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.