Turning Tables

Author’s Note: 

This is my response for tone and meaning for the passage, “Of course I want to be a model. I want to paint my eyelids gold. I saw that on a magazine cover and it looked amazing - turned the model into a sexy alien that everyone would look at but nobody dared touch. I like cheeseburgers too much to be a model. Heather has stopped eating and complains about fluid retention. She should worry more about brain retention, the way she’s dieting away her gray matter. At last check, she was wearing a size one and a half, and she just has to get down to a size one.
I don’t buy the gold eyeshadow, but I do pick up a bottle of Black Death nail polish. It’s gloomy, with squiggly lines of red in it. My nails are bitten to the bleeding point, so it will look natural. I need to get a shirt that matches. Something in a tubercular gray.”, in the novel Speak.

Gold eyelids, sexy aliens, being a model: Melinda wanted it all.  This passage shows Melinda’s old personality coming back for the first time.  She is starting to remember what it was like to be normal, accepted, but just when she gathers up her fantasies; she goes back to wanting her Black Death nail polish.  I think that the purpose of this passage was to show the reader that the plot had a good chance of changing Melinda back to her old, spunky self.  It made me think of every cloud having a silver lining; because, while Melinda still bites her nails and dresses dully, she wants to be bright and noticeable again.  Also, the reader is starting to learn more and more about the type of self centered person Heather truly is.  The passage mentions how Heather “just has to get down to a size one”, which is inordinately small for a girl her age.  To conclude, I think that this paragraph is a turning point in both Heather’s and Melinda’s character’s personalities.