Privilege in a district as poor as District 12 is a disorienting thing. I learned that as soon as I could sit still long enough for a story. It was always the same, the only story my mother could ever tell. Her sister Maysilee, beautiful, blonde, the brave one. A tribute. Dead, sacrificed to the Games in a senseless slaughter while the workingman, the people's hero, returned home to as much pomp as the destitute could muster. He had as good as killed her and her memory was obliterated, to make room for the glory of a winning tribute. The story always ended the same – my mother damned the District as strongly as an atheist could for not managing to remember her twin's surrender beyond the final broadcast until she silenced herself, her eyes twisted shut and her hand on her forehead. I knew that was the cue for me to leave, to summon the nurse. Stories were rare in the Mayor's household.
Stepping away from my mirror, I tucked away the stray remembrance. I looked a mayor's daughter, my golden hair gleaming conspicuously in the sunlight from the large windows. The dress was new, picked out by my mother in a rare moment of capability, and it snowed the color from my complexion. It didn't particularly matter – unless I was chosen for the Reaping, the cameras wouldn't be able to catch me standing in the back with the other sixteens. Besides, all the blonde merchant kids looked the same, much like all the Seam kids shared dark hair and a dark complexion. It was almost as if the two were entirely separate societies. Which they were, in a twisted sense.
I have seen those Games, when Maysilee had died. I know that Haymitch was not to blame for my aunt's death, that he had nothing but regrets for the nature of his success. I understand that the sheer number of tributes thrown onto the pyre without hope of return drown out the memories of those who have been lost even a year before. They do always seem to be Seam kids, but when a merchant kid is lost it is a unique phenomenon. The family turns inward on itself, nearly frightened to display grief with customers or passerby always ready to remind them the greater sufferings they were spared daily. The loss of a family member is nothing in comparison to the loss of a breadwinner, the gnawing of hunger, the aches of premature dotage. The two communities were thus isolated, separated, each feeling their pains belittled by the others. It was yet another tool of the Capitol, a subtle one, and useful here in a District too poor to have much else to use against the people. I can sense it, most strongly around the Reaping, and I hate it.
I glanced at the clock. Forty-five minutes until the Reaping would begin. I shouldn't have begun preparing so early, but the nervous sun woke me and wouldn't let me rest, not even long enough to eat a proper breakfast. I searched for just an apple to satisfy my stomach, but finding none grabbed a crust of bread from the sideboard, lathering softening yellow butter over it before I strayed out of the dining room and into the music room. Sitting down on the piano bench, my greasy fingers flitted over the closed lid, too anxious to touch actual ivory. My mother had taught me to play on this piano until her grief had confined her to her room, and I had taken to playing as a sort of private communion between my mother and I. She isn't listening today, shut away in her world of dreams and sedatives, and I don't care to play. Yet, as the frenetic rhythm of my mind flowed onto the polished wood the world was soothed enough to release its tense grip on my heartbeat, my spine slowly collapsing in on itself in a mockery of my usually perfect posture.
By now the sun was well in the sky and there was no sleep to be found, no matter how still I lay. I chose instead to prepare for what very well may be the beginning of my sacrificial ritual, feeling a kinship with those maidens the barbaric ancient civilizations sacrificed to appease the demands of disquieted gods. I wasn't certain if the Capitol citizens could rightly comprise a wrathful deity, but the both shared a lack of sanity, if past Hunger Games could serve as any indicator.
They were about all I had to base my perceptions of the Capitol on, as once my father had been assigned to District 12 neither the Donners nor the Undersees had set foot in the district. They were enough though, as the Games were nothing more than a show, a reflection of the current tastes in the Capitol. They were designed to please and appease the Capitol, to satisfy their desire for a show and distract them from any real problems, while rubbing the Districts' collective faces in their sheer powerlessness. At least, that was how Katniss had explained things, which in turn was how they were explained by Gale. I wasn't sure how well I could trust Gale's opinion, having had only brief encounters with him, but Katniss' judgment I had come to rely on, being a classmate I comfortably, if wordlessly, understood.
Cocking my head to listen to the song of a distant mockingjay, a small shiver ran down my spine. I knew that Katniss should be here soon, and with a pat of the ribbon that was currently serving a merely decorative function in my hair I left her room for the kitchen, stopping by my father's study for the money he keeps there for such things. He rarely left it locked, out of what I could only guess to be an inherent trust of our staff, who have all been with us for some time, and convenience in matters such as these. With a gentle turn of the knob I had access to more information than anyone in the district except for perhaps my father, or the head Peacekeeper, Cray.
