Let's Break the Rules

           Have you ever had to break a rule in order to do what’s best for you or someone close to you? Did you do this even though you knew there would be consequences? In Scarlet by Marissa Meyer, the title character is a rebellious teenaged French farm girl whose grandmother goes missing. With the help of mysterious street fighter Wolf, Scarlet goes on a journey to get her grandma back. While I was reading Scarlet, I observed that Marissa Meyer mentions a lot of rules in the characters’ lives that they end up breaking. This made me realize that sometimes rules have to be broken in order to do what’s right for you.

            Scarlet breaks a major law midway through the book. This happens when Scarlet and Wolf’s train trip to Paris to rescue Scarlet’s grandma is interrupted due to the infection of one of the passengers with the plague. The whole train is to be quarantined, so Scarlet escapes because she knows her grandma is more important. There’s no guilt involved. She knows what she has to do, and she does it. I was impressed by her choice, because although she sometimes got into fights with her family and had a fiery temper, she was pretty straight-laced overall. After seeing Scarlet’s changes as a character throughout the book, it seems realistic to assume that if she had been quarantined without her grandma’s kidnapping being involved, she wouldn’t have tried to escape. What she did was a selfless act for her grandmother. She broke a law not because she wanted to, but because she had to.

            Cinder, the main character in the previous book in this series and who plays a huge part in this book has also broken many rules. One of the most prominent is that she escapes from jail. She does this because she was imprisoned by the ruthless Queen Levana, who she knows needs to be brought to justice. Cinder has a very strong moral code, and I think that if she had been thrown in jail under different premises, she wouldn’t have tried to escape. Cinder, like Scarlet, feels no guilt about what she is doing. Cinder has her priorities, and she will accomplish what she needs to do no matter what the consequence. When I first read the part about Cinder’s jailbreak, I thought it was a selfish thing to do. However, after I considered it some more, I concluded that Cinder, again like Scarlet, was acting not for herself, but for others. Her situation is on an even larger scale than Scarlet’s: instead of just trying to save one beloved family member, Cinder is acting to save the world.

            In conclusion, both Scarlet and Cinder, despite their different motives and situations, deliberately break the law. Rules are necessary to help a community function. Without them, people could do whatever they wanted without consequence. However, power is sometimes abused, and laws aren’t always applicable to every situation. We all break rules. Cinder and Scarlet both escaped from something, but you can also break rules on a smaller scale. I know I have. I remember this one specific time when I broke a rule. It was the final performance of La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera House. I was nine. I was singing in the Children's Chorus. It was a bittersweet night - everyone wanted it to go well and to have fun, but we all knew somewhere in the back of our minds that this was the end. Endings are hard. While I was on stage, I kept seeing the little lollipops that were in one of the pretend stores that made up the set. They were real lollipops, not props. We weren't allowed to take them, and that was okay, because up to that point I'd looked forward to getting to sniff them during every performance. But this was the last one. I felt like I needed a souvenir... something to remember all of it by. And what better than one of the lollipops? I knew we weren't supposed to take them, but every time I walked by the lollipops on stage that night, they smelled even better... even sweeter. So the last time I passed the lollipop store, I grabbed one quickly and slipped it up the sleeve of my costume. When the director came up to talk to me when we were exiting the stage, I felt guilty because the lollipop was pressed tight against my arm. It was okay, though. I brought the lollipop home safely. I got what I needed: something to hold onto now that the show was over. That was only one of the times I broke a rule. I think that, especially as teenagers, we feel the need to break rules in order to prove ourselves. Even if breaking rules is usually not encouraged, it does seem to be a part of the human experience. People often think that breaking rules is irresponsible, but I actually think that breaking a rule and accepting the consequence takes a lot of responsibility. Accepting the results of your actions can be tough, but if the something or someone you acted for is important enough, I think it can be worth it.