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Part 1, Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Speak, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
Communication versus Silence
Appearance versus Reality
Family and Friendship
Isolation, Loneliness, and Depression
Memory and Trauma
Summary
Analysis
With sarcasm and bitterness, Melinda describes the school’s cheerleaders. She notes their simultaneous promiscuity and purity, and marvels at the fact that they are hailed as role models even as they sleep with the entire football team. These girls exist in two different realities, she realizes: in one they are perfect, gorgeous role models, while in the other they throw wild parties and “get group-rate abortions before the prom.” She ponders how happy they must be, and how “cute” they are, and compares their perfection with her own failures.
Even as Melinda is scornful of the cheerleaders, she is also jealous of them. Afflicted by trauma and depression, Melinda feels that she is somehow broken and defective. She does not understand that people can look perfect even if their lives are imperfect. Her envy of the cheerleaders is much like her envy of Nicole; she believes that they are everything that she is not.
Themes
As the rally ends, someone knocks Melinda down three rows of bleachers. She fantasizes about creating a clique called the Anti-Cheerleaders, which will hang out underneath the bleachers and “commit mild acts of mayhem.”
Once again, Melinda maintains her dark sense of humor even as the world treats her harshly.
Themes
