Speak

by Laurie Halse Anderson

“You will each pick a piece of paper out of the globe.” He walks around the room so we can pull red scraps from the center of the earth. “On the paper you will find one word, the name of an object. I hope you like it. You will spend the rest of the year learning how to turn that object into a piece of art. You will sculpt it. You will sketch it, papier-mâché it, carve it. If the computer teacher is talking to me this year, you can use the lab for computer-aided designs. But there’s a catch—by the end of the year, you must figure out how to make your object say something, express an emotion, speak to every person who looks at it.”

“Aren’t you the one who called the cops at Kyle Rodgers’s party at the end of the summer?”

I look out my window. A group of little creatures is coming up the walk. A pirate, a dinosaur, two fairies, and a bride. Why is it that you never see a kid dressed as a groom on Halloween?

Hawthorne wanted snow to symbolize cold, that’s what I think. Cold and silence. Nothing quieter than snow. The sky screams to deliver it, a hundred banshees flying on the edge of the blizzard. But once the snow covers the ground, it hushes as still as my heart.

IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding. Andy Evans raped me in August when I was drunk and too young to know what was happening. It wasn’t my fault. He hurt me. It wasn’t my fault. And I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow.