Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

One day my teacher told the class we'd be putting on a play and that everyone had to participate. In school I got teased and because of this I did not have many friends and I did not talk very much. When I was seven, I tell these kids, I used to whistle every time I said the letter S. My role is to show them there's someone who is ready to listen to what they have to say and the way they have to say it.

Some students cover their mouths with their hands at this point I have even seen one little girl cry: they cannot stand to hear their own voices, pieces of themselves that they have been told are ugly. Sometimes I stay silent too, until the student breaks the ice and asks what he or she is supposed to do. At first, they come into my little makeshift classroom one at a time and they shuffle their Keds on the floor and shyly glance at the formidable recording equipment and they are absolutely silent. My job is to help children find their voices - kinds that come to school mute, or with lisps or cleft palates. Oliver would be content to live in a sailcloth tent on the coast of Argentina, watching his whales sound in warm water. I enjoy my work but certainly not the way Oliver enjoys his work. It's not such a big deal now that Rebecca is old enough to take care of herself, and since Oliver is away so much of the time, I have less to do at home. I am the only speech pathologist in this town, which means I get shuttled back and forth to different elementary schools in the San Diego suburbs. As mysteriously as it all started, the screaming went away and the next morning I married Oliver Jones - the Oliver Jones - and we just about lived happily ever after. To this day, I don't know why that happened to me. There was no foreseeable problem that I could articulate.

I had a job waiting for me when I returned from my honeymoon. I was marrying the man of my dreams in a prototypical white clapboard New England church, and the reception - a lavish one with white-gloved waiters and Beluga caviar - was going to be held in my parents' backyard. I was barely nineteen, a straight-A student fresh out of Wellesley College and in 1976 that was still an accomplishment. I watched the lights come on in different houses - blue and yellow, blinking like Christmas - and wondered what was happening to me.

We lived in a button-down suburb of Boston, and we were waking up the neighbors one by one. Even with my mouth closed, I continued - the high, shrill note of a nocturnal animal. My parents came into the room and put their arms around me they patted my head and smoothed my hair, fine, and I still couldn't stop screaming. The night before I got married I woke up, screaming, from my sleep.

Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult