Speak: Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Melinda reports that Heather has gotten a job as a model at a local department store (though Melinda believes that Heather’s father may have gotten the job for her). The Marthas, meanwhile, are impressed.

Melinda accompanies Heather to a bathing suit shoot, and Heather’s mother asks whether she too wants to be a model. Embarrassed by her scabbed mouth, Melinda does not answer (Heather, meanwhile, tells her mother that Melinda is “‘too shy’”), but admits to herself that she does want to be a model. She wants to put on gold eye shadow, look like “a sexy alien,” and be seen as untouchable.

Reflecting that she likes food too much to model, Melinda scoffs at Heather’s obsessive dieting. She watches as Heather attempts to model a swimsuit in a freezing cold building (and reflects that the goose-bumped Heather looks a lot like the Sordino family’s Thanksgiving turkey), and as a photographer creepily commands her to act sexily. Melinda comments that her throat is sore, and reports that although she has not bought golden eye shadow, she did buy black and red nail polish called Black Death to match her bloody, bitten nails. Next, she sarcastically decides, she will buy a shirt in “tubercular gray.”