8TH GRADE

Excerpt from Monster by Walter Dean Myers, pages 3 – 5
ISBN: 9780064407311 Publisher: Harper Collins Lexile: 670L
“Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning. The movie is in black and white, and grainy. Sometimes the camera moves in so close that you can’t tell what is going on, and you just listen to the sounds and guess. I have seen many movies of prisons but never one like this. This is not a movie about bars and locked doors. It is about being alone and about being scared all the time. I think to get used to this I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else. I wish I could make sense of it. Maybe I could make my own movie. I could write it out and play in my head. I could block out the scenes like we did in school. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I’ll write it down in the notebook they let me keep. I’ll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. Monster.”