"I killed a boy whose name I don't even know. Somewhere his family is weeping for him. His friends call for my blood.
Maybe he had a girlfriend who really believed he would come backā¦"
- The Hunger Games, page 243
Foreward
WHEN he died, a collective sigh fell across the streets rimmed with golden accents. It flowed from the windows of lavish homes across the square and from the crowded tenant buildings near the diamond factories on the outskirts of the district known for its luxury. Well that was it, wasn't it? No hand-outs for the rich this year, no days off for the working class.
If you would have asked the two women with matching silver tattoos engraved into their fair skin who usually sat outside for their lunch on the cobble stone roads of the inner-most part of the square; they would have hardly been able to contain their giggles as they told you that their male tribute this year was certainly handsome enough with his white teeth and strong bone structure, though they knew nothing of fighting. If you would have asked the middle aged man who almost always could have been found at the bar near the factories when he wasn't working, he would have told you as he dipped his pipe into a dish of morphling that you were a fool for not betting on the kid- no, really, even though he usually had bad luck when it came to gambles he was putting a lot on this one.
But at the moment of his death, one of the woman with the silver tattoos had attended a party and was giggling at a joke told by a gentleman who was visiting from the Capitol, while the middle aged man sat before the dingy television screen at the bar, throwing his money on the ground as good friends jested at his luck.
No one who hailed from District One could have foreseen what the boy had done, the revolution his actions had sparked. They didn't know that he had started a fire when he killed the little girl. A fire that would change their ways of life; some for better, and some for worse.
They didn't know. They couldn't know. Not at the time, not then. No one thought that far ahead.
And as for the boy, well, he would go down in the history books as dead.
No one knew that was his worst fear. When the Girl from Twelve- whose name would not be forgotten for generations to come (the girl who began the fire, they would later say), dropped the nest of Tracker Jackers on the camp where he slept, District One had barely even paid attention to him; mostly because they were too busy watching their other contribution to the Games call out for help while her lovely skin bubbled from fatal stings. But even if they had, all they would have seen was him withering on the ground and crawling into a bush.
They wouldn't have understood that he covered his face to keep the roots of the trees from crawling into his eyes and nostrils because they were trying to keep him in that arena forever. They wouldn't have understood that he cringed because he realized that he had no purpose, when he died the world would keep turning and he would be left with nothing at all. Just blackness.
He realized a little too late in life that death was his worst fear. And at just seventeen years old he died.
If you were to say this to the woman with the silver tattoos, perhaps tap on her shoulder as she talked to the Capitol man she fancied, she would have sighed "How poetic, what a tragedy!" But if you traveled far across the country to tell this to a girl with a single coin stuffed in her shoe and beads of sweat across her dark forehead, she would have told you with narrow eyes, "He deserved it."
In the grand scheme, the boy ended up being nothing more than his actions. And with time, the nation would even forget that.
But that is in the grand scheme. As individuals, the grand scheme isn't what always matters because there are a million smaller stories to create it. And perhaps this is something the boy never knew, or never took the time to think about. But it is true.
If you were to walk past the cobble stone streets gilded with gold and lined with sprawling estates; if you were to walk past the empty market place; if you were to follow the roads until grass spilled forth from the cracks in the stones; you would have come to a chain fence topped with barbed wire. On the day the boy died, if you were to go to that spot, you would have found a girl who held her face in her hands and whose frail shoulders racked from the pain as tears made permanent scars in the places they trailed down her cheeks. Because the boy who would now only be known as dead had worked his way into her very being until he had become a part in every fiber of her life.
When Katniss Everdeen shot her arrow through the boy's throat, she had also pulled the thread that completely, irreversibly unraveled this girl who sat miles away from them in District One (where the boy would have more than preferred her to be.) To this girl, to this individual, the boy's death had shattered her to an unconceivable amount of tiny little pieces, some she would never be able to completely pick back up.
But one day, she would stand in a crowd before the very person that killed him and understand why she did. One day, she would become but a single pebble in a wave of rebellion- dutifully moving along with it, but not quite a part. One day, after the list of her loved ones lost had increased in number, she would realize that unless she wanted to dissipate into nothing beneath the unbelievable crush of her sorrows, she would have to let go and see that life goes on.
And life does go on. It really does.
But still, there were mornings when she would burrow her face in her knees and say his name, just once. Because even after years had passed there were times when she silently hoped he was still there with her, she just couldn't see.
