Clove didn't laugh - she didn't have a reason to. Everybody, all around her was laughing, and she couldn't stand it. She didn't really find anything so funny. Life wasn't a game, wasn't a joke. Life was. . .life. And you can't laugh about something so cruelly difficult.
She had been dead serious about training when she was two weeks away from turning eleven. The sign on the small shack that the training center was held in said "ages 12-18" in big black letters but she marched in there, told her how much she could pay, and the man at the door stared down at her, laughed, and folded his arms.
"I mean it!" she shouted as loud as she could. She hated being laughed at.
"You're not twelve. You're not even eleven. I can't let you in," he said as kindly as possible.
"Why not?" she shouted, and stomped her foot. She offered him a handful of coins from her book bag and he leaned back against the wall, counted the money, and raised his eyebrows. He shrugged and half-gestured, half-pushed her through the door.
The shack outside was rundown and broken, but the inside was pristine. You went down a long set of steps into darkness, and there was a dim lightbulb lighting up the door. You could see a blue welcome mat outside the door and that the floor was totally clean around it - the railing was a pretty maple color and the floor wasn't concrete - it was grey carpet and it was clean. Career kids didn't strike her as clean.
She pushed through the door and the heads of a couple dozen kids turned towards her. A woman who was holding the bow of a girl maybe fourteen or fifteen walked over to her. Clove was short for her age - not even four-foot-six, but the woman was shorter. On her tiptoes, she was sure she'd be taller.
"What's your name, age, and preferred weapon?" the woman asked, her face totally blank of all expression. Maybe they had that in common.
"Clove Raleigh, I've been twelve for two weeks, and-" She paused, biting her lip. What was the easiest thing to find in the Games? "Knives. I use knives, but my mother trained with spears and I'd like to learn how to use spears."
The woman jotted that down on a paper on a wall. Clove R. 12. Knife/spear. It looked so plain and official - her handwriting matched her attitude. Clove shuffled in place for a moment.
"Dmitri!" the woman called. "Do we have any spare throwing knife kits?"
A man with darkly tanned skin appeared from inside a storage closet. No, he wasn't a man - he was maybe sixteen or seventeen, probably the equipment manager or something. "No," he said loudly, "but we have a million sets of spears."
"Well, that's what she'll be training with for now." Clove curled her toes inside her boots. Her father's choice weapon.
Dmitri brought out a small case of spears, their points poking down into the bag. "I'm the spear specialist," he said with a small smile, holding out his hand.
She forced a smile and shook his hand. This was all new and foreign. His hand was warm but that made her feel a little bit uncomfortable inside. "I'm Clove," she said, nodding a little bit.
Dmitri walked in front of an empty target, and she could see why no one was using it - there were holes in every inch of it. He took a spear from the case and showed her where to put her hands, how to feel the weight of it. They were standing maybe ten yards from the target and he stepped a few feet behind the line, took a running start, and slammed the spear into the center of the red-and-white target.
It had made a loud noise and the target shook. Dmitri smiled a little and, again, she forced a smile back. This wasn't what training was supposed to be like. Training was supposed to be loud music, trying and failing and crying and failing until you hit the bullseye. That's what it had been like in that discount movie she'd seen a view months before at the small cinema in her town.
They all sat in a circle for lunch - Clove didn't have any, so she just tucked her feet under her and listened. They were all telling jokes and laughing and there was milk coming out of their noses when they did it (which, by the way, was disgusting). Clove was listening to all of them and some of them really were funny, but she wasn't laughing.
This wasn't what Careers were supposed to be like. They were supposed to be ruthless creatures, ones who didn't smile unless they were smirking, ones who didn't laugh unless it was sarcastic.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, they all stood up and returned to their targets.
Clove had been so dead-set on being a career, ruthless and cold (she already had the not-laughing thing), but she could train at home. It wasn't the classic Career attitude she saw during the Games and she felt like the classic Career. She didn't feel like one of these.
She slipped out the door, up the long stairs, and out the front door, already figuring out her lie of where she'd been.
For the Dodgeball contest at Caesar's Palace. Prompt: Agelast.