I reached into my backpack and took out a folder that had my three best kraken sketches. “Voila,” I said, putting them on his desk. “My favorite is the one with the spikes, but it’s your logo, so you decide.”
“Whoa!” he cried. “Norah, they’re all amazing! You’re amazing.”
Then we both got too embarrassed to keep talking.
* * *
“Norah, good to see you!” Ms. Farrell greeted me. “We need to talk about your speech. Give me three minutes, and then you and I can chat.”
She scurried off to talk to Addison and Malik, leaving the fancy-soap smell behind her.
“Do you know which character you’re doing?” Harper asked. She was so happy I was back that she couldn’t stop smiling.
I didn’t even have to think. “Yep. Persephone.”
“The one who got kidnapped by Hades?”
“Yeah. And rescued by her mom. But then she had to go back to the underworld half of the year because she ate the pomegranate.”
Harper nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I never understood that part.”
“You mean why she ate it, if it was the food of the dead?”
“Yeah,” Harper said. “Was she just stress eating, maybe?”
“Maybe.” The truth was, I hadn’t thought very hard about that detail either. It was definitely strange: If Persephone hated being in the underworld so much, why would she eat a fruit that meant she could never leave?
“All right.” Ms. Farrell had returned to my desk. “Norah, so that we don’t disturb Harper, who needs to be finishing up her first draft”—she raised her eyebrows at Harper’s nearly empty page—“why don’t you and I relocate?”
I followed Ms. Farrell to the back wall, where there were two chairs set up for “conferencing.”
“So,” she said. “First of all, Norah: I’d just like to say I’m delighted to see you back at school. Anything you ever need, any time you’d like to chat about anything—”
“Thank you,” I said. It was the first time I’d said those words without trying to end the conversation. Ms. Farrell was a great teacher, I thought, so smart about things, and not fake-understanding. And I loved the fact that today she was wearing a Beowulf tee.
She smiled. “So you’ve chosen your character, I hope?”
When I told her yes, I’d chosen Persephone, she asked why.
“I just really like that myth,” I said, shrugging. “It’s always been my favorite.”
“Okay, but the project is not about liking a myth, or a particular character. It’s about empathy, remember? You need to do it first person, feeling Persephone’s emotions, thinking her thoughts. Do you think you can relate to her that way?”
I was prepared for this. “Oh, definitely! Because of the way Hades and Demeter fight over her. It’s like how my mom and dad compete over me.”
But as soon as I said this answer, I thought: Except not anymore. Not really. The truth was, ever since that time Mom stuck up for Nicole, everyone had been getting along okay. Nicole wasn’t avoiding our house all the time. Mom and Dad had stopped trying to make me choose sides. They’d even stopped competing about who was a better nurse.
So why did I like this myth so much, anyway? Why did I feel this strong connection to Persephone?
Ms. Farrell tucked some loose wisps of hair behind her ear. “Okay, Norah,” she said. “I know you’ll do a great speech. But I hope you’ll keep thinking about that story.”
“What do you mean?” I felt almost scared, as if my teacher had just read my mind.
“I just mean dig deeper. Don’t go with the obvious. Ask yourself if there’s more there for you to say. More to connect with.”
“Like what?”
“Just keep thinking.” She smiled, pressed her hand on my shoulder, and walked off to talk to Cait.
THE DOG
The rest of the day, I tried not to think about what Ms. Farrell meant. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion that once again, she was asking me to be Cancer Girl, turning the whole Persephone myth into a story about My Leukemia.
And here was the funny thing: I wasn’t even mad this time. A few things had happened—the bake sale disaster, seeing Ayesha again, that conversation with Griffin at my house—to make something shift inside of me, somehow. Now I didn’t think, How dare Ms. Farrell force me to give a speech about something private! Something nobody in the class can understand! I thought: What did she mean about digging deeper? Is there something about the myth—which I’ve read more than a zillion times—that I’m not getting? It seemed impossible.
And yet:
Persephone had been playing in the meadow, innocently gathering flowers, when out of the blue the earth cracked beneath her, and she got sucked down to the underworld. Which, the more I thought about it, was a bit like getting cancer. Because two years ago, there I was, minding my own business, going to school, hanging out with Harper and Silas, when BOOM. The earth cracked open, and down I fell.
And Phipps was sort of like the underworld, in a way. I mean, all the people there were extremely nice, especially Dr. Glickstein, Raina, and Ayesha. But being there still felt like being Nowhere, especially in the middle of the night. And the chemo drugs were awful, even if they saved my life.
And now here I was, rescued, back on earth with Demeter. (And Dad, who I guessed was Zeus? Although he only had one girlfriend.) All of that made sense to me. But if there was more to say about that myth, more to connect with, more that had to do with me, I didn’t see it. So I couldn’t imagine what Ms. Farrell wanted, why she wasn’t satisfied.
* * *
At dismissal, Dad was waiting for me in his car.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked as I slid into the passenger seat. I knew she’d changed her plan to go back to California right away, but other details were still fuzzy.
“Actually, she’s interviewing,” Dad said. “At Columbia University.”
I screamed. “You mean for a job? Back here, in the city?”
“Yep. The bicoastal family
