He blames immigrants and says the US government should have stopped all immigration in When students challenge him, he shuts down the debate. David Petrakis, Melinda's lab partner, stands up and says, "The Constitution does not recognize different classes of citizenship based on time spent living in the country. In case you don't know, "xenophobia" is "an unreasonable fear of foreigners.
She does, however, find one bright spot in her day: art class. Her art teacher, Mr. Freeman, is an effusive, soulful teacher who encourages creativity and emotion in his students. He has each student pull a scrap of paper out of a broken globe; written on each scrap is a word that the student will try to create in art for the rest of the semester. Melinda pulls the word tree. In these first sections of Speak , you meet Melinda, and through her description of her classmates and teachers, you gain a sense of their character as well as her own.
You also see hints as to what has caused Melinda to be isolated and view herself as an "outcast. First, Melinda presents herself as a thoughtful, sarcastic, and reserved person. While she formerly saw herself as a "Plain Jane" with her small group of friends, she now sees herself as "Outcast," friend of no one.
The calm Melinda describes on reaching art class suggests that art will continue to be an outlet for her as she wrestles with the breach between her and her friends and her new life as a high school student.
Secondly, Melinda's description of her peers and teachers not only reveals her wit and sarcasm, but also illustrates the theme of control with which Melinda will struggle throughout the novel.
Pay close attention to the names of the people around Melinda and whether or not she gives them nicknames. The Ecology Club's campaign against having a tiger as the school mascot succeeds, and the school holds an assembly to come up with new suggestions. The students vote on one of four options.
Melinda's parents are making her stay after school to get extra help from her teachers because her grades are so bad. Melinda, however, uses the time after school to tidy up and decorate her janitor's closet with a poster of Maya Angelou. Increasingly, Melinda is finding it difficult to speak; in addition to her sore and bitten lips, her throat constantly hurts. In Spanish class, her teacher instructs the class to translate and conjugate five verbs.
Melinda chooses traducir, fracasar, esconder, escaper, olvidar. On Job Day, Melinda and the rest of her classmates take a test to see what field they should go into. Melinda's test indicates she should go into forestry, firefighting, communications, or mortuary science. Heather's test indicates she should be a nurse.
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