Out of My Mind
Chapter 1: Melody explains how words have been around her her whole life, how they were like sweet liquid gifts she drank like lemonade, and how she held onto every single one of them.
Chapter 2: Melody explains how people think of her, a small girl with curly black hair, strapped into a pink wheelchair (which is not cute at all). She also talks about how she is almost 11, never spoken a word in her life but has soo much to say. Melody remembers everything, with a photographic memory, mostly words, which she explains as taken for granted.
Chapter 3: Melody and her parents knew she was different at a young age. Her dad gave her a stuffed cat “play pretty” once and she just couldn’t help but drop it. She was always falling onto the floor; she never had balance, ever. But her dad was always kind to her, and understood, just as she had always listened to him talk and she understood.
Chapter 4: Melody tells a story of when she was five and was just about old enough to get enrolled in school. Her mother took her to determine how smart she was. Dr.Hugley, who was ironically a pretty large man, tested Melody with blocks which she could not hold to arrange in size order like the doctor asked, it was physically impossible for Melody. Then, he asked her which object did not belong out of a tomato, cherry, red balloon, and a banana, she knew he wanted the balloon but it was too easy so she choose the banana because of its difference in size and shape. After a few more tests Dr. Hugely decided Melody was “severely brain-damaged and profoundly retarded.” But Melody got so mad, just as her mom did who then wildly protested. Dr. Hugely then offered a nursing home where Melody could ‘forget about her parents, so they could live happily,’ this made both Melody and her mother nervous but it shot Melody’s mother out of the roof with madness. So after they left the office in refusal they did a fist bump (well as best as melody could) and went home.
Chapter 5: Melody introduces all of her classmates, and talks about how their room is fit for babies with all the paintings on the wall. They have a different teacher every year but they learn the same things and stay in the same classroom, H5. The youngest kid in melody's class is a tiny girl named Ashley, followed by Carl, Maria, Gloria, Willy Williams, and the oldest is Freddy, and they whole school calls them the kids with 'disabilities'. Every year their teacher will reach into the closet and take three large, yellowing, foam balls and puts them together to make a stupid 6 foot tall snowman, who everyone but Maria hates. At the end of this chapter melody has concluded that she out of everyone in the school can understand her classmates in H5 the best, and that there is no one else like her there. "It's like (she lives).. in a cage with no door and no key. And (she has)... no way to tell someone how to get (her).. out."