48 pages • 1 hour read
Sharon G. FlakeThe Skin I'm In
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 23-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 23 Summary
At school, Maleeka submits her work for the library writing contest. She decides to sit with some poetry books that remind her of Daddy’s poem. At the school office later, Juju comes in yelling that Charlese is failing because of Miss Saunders. What has actually been happening, though, is that Maleeka has been doing less of Charlese’s homework; additionally, as soon as Miss Saunders arrived at the school, she separated Maleeka’s and Charlese’s seats, so Maleeka hasn’t helped Charlese cheat in class, either.
Mr. Pajolli introduces himself, but Juju continues ranting. When Miss Saunders gets to the office, she shows Juju Charlese’s incomplete work. Before Maleeka can see what happens next, Miss Carol sends her on an errand to get her out of the office. When she returns, Juju is stomping away, threatening to keep Miss Saunders from ever teaching again if she gives Charlese a failing grade.
Chapter 24 Summary
Charlese has taken revenge on several teachers in the past, and her antics usually involve destroying their property. Now, Charlese has been talking about getting revenge on Miss Saunders, and Maleeka knows Charlese means it. While they hang out behind the school, Charlese tells Maleeka and the twins to meet her tomorrow to plot the payback. Meanwhile, a thunderstorm is starting. Maleeka, who is afraid of storms, eyes the lightning nervously and thinks about how Charlese enjoys watching people get caught in the rain. Charlese plans to wreck Miss Saunders’s classroom: They can slice up the expensive globe and spray paint the walls; that will be only the beginning of the revenge.
Maleeka suggests these plans are taking things too far, but Charlese is stubborn. John-John and his friends come by, teasing Maleeka. When he calls her “midnight,” her mind trails off to a poem from earlier titled “Midnight.” Confused by her distant expression, John-John and his friends walk away. Then Caleb comes. Charlese tries to flirt with him, but he just wants Maleeka. He tells her some kids are going to meet to discuss how to make McClenton better, and he invites her to join. Charlese butts in, saying that Maleeka is busy; Maleeka hopes to help Caleb afterward. Caleb warns Maleeka about Charlese, and he walks away. However, it’s not easy to stop being friends with Charlese.
Chapter 25 Summary
Early in the morning, Maleeka sneaks out to meet Charlese and the twins at the school. They sneak into Miss Saunders’s room, which is decorated with a theme for the new book they’re reading, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Maleeka expresses worry, but Charlese is determined. The other girls start destroying things in the classroom. When Charlese insists Maleeka get involved, Maleeka replaces some D's with A’s in the grade book. Charlese demands that Maleeka burn some of the foreign money Miss Saunders brought in for the book theme, but Maleeka refuses. Charlese bullies her into it. The curtains catch fire and the girls run, but the janitor spots Maleeka, who is out last. She falls and cuts her knee open, then continues running home, crying.
Chapter 26 Summary
Maleeka gets home so nervous that she struggles to get the key in the door. The dogs that belong to their next-door neighbor, Miss Jackson, are barking at her. She sneaks back upstairs without waking Momma—but then the phone rings, and it’s Miss Jackson asking for Momma, who wakes up and takes the phone. Maleeka is worried that Miss Jackson saw her sneak back into the house. The women bicker about Momma’s promise to take Miss Jackson to a doctor’s appointment, and Momma tells Maleeka to go back to sleep.
Chapter 27 Summary
Maleeka gets suspended from school, and Momma is distraught when she finds out. At home, they cry at the table together. Maleeka is apologetic and says she didn’t really intend any of it, but Momma is covered in stress hives from trying to figure out how to pay the school back the $2,000 in damages. She decides that Maleeka is smart and can figure it out herself; Maleeka panics, at a loss for how to scrounge up thousands of dollars.
Charlese calls and asks Maleeka if she told on her; she did not. If the school finds out Charlese was involved, she will be expelled. She has already been in trouble in the past for cutting the roof off a teacher’s car. Charlese agrees that she and the twins will help Maleeka pay back the money if Maleeka promises not to report them. Maleeka writes a short diary entry of her own about how acorns grow even when you can’t see them under the dirt. She crumples up the page and throws it away.
Chapters 23-27 Analysis
In Chapter 25, Charlese leads Raise, Raina, and Maleeka in wrecking Miss Saunders’s classroom. This begins the story’s climax, or the main turning point in any narrative, where the conflict brings the drama to its height before the conclusion. While Charlese and the twins plot the details of the revenge, Maleeka also notices a literal storm is brewing; this both mirrors and foreshadows the metaphorical storm ahead.
When the girls go to exact Charlese’s vengeance, they discover that Miss Saunders has decorated the classroom in the theme of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the story the students will be reading. The story, however, is not just the students’ work but also a commentary on Maleeka’s role in The Skin I’m In. In Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Ali Baba is an honest man who stumbles upon a den of thieves and gets into some trouble. Likewise, Maleeka is a good girl and a smart student, but she gets mixed up with three girls who are bad influences. Charlese even ends up being a thief, as she will be revealed in Chapter 29 to have stolen Miss Saunders’s watch. At the end of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, however, the protagonist escapes the thieves’ plots and gets to keep their treasure. Likewise, Maleeka will end up free of Charlese (who will be sent away to Alabama), win the writing prize, and be able to return to school. This connection is an example of intertextuality, which is when a writer draws connections between their text and another text.
An analogy is the literary device of comparing two different things to each other. The difference between an analogy and a metaphor is that a metaphor typically entails using a word or phrase to refer to something completely different, whereas an analogy can be a broader comparison. Maleeka draws on analogy in Chapter 27 when she writes in her diary, “Remember the acorn. Even when you don’t see it growing, it’s pushing past the dirt. Reaching for the sun. Growing stronger” (86). In this analogy, Maleeka compares herself to an acorn to motivate herself to overcome the recent incident and her suspension from school. Like an acorn, Maleeka knows that she is growing; her writing has been improving, she has been gaining confidence steadily, and she can sense a repaired relationship developing with Caleb. However, the incident of vandalism and suspension have buried her like dirt, in a sense, covering up all the great progress she has made. Nevertheless, like an acorn that still grows, Maleeka is determined to overcome the situation and keep reaching for self-confidence.