I slipped in quietly with a precautionary glance around me, as if after all these years I still expected President Snow to appear and drag me off for unlawful exposure. Shutting the door quietly behind me, I softly exhaled, the sound drowned out by the television in the corner required to be on twenty-four hours a day. Except in moments such as these I never watched this television as a much larger one in our receiving room served to deliver us all mandated Capitol programming. This television played the news that didn't make it to people, although even I could tell that this news wasn't always the whole truth. Crossing the soft carpeting to the desk, I opened the top left hand drawer and withdrew the cashbox therein when a new story flashed up on the screen and caught my eye. A local natural disaster, a hurricane or something, had hit District 11, reducing productivity. The hair on the back of my neck stood up – there had been no apples at breakfast.
I had long known that not all was right in Panem. Before the Capitol started to bury these sorts of stories my father would spend nights in his study reading reports about how best to quell any rebellion should it spread to our remote district. It never seemed to, but I suppose our proximity to the legendary District 13 made the Capitol nervous. I knew because I spent those same nights curled in his lap, or under his desk, or on the armchair, unable to sleep for the tension in the air. I couldn't understand all the words, but I understood enough. Enough to know when the documents started to change, from reports of rebellion to reports of natural disasters, or grievous accidents, or some other convenient excuse, in other districts, to documents that didn't make much sense. I knew they weren't from the Capitol because they were constantly asking questions about the districts and the Capitol never asked, only commanded. Besides, Capitol documents had jabberjays watermarked into the top right corner – these had a mockingjay instead. I knew the difference – my mother had taught me once.
As I grew older and began to understand more, I was allowed less and less time in the study, less and less time with my father. Standing at the door now, my hand on the wood, I remembered the night I had woken from a nightmare, the nature of which I no longer recall, only to find my mother unconscious and my father barricaded in the study with another voice. I had pounded on the door, too terrified to stay alone in the black hallway, until the door had opened and I fell at the feet of Haymitch Abernathy. He looked at me with strange emotions in his eyes before he wordlessly stepped over my prostrate figure and into the dark. My father picked me up with a grunt and carried me back to my room, soothing me as he staggered down a hallway only lit by the light that dared seep from the study, but before we had taken a step I saw Aunt Maysilee's pin sitting on an otherwise bare desk. I didn't say a word, not wanting to wake Mother and have her discover that her sister's memory was not where it should be.
Pushing open the door, I did my best to push these thoughts away as well. Whatever it was, I had been too young then and too powerless now to be a part of it. I trusted Father enough still to do what was right for me, whether that was to include me in some way or to keep in the periphery as always. While I chafe at these constraints and ache to know more, I know these things will be revealed to me in time.
By the time I reached the empty kitchen, the cook by now off to prepare for the "holiday", there was already knocking at the back door. Opening the door, I found Katniss, with Gale, practically over the threshold like always. Katniss and I exchanged our usual greetings while I looked over the berries and I was doling out the agreed upon price when Gale spoke up.
"Pretty dress." I looked at him, trying to decide just what he meant. Tall, strong and silent, I had never heard a compliment from Gale, about anyone. Not out of meanness, I had come to know, but out of a long-ingrained sense of lack, of a rationing that had come to apply to words as well.
I paused, choosing my words carefully before I responded.
"Well, if I end up going to the Capitol I want to look nice, don't I?"
Immediately I could tell that this was the wrong answer – Gale's eyes became chips of ice and, with a stiff jaw, he spat "You won't be going to the Capitol. What can you have? Five or six entries? I had six when I was twelve years old." I bit my tongue, stepping behind the doorframe. There was no point in saying anything – we all knew this unacknowledged truth, although they could never understand mine. I feel Maysilee's hand, my mother's hand on my head. Retreating, I heard Katniss defend me, but Gale would not be pacified.
"No, it's no one's fault. It's just the way it is." The accusation isn't even thinly veiled – it hangs on the entryway between us, a precious egg lobbed and wasted on wood.
It is time for them to leave. They have lingered here so long as to raise the eyebrows of the eyes that rarely watch. I hand Katniss the money, more than necessary although she fails to notice, wishing her luck, and shut the door perhaps too suddenly on their retreating backs with an intake of air. It seems heavier, full of Maysilee – I must sag against the door, reinforce it, keep her inside.
I only rise when my father enters, ready to leave for the day that ages him more than any other. I listen for my mother's tread on the stair, straining to hear the impossible, but she is not there. I stand at attention, taking a strawberry from the cloth on my arm and weighing it in one hand as the Mayor beckons me. Setting it the bounty to the side, I gently squeeze the berry between my fingers, feel the flesh begin to give way before I relent, instead providing it a swift end between my silent lips. I must go.