The Quiet Place

Lexile: 830 | Grade: 4

Passage

Jalen liked to sit by the window during recess. While others raced across the field or jumped rope, he watched shadows move across the ground. He noticed how the trees leaned just a little more when the wind passed. He heard sounds others didn’t—like the way the leaves whispered or how the fence creaked at the corner.

Some kids thought Jalen was strange. 'Why don’t you ever play?' they asked. But Jalen just smiled. He didn’t always have words for what he felt, only that the quiet filled him in a way noise never did.

One day, the teacher gave the class a writing assignment: 'Describe something most people don’t notice.'

While the room buzzed with ideas, Jalen calmly picked up his pencil. He wrote about the wind’s footsteps and the way the light curved through the trees. He wrote about the fence that groaned like it had a story to tell. He wrote what he saw—what he always saw.

When he read his piece aloud, the room went still. No laughter. No teasing. Just silence, and something new: attention. Afterward, a classmate whispered, 'I never noticed those things until now.'

Jalen didn’t smile to be proud. He smiled because he had shown them the quiet. And the quiet, for once, had spoken back.