In Parade’s exclusive excerpt from her autobiography, young activist Malala Yousafzai recounts the day she was shot by the Taliban

“Don’t worry. The Taliban have never come for a small girl.” With those words, Malala Yousafzai attempted to reassure her friend Moniba, frightened by the threats Malala and her family had been receiving all year.

“I wasn’t scared,” Malala writes in her autobiography I Am Malala, excerpted exclusively in this Sunday’s Parade, “but I had started making sure the gate was locked at night and asking God what happens when you die.”

In a country that’s seen more than its share of violence, the fate of one teenager might not seem to count for much. But somehow Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan has managed to become an international inspiration. She was only 11 when she took on the Taliban, demanding that girls be given full access to school. Her campaign received global attention, a prelude to even more extraordinary events. Last October, Taliban assassins attacked Malala, then 15, on her way home from school, shooting her in the head. In Parade’s excerpt Malala describes that day and offers her hopes for the future.

Before being attacked, Malala often wondered what she would do if a terrorist ever jumped out and shot her. “Maybe I’d take off my shoes and hit him,” she writes. “But then I’d think that if I did that, there would be no difference between me and a terrorist. It would be better to plead, ‘Okay, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I’m not against you personally. I just want every girl to go to school.’”

She had no time to plead when that day arrived. “Who is Malala?” the masked man asked as he leaned in over her and her friends on the bus taking them home from school. Malala, who was the only girl with her face uncovered, remembers: “My friends say he fired three shots. The first went through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder. I slumped forward onto Moniba, blood coming from my left ear, so the other two bullets hit the girls next to me…My friends later told me the gunman’s hand was shaking as he fired.”

Of her miraculous recovery, Malala says: “It feels like this life is not my life. It’s a second life. People have prayed to God to spare me and I was spared for a reason—to use my life for helping people.”

To read more about Malala, the full excerpt appears in Sunday’s Parade, and check out the videos below for more on her journey.

Watch Class Dismissed, A New York Times documentary about Malala’s grassroots struggle, filmed in 2009.

Malala’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on July 12, 2013, her 16th birthday.