Laurie Anderson: Hello, this is Laurie Halse Anderson. I remember so clearly, when I was 14, feeling completely alone. Some bad things had happened to me back then, and I didn't think I could tell anybody about them. I thought I was the only person in the world who'd ever felt that way. That's why I wrote Speak. Let me read a couple pages to you.

It starts like this. Welcome to Maryweather High. It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomach ache. The school bus wheezes to my corner. The door opens and I step up. I'm the first pick up of the day. The driver pulls away from the curb while I stand in the aisle. Where to sit? I've never been a backseat waif case. If I sit in the middle, a stranger could sit next to me. If I sit in the front, it'll make me look like a little kid. But I figured that's my best chance to make eye contact with one of my friends, if any of them have decided to talk to me yet.

The bus picks up students in groups of four or five. As they walk down the aisle, people who were my middle school lab partners or gym buddies glare at me. I close my eyes. This is what I've been dreading. As we leave the last stop, I am the only person sitting alone. The driver downshifts to drag us over the hills. The engine clanks, which makes some guys in the back holler something obscene. Someone is wearing too much cologne. I try to open my window, but the little latches won't move. I guy behind me unwraps his breakfast and shoots the wrapper at the back of my head. It bounces in my lap, a Ho-Ho.

We pass janitors painting over the sign in front of the high school. The school board has decided that Maryweather High, home of the Trojans, didn't send a strong abstinence message, so they have transformed us into the Blue Devils. Better the devil you know than the Trojan you don't, I guess. School colors will stay purple and gray. The board didn't want to spring for new uniforms.

Older students are allowed to roam until the bell, but ninth graders are herded into the auditorium. We fall into clans: jocks, country clubbers, idiot savants, cheerleaders, human waste, Euro trash, future fascists of America, big hair chicks, the Marthas, suffering artists, thespians, goths, shredders. I am clanless. I wasted the last weeks of August watching bad cartoons. I didn't go to the mall, the lake, or the pool, or answer the phone. I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude, and I don't have anyone to sit with. I am outcast.