101 pages • 3 hours read
Out of My Mind
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Melody reflects on the difficulties that aides and teachers must have working with kids like her, and those issues probably tie into the high turnover rate at her school. Of all of her teachers, it’s Mrs. Tracey, Melody’s second-grade teacher, with whom Melody connects. Mrs. Tracey recognizes that Melody likes books and reading, and even more importantly, realizes that Dr. Seuss level books are not at all challenging for her young student. The teacher gets higher-level audiobooks for Melody, then asks her critical thinking questions about what she has read when she finishes listening to the recordings. This process provides Melody with an outlet to expand her mind and feel engaged at the same time.
The third-grade teacher, Mrs. Billups, does not follow the same process. Instead, she treats the students as if they are incapable of basic understandings, treating them to a CD of music for infants, and goes over the letters of the alphabet daily. Melody hits a breaking point where she begins to screech and scream, “because I couldn’t talk and tell her to shut up! And that made me cry because I’d never be able to tell anybody what I was really thinking” (54). The teachers and aides don’t know how to manage Melody’s tantrum, and the other students in the class become agitated as well.
Melody’s mother is called to the school, and when she arrives, she asks Melody what went wrong. She realizes that Melody is frustrated by the low-level alphabet lessons and engages in an argument with Mrs. Billups. Mrs. Brooks is shocked that it is February, and Mrs. Billups is still reviewing the letter “B” with the students. She is even more offended that the teacher didn’t keep in mind Melody’s previously learned knowledge: “Melody knows her alphabet, all the sounds of all the letters, and hundreds of words on sight […] We discussed all this at our last parent conference, didn’t we?” (57). Mrs. Billups’s response is that parents tend to exaggerate their child’s abilities.
In response to Mrs. Billups’s insistence that Melody is mentally deficient, Mrs. Brooks argues that Melody is highly intelligent, and her school records from the previous year prove it. She reaches for the music CD and, to the delight of the children in the class, snaps it in half. Melody notes that Mrs. Billups quits after spring break having believed that it would be “easy to work with people who were dumber than she was. She was wrong” (59).
Chapter 8 Summary
Melody draws a comparison between herself and her pet fish, Ollie. In the fish, won for her by her father at a carnival, Melody sees a life that is even more limited than her own. Ollie’s world stretches the small length of the bowl that he lives in, whereas even Melody can go outside to see different sights.
When she is seven, Melody witnesses Ollie jump out of his bowl and land on the table. Knowing that the fish will not survive long without water, Melody screams, but her mother doesn’t hear her right away. Desperate, Melody tries to save Ollie by reaching over to the table and trying to touch him: “I figured that if I could get the fish wet, at least a little bit, I might be able to save him” (63). She manages to grab onto the edge of the fishbowl and pulls it over. The water splashes over everything, including Ollie.
Melody continues to scream until her mother finally responds by coming upstairs and asking Melody why she would knock over the bowl knowing the fish needed water. Angrily, Melody thinks, “I’m not stupid. Why did she think I’d been screeching and calling for her?” (65). Her mother’s attempts to save Ollie fail and Melody wonders “if maybe Ollie wasn’t so happy after all […] Maybe he just couldn’t take it anymore. I feel like that sometimes” (66).
When she is eight, Melody is given a golden retriever puppy, who immediately jumps up into her lap in the wheelchair, stunning the young girl who says, “Then, wow, wow, wow, she turned around three times, and made herself comfortable. I think she made a noise like a sigh of satisfaction. I know I did” (65). Melody communicates to her parents that she wants to name the puppy Butterscotch after Melody’s favorite candies. The dog sleeps at the bottom of Melody’s bed every night, and best of all, “Butterscotch doesn’t care that I can’t talk to her—she knows I love her. She just gets it” (65-66).
