I was supposed to be apparating, but I felt like I was being ripped apart. Every particle in my body seemed to be jolting around, crashing together. And with every crash, a memory came to me.

Crash. It is raining, and the roof is leaking. I'm drinking a disgusting liquid, supposed to be tea. A cold wind blows through the wall, there doesn't seem to have any chance stopping it.

Crash. Trees everywhere the eye can see. The sun is shining, and dad is showing me how to use an axe. To cut lumber. Except, though I know it is my dad, I also know it isn't. Why would my dad, the second secretary for the Minister of Magic, take me to the woods and teach me to cut lumber with my hands?

Crash. I'm sitting under a great elm, my favourite tree. The sun is rising so slow, but yet far too fast. It's my first reaping. It's the first year, I'm in, but I'm already in there three times.

Crash. Crash. Crash. My head flooded with the memories of a whole life. My life.

The pain was excruciating, both physical and mental, and I was screaming and screaming and screaming and...

And suddenly it was over.

Confused I opened my eyes. I had never been here before in my life, but I still knew it to be my home. I was in a bed, the sheets scratching. And... And it was reaping-day. I didn't want to get out, I didn't want to face the terror in everybody's faces.

"Jess?" mum's soft voice called. No, I said to my self. She isn't my mum! "You have to get up. I've let you stay there far too long already." Hesitatingly, I got out and stood on the floor.

"Can you get those clothes off. Immediately!" Her face was pale white, looking at my Hogwarts ropes. Before I could as much as think of starting to undress myself, she was ripping it off my body, replacing it with an old blue dress of her own. It might've been pretty once, but that couldn't have been in this decade. Or the previous.

I couldn't escape the fact, that I should be terrified. 18. That was how many times my name was in that bowl, and I knew, I didn't want to get reaped into these Hunger Games, I'd never heard of before, but watched throughout my whole life.

I was sitting under an elm tree. This was one of my favourite places in District 7, where I lived. Though I didn't.

"My name is Jessica Crawley," I whispered. "I live in St Ives, Cornwall. I was sorted into Ravenclaw when I was eleven, and I'm at my seventh and last year of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Panem is nothing but an illusion."With closed eyes and crossed fingers I repeated this, again and again, till it became the truth, the only truth.

"You never told me about Ravenclaw," a voice said, and I jolted back and hit my head against the tree.

"Ouch," I groaned. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Oh, sorry, Crawley. I hadn't realized this was your private spot," Marie said sarcastically.

"I just... Wasn't expecting company, that's all."

"I'm worried about you," she admitted.

"Why?"

"You know why. You're in there like hundred times! You could be drawn." I was clutching my wand in my hands, knowing I could finish it all easily if I wanted to.

"I'm not. Worried, I mean. Why should I be? I don't believe in any of this anyway," I whispered.

"Yeah, I know what you think. That we're all just a trick you mind played you, but it's time to wake up, Jess! This is reality, that Howart thing isn't!"

"Hogwarts."

"I don't care, and neither should you."

"You and your reality! If this is the real world, then tell me why I can do this," I shouted, pointing my wand at her and without a word from me, water splattered out on her. "And how I can do this." Still silent, I stroke her with the tip of my wand, and the water evaporated, leaving her cloth dry and warm.

"I don't know," she said. "But I do know, that even if that school of yours exists, you can't escape from this place. You have to put it behind you, Jess. And... I don't want to find out, what they do to crazy people!" She turned away from me and walked back to town. I couldn't think of even one word, that could make her stay.