Nail Polish on a New Carpet

Author's Note- This is my scene analysis for the novel Speak.  I decided to analyze a scene that helps us discover some interesting things about Heather and Melinda.

One of the scenes that we can truly learn about Heather in is the nail polish scene.  A bottle of nail polish spills on her white carpet in her room.  Not that much of a big deal, you would think, right?  To a normal person it wouldn't be.  But Heather's not exactly something I'd call normal.  As soon as it's spilled, she throws herself on her bed and starts sobbing.  Not just crying- full on sobbing.  And when Melinda tries to help by cleaning it up and ends up making it worse, Heather becomes inconsolable.  Although it might seem like just your average teenage temper tantrum, it serves a greater purpose than that.  It's actually symbolism.  The clean, white carpet represents her reputation.  She's got a fresh start, a clean slate.  She's obviously very excited about this.  Nobody knows about her.  No one knows about the things she may or may not have done at her past school.  She can make a brand new fist impression on everybody.   When the nail polish stains the carpet, it symbolizes a stain on her reputation.  It reminds her of her past mistakes, and the mistakes she most likely will make at this school.  When Melinda tries to help fix it, the negative mark on her reputation only gets worse, kind of like when Melinda tries to help her with the Martha projects she was given, but only ruins centerpieces and pillows instead.  Melinda becomes the nail polish on Heather's brand new carpet.  She becomes the problem, rather than solution, in Heather's social life.

There's an Elephant in the Room

Author's Note- This is my Speak essay.   I wrote it about speaking up.  How Melinda won't because she's afraid of the consequences (both positive and negative) of speaking up.  I included a quote from a poem by Terry Kettering called "Elephant in the Room" to help explain my thoughts, and  compare it to Melinda's predicament.

Everything we say has a consequence.  For every cause, an effect.  Sometimes, those consequences are small.  When you get your food from the cafeteria, if you don't say "please" or "thank you", or at least smile politely, the chef might give you the soggy, floppy chicken nuggets from the bottom of the pile instead of the crispy, fresh ones sitting at the top.  But some things you say can have quite severe consequences.  Sometimes, when speaking up, the outcome will be either really fantastic or really destructive, depending on how your peers take it.  Fourteen-year old Melinda Sordino was afraid of the latter, which is one of the countless reasons why she wouldn't speak up about the traumatizing event that caused her to burrow into a hole and hide, practically mute.

Melinda was so traumatized that she wouldn't speak up -- she was afraid of the consequences, afraid of saying the wrong thing.  She's afraid of talking about That Night, wouldn't speak to anybody about it, because she didn't know how.  She thought no one would listen.  Because that would've made it seem even more real, she's afraid of even verbalizing it..  One of the main reasons she's so afraid of this is because she'd seen it happen.  Almost every time someone in this book spoke up, they were punished.  She had a huge issue, but she just wouldn't talk about it. So similar to Melinda's problem is Terry Kettering's in her poem An Elephant in the Room.

There’s an elephant in the room.

It is large and squatting,

so it is hard to get around it.

Yet we squeeze by with,

“How are you?” and, “I’m fine,”

and a thousand other forms of trivial chatter.

We talk about the weather;

we talk about work;

we talk about everything else—

except the elephant in the room.

There’s an elephant in the room.

We all know it is there.

We are thinking about the elephant

as we talk together.

It is constantly on our minds.

For, you see, it is a very big elephant.

It has hurt us all, but we do not talk about

the elephant in the room.

This related to Melinda because she had an elephant in her room, too.  Andy Evans.   Every girl who's ever dated him, or had been friends with someone who dated him, knew how much of a terrible, perverted person he really was.  In fact, on the walls of the stalls in the girl's bathroom of Melinda's school, there's a list of reasons why he's so horrible, what he's done, and who else just outright hates him.  Melinda thought she has no one, and that's almost true.  She didn't have Heather or her parents to confide in, that's for sure.  But she had these bathroom stall door people who know how disgusting Andy is all around her.  She had Mr. Freeman.  Ivy even tried to reach out to her a few times.  She wasn't alone.  If she started to realize this sooner, maybe she could've saved herself a ton of trouble in the end. 

But alas, she was still too afraid to speak up.