Sarah Simpson's Rules for Living by Rebecca Rupp Page B

comes back together again. I bet the stars are going to keep moving away from each other forever.
    MY LIST OF AWFUL THINGS
    1. The universe is falling apart.
    2. The good people will never take over the world.
    3. Grown-ups lie.
    4. I am really ugly.
    5. If any boy ever likes me, it will be that geek Horace Zimmerman.
    It’s still snowing. I feel like I’m falling upside down into the sky.

JANUARY 6
    I am going to be in a play at school.
    My school is called Pelham Free Academy. That sounds fancy, but it’s really just a dumpy school made out of cement blocks painted a sort of yellowy color with a chain-link fence around it. The sixth-grade teacher is named Winona Bentley. Every time we have a school vacation, Ms. Bentley goes to workshops and conferences and comes back with new ideas for improving our minds. Over Christmas, she spent two days in Boston learning about Teaching Literature through Dramatic Arts in the Classroom.
    So now we’re doing this play.
    The play is all about the Greek myths. Emily Harris is Aphrodite. Ronnie Pincus, who has biceps from working weekends and summers on his family’s farm, is Zeus. Horace Zimmerman, who is tall and skinny and wears thick black glasses, is Hades.
    I am Persephone, the brainless drip who ate the pomegranate seeds and ended up spending half her life in hell.
    THINGS I HATE ABOUT THIS PLAY
    1. Getting up in front of people.
    2. Being dragged into the Underworld by Horace Zimmerman.
    3. Wearing toilet-paper flowers in my hair.
    4. Not knowing what a pomegranate is.

JANUARY 7
    From Aunt Elaine’s dictionary:
    pomegranate
(n.) From the Old French
pome grenate,
many-seeded apple. A fruit with a tough skin containing many seeds in a red pulp. The tree bearing this fruit,
Punica granatum,
is native to N. Africa and W. Asia.
    At the new year in Greece, Sally says, people throw a pomegranate on the floor. If it smashes into lots of little pieces, that means good luck. We should have done that, she said.
    I think it’s a good thing we didn’t. It would have been too depressing.
    It probably would have bounced.

JANUARY 14
    George thinks Persephone is a great part, even with the toilet paper. He has been in two plays in kindergarten. In one of them he played the letter B, and in the other he was a toadstool. Jonah says he was particularly good at the toadstool because it is difficult to play a fungus with distinction.
    It must be nice to be five.
    George has a picture book of the myth of Persephone from the library and he made me read it to him twice while Sally and Jonah were out in the kitchen, giggling and doing the dishes. It begins with Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and her daughter, Persephone, picking daisies in a meadow. Demeter is fat and pink and cheerful-looking and has a basket full of fruit and stuff. Persephone is blond and looks like Emily Harris.
    Then Persephone wanders out of her mother’s sight and the minute she does, Hades, looking a bit like Elvis Presley, pops out of the ground in a black chariot pulled by big black horses and he grabs her and gallops off with her to the Underworld, which is dark and gloomy and looks like a basement. Persephone hates it there, even though Hades loads her with jewelry and makes her his queen. Aboveground, Demeter is miserable too. She loses weight, her hair turns gray, and she cries all the time and forgets about the harvest, so everybody in the world is starving and it’s always winter.
    Finally they strike a deal: Persephone can go back home, provided she hasn’t eaten any of the Underworld food. But it turns out she’s nibbled these pomegranate seeds. So she can only go home for half the year. The rest of the time she has to spend with Hades.
    The last page of the book shows Persephone running out of a cave laughing, and her mother is laughing, and everything is sunshine and lambs. George loves that. He doesn’t seem to worry about the fact that in just a little while