SPEAK

It’s a Saturday night, and you’re going over to a small gathering at your friend’s house. You’re a senior in high school, and it seemed like you had everything; cheer captain, the quarterback for a boyfriend, perfect grades, everything. You asked Lisa what you guys would be doing at the gathering, but she just replied with, “You know, I thought we could try a new fad.” As you start to pull into the driveway of the dimly lighted house, you become timorous of what this new fad might be. As you walk into the house, you see Lisa and three other friends sitting at a kitchen table. Lisa was usually impassive and imperturbable, but tonight, something had changed about her. “Hey, there um, wait. What’s your name again?” Lisa slurred. It was very limpid that the four of them must have been drinking. “Want some?” Dave held out a beer to me. You were fantod that if you didn’t try it, you might lose your reputation of being popular. So you took the beer, and started to drink it. One little sip wouldn’t hurt, right? Two hours later you wake up on the floor with several beers in your system, and you are way past the point of being drunk. You look at the clock and see that it is 3:00 AM; since it is way past your cur few, you decide to drive home. Right as you get onto the highway, you are swerving back and forth between lanes and you’ve lost all control of the wheel. Then all of a sudden, everything went black. You wake up in an ambulance feeling as if thousands of needles were piercing into your body. You can’t see anything but you can hear the doctor say, “I don’t think she’s going to make it.” Scared as you could possibly ever be, you try to tell them that you’re fine; but you just can’t seem to get the words out. You start to feel more and more pain, it felt as like a thousand rocks were flattening your lungs, and all of a sudden you can’t breathe. The perfect life that you once had, gone… Many teens in today’s world are put under tons of peer pressure each and every day. If it be from their parents, friends, family or even teachers; it’s hard to say no. In Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, a girl named Melinda learns that sometimes doing things that your friends are doing isn’t always the best choice.

To start, Melinda is about to be a freshman at Merryweather High school and everything looks like it’s going to be a great year. Melinda has many friends, good grades, and a loving family; nothing could possibly go wrong, right? When Melinda and her friends pulled up to the end of the summer party at an abandoned barn, everything seemed a little shady. There’s underage drinking, smoking, and way too many teens out of control. And when Melinda starts to drink a little too much, everything goes into chaos. Andy Evans, a soon to be senior, asks Melinda to dance; and of course she politely accepts. After awhile they start to kiss. Melinda feels as if she’s on top of the world. Five minutes later she is crying in the middle of the woods. So how did she go from ecstatic to horrible in a matter of minutes? Melinda was one of the many people in the United States who have been raped.
To continue, teenagers constantly have issues with peer pressure. It seems like everywhere we go there is somebody that wants us to do something that we really shouldn’t be doing. But it’s very hard to say no to things that are potentially deleterious, especially when your friendships could be on the line. Melinda was pressured to drink which then caused a chain reaction of bad decisions; drinking lead to kissing, which lead to rape, which lead to losing all of her friends, which finally lead to depression. Depression can sometimes lead to suicide, which luckily Melinda did not commit. Nearly 30,000 people’s lives are taken by suicide each year. Most of these people don’t even try to get help because they think no one is there for them or no one will listen. But the truth is many people will listen to what you have to say. Because if you take away your own life, who knows what you’ve taken away from the world; the next president, open heart surgeon, or something as simple as a stay at home mom. There might be someone out there in the world that might need to talk to you about suicide one day. So if you aren’t alive for them to talk to, that’s potentially another person added to the 30,000.

Aside from suicide, rape or being sexually assaulted is one of the other things many people are affected by each year. Every two minutes someone in the United States is sexually assaulted, that’s 720 sexual assaults each day. So who can you trust in this chaotic world of ours you might ask? You can trust most, if not all the people you know out there. But you just have to be careful. Not every party is going to end in a bad situation. It’s just very unfortunate that Melinda happened to be at the wrong place, with the wrong guy, at the wrong time.

To conclude, we need to be more aware of all the things going on around us. You might have a great life now, but you really don’t want to end up being one of those 720 people. Sometimes bad situations aren’t preventable, but that doesn’t mean you have to go through with them. Nobody knows when the next dangerous trend will come knocking on our doors. But when it does, will you have the guts to take a stand? Or will you be knocking your first domino over into a new chain of bad decisions?