She is born on a still afternoon in the middle of summer, on a day so damn hot that you burn your feet just by touching the ground.
She is born in an empty room in an old, cold house, welcomed into the world by only her mother and the woman who helped deliver her.
She is born, and her mother isn't even smiling, doesn't want to hold her; is only going on and on about somebody, please, get me out of these dirty clothes.
And her dad—well, he isn't even there. This will be a recurring theme.
x
Growing up, she doesn't want for much. Her house is big, her family is rich, her room is full of colors and toys and she eats three full meals every day.
Her dad's never home but it's fine, she doesn't need him anyway, learns to read books and play games and take care of herself without anybody's help but her own.
Her mom is the only person ever around, besides the nurses and cooks and servants who never do anything besides their jobs, but she's usually drunk, going on and on about a pathetic husband and wasted time; the only things she ever gets from her mother are the notion that men are useless, and also sometimes a slap on the wrist.
x
This is the only home she ever knows, and it's fine.
She still grows up, all on her own.
x
And on a cold night in January, when she's eight years old, she draws pictures of her parents with the paper and crayons that they bought her themselves.
She's not bitter, she promises she isn't, but she tosses the pages in the living room fireplace, watches them burn, the flames reflecting in her eyes—eyes that are much too red and much too hateful for somebody so young.
She watches the pages turn to ash, and something shifts deep in her stomach, and she feels emotions close to happiness, but not quite.
And really, so what if her dad's never around, she doesn't need him anyway.
So what if her mom drinks too much and hits her, the wounds heal and she gets stronger every day.
So what if her only friends are the birds outside her window, she's fine, just fine, completely fine on her own.
x
When she is ten, her parents send her off to District 2's training academy, with cold stares and taut, breakable smiles and a threat that if she doesn't learn how to win, she is no daughter of theirs.
When she is ten, she realizes that she is empty, that her heart is void, that the only thing her father ever wanted her as was a device, a tool, a machine.
And she's fine with it. She can learn to win. She doesn't need love or happiness or a family who cares. She can learn to win, can learn to kill, and she will do it alone, with her pretty face and her vacant eyes and her cold, useless heart.
x
She immediately impresses the academy's trainers with her speed and her precision and her fierce, determined stare.
She immediately rises above her classmates with her confidence and her intelligence and her disturbingly natural abilities with weapons.
On a cold winter afternoon, she holds her very first knife, and it only takes her two tries before she sends it straight into the center of a mannequin chest, eyes burning and heart pumping and blood running ice cold—she immediately becomes the very device, the very machine, her father hoped she would be.
x
Soon knives and blades become her solace, become the only thing that feels like home.
She gets addicted to the way a weapon feels in her hand, the way it makes her so powerful.
There's something totally, completely intoxicating about blood and flesh and the sound of a body's heartbeat, about her fingers' ability to kill; she often dreams of murder, of skin and bone, of wrapping her hands around somebody's neck until every bit of oxygen has vacated their lungs.
Every moment, her fingers itch more and more to kill, and every night she sleeps with her favorite knife and with one eye open.
x
Four years later, on a morning in spring, when the air outside feels fresh and full of possibility, she meets a muscled blonde-haired boy, about her age, at the training academy.
She meets him, and she falls in love with his bright blue eyes and his twisted smile and the way he never sits still.
She doesn't fall in love with him, of course, but she trains with him every day, because he's stronglike nobody else, and she doesn't mind kissing him or holding him or putting his dick into her mouth, sometimes.
She doesn't fall in love with him, but he falls in love with her, and he dishes out the only attention and affection that she's ever known.
x
When she's fifteen years old, the academy finally gives its students a break, allows them to return home for one week.
She is the only person who stays behind, and she honestly, truly doesn't care.
It gives her more time to practice, more time to spend with her knives. She isn't bitter, she really isn't, but she sometimes pretends that a couple of the mannequins are her parents, and maybe works a little bit harder than usual to make sure that her blades dive right into their hearts.
x
It's on a cold night in wintertime that the blonde boy tells her he loves her as they lay naked on his bedsheets, which suddenly seem colder and harder and nothing like home.
She just laughs and lets his words fall to the floor, where they land with an empty thud and where they will wane and rust.
x
The next day she sits outside in the snow, completely alone, watching a bird as it flutters around a leafless tree.
She watches the bird and she doesn't cry, never has, but she feels something dark and sad deep inside her stomach, something she's never felt before.
Her life is an empty one, full of knives and blood and dreams that will never fill the emptiness in her core. She is a little girl who grew up too fast, and now has only a pretty face and a loveless heart and a boy with feelings that she has no capacity to return.
x
And two weeks later, she volunteers for the 74th Hunger Games, confident and prepared, with that same blonde boy beside her as thousands of people cheer her name.
On the train that night, his arms wrap all the way around her, hold her warm and tight on the long night, but she knows something that he doesn't know:
She has never known love, and she will never know it. She will never want it, will never receive it, and will never, ever be able to give it back.
x
During the Games, she kills with ferocity, with speed and precision and her cold, empty eyes, and she loses herself in the blood and the adrenaline and the way it feels to really, truly throw a knife right into somebody's back.
She feels no guilt, she feels nothing, really; she hopes her parents are watching, but at the same time, really hopes they aren't.
x
When death comes, she doesn't even see it coming: a rock to the head, a crack in the skull, that blonde boy crying, hopelessly in love with a girl he never understood.
This isn't how she expected it, this isn't what she wanted; there's no honor, no glory, no proud parents, no flesh and bone and blades; only grass, only dirt, only blackness clouding her vision and her dark, dark eyes projected on a screen for millions of people to see.
She will not be remembered, she knows. She will be a body, a number, a corpse. She will not be mourned, and really, it's surprisingly fitting, because she will die exactly how she was born.
(A tiny, pretty girl, covered in blood and irrevocably alone.)