Annotation: Melinda managed to sabotage her freshman year of high school before classes even began, by calling the police and breaking up a wild end-of-summer party. Despised by former friends and strangers alike, Melinda has no one that she can talk to, and no one knows the real reason she called the cops that fateful night. Melinda's silence begins to take over her life crippling her until she is often incapable of speech at all. Ostracized by her peers, Melinda must learn to live with herself, and to listen to herself, and find her identity without the influence of friends. Slowly, as the story progresses, Melinda learns to compensate for her inability to speak through other mediums of expression. Art becomes Melinda's only means of recognizing and expressing her emotional struggles, and uses it to gain confidence, strength and the beginnings of her own identity. Using written language to communicate a potential danger and the briefest admittance of the trauma she experienced the fateful night of the party to her ex-best friend, Melinda inches closer and closer to healing until she faces a cataclysmic moment in which she is forced to face the fear and pain of her past and finds within herself the strength to speak.