One afternoon, Mrs. Brooks lies down for a nap while Melody watches The Wizard of Oz in her wheelchair. She laughs at something in the movie and falls out of the chair. With Butterscotch at her side, Melody doesn’t get upset, although she is unhappy that she cannot see the television screen from the floor. Butterscotch comes to the rescue by scratching at Mrs. Brooks’s closed bedroom door, then barking, and finally throwing her whole body against the door. Melody’s mother wakes up and comes into the room to find Melody on the floor. She praises Butterscotch for sounding the alarm, and Melody, proud of her dog, imagines that if she and her dog traveled to Oz, the only things she would want would be to dance and sing.
Chapter 9 Summary
Melody’s mother is pregnant, and when she tells Melody, the young girl is thrilled, although she knows her parents are worried. Her mother hopes the new baby doesn’t have to face the challenges that Melody does. While Melody is happy with the concept of a new sibling, she wonders how her parents will have time to care for both children, especially when they have to do so much for her.
One night, she overhears her parents discussing their fears about the baby being born with cerebral palsy. Melody’s mother blames herself for Melody’s condition and worries that she could hurt her new child as well. Melody’s father tries to reassure his wife that she was not to blame, and Melody wishes she could do the same: “I wanted to tell Mom that I was sorry she was so sad and so scared” (75).
Their fears are put to rest when Penny is born healthy and happy, but the demands and rigors of caring for two young children, one with special needs, begin to take a toll on Melody’s parents. She hears them arguing more frequently and both trying to make the situation work. Melody feels guilty when she hears them because she thinks her condition makes an already difficult situation even worse. She compares herself to a broken electronic doll and wonders if her mom ever wished she could get a refund for her first child.
Melody—called “Dee-Dee” by her baby sister—watches in awe and envy as Penny learns to move and walk and talk. The family’s morning routines become twice as hectic between feeding, dressing, and cleaning two children, and Melody marvels that they all make it out the door on time every day.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Chapters 7-9 introduce new characters into Melody’s life. Her education is disrupted in third grade by her teacher, Mrs. Billups, who believes in treating special needs students as if they are mentally impaired and incapable of learning anything but the most rudimentary basics. Mrs. Brooks puts Mrs. Billups in her place when she derides the teacher for not having the best interests of her students in mind.
After the upsetting death of her goldfish, Ollie, Melody receives a golden retriever as a gift. The dog, Butterscotch, proves herself a loyal friend whom Melody loves because the dog does not judge her or care that she cannot talk. The dog is also courageous and resourceful, helping to inform Melody’s mom when Melody accidentally falls out of her wheelchair.
The newest addition to Melody’s family is her sister, Penny, who despite her parent’s fears, is born safely and healthy. Melody is both enchanted with and envious of her sister, a baby who can eventually use her limbs, and walk, and speak. Penny’s entrance into the family doubles the workload for Melody’s parents, resulting in increased tensions, arguments, and chaos in the home and foreshadowing the accident concerning Penny.
This section introduces Melody’s mother in more detail. Whereas before the reader only knew her as a frustrated caregiver, this section and the one prior prove her to be in Melody’s corner. Though she often misunderstands Melody, as in the goldfish incident, she believes she is intelligent and angrily points out Melody’s intelligence and abilities to Dr. Hugely and Mrs. Billups. She is aggressively maternal in these instances, which may be informed by her feelings of guilt over Melody’s disability; she confesses that she believes Melody’s cerebral palsy is her fault. Cerebral palsy is often caused by brain damage in the womb or during birth, but it can also result from infections. While it isn’t clear what action Melody’s mother attributes to Melody’s disability, these feelings of guilt inform her behaviors throughout the novel.
Melody’s feelings of guilt over her parents’ stress suggest that she, like her mother, internalizes issues that are beyond her control. Melody cannot unburden her parents because she’s physically incapable. Interestingly, when Melody sees the fish jump from the bowl, she assumes that the fish was so unhappy with his situation that he would rather die. Melody confesses to have considered this alternative for herself: maybe committing suicide would be better than being trapped inside her disabled body.
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