NOTES
Sometimes, in writing a chapter, it helps to take a break and explore what's going on in the heads of characters who are not narrating the story. So I figured I might as well share . . . at least where it isn't going to spoil future plot points!
Some of these may very well work as standalones. But they're definitely intended as counterparts to The Pan-American High School Scholarship Pageant Competition.
First up: A little Haymitch backstory. Goes with The Pan-American High School Scholarship Pageant Competition chapter 5.
Haymitch Abernathy hates Effie Trinket. More than hates. Loathes.
There's a fine line between love and hate, people are fond of telling Haymitch, condescending, knowing smirks on their faces. But Haymitch knows they're wrong.
As far as Haymitch is concerned, there are three very different types of loathing. There is the kind of loathing that rides the razor edge of passion, a feeling so fierce, so obsessive, it might as well be love. There is clear-cut, rational loathing, which has a clear cause and also clear intention (even if that intention is only to stoke the drive for revenge). And then there is the bitter loathing reserved for things that remind one of one's own failings, one's own impotence.
The first kind of loathing is how he feels about alcohol.
The second is what he feels for pageant director Snow and the rest of the Northwest Mining Company Insurance's board of directors: the men responsible for rescinding his health care after he was forced to go on disability, for forcing his wife into the struggling community care facility—with its too few doctors and too old equipment, all they could afford even going so far into debt he would never get out—that killed her.
The third loathing—this is the type he feels toward Effie. Effie, who is endlessly, blindly optimistic. Who believes this competition she pours her heart and soul into every year isn't fixed from the start—who believes that life isn't fixed from the start.
It's a pointless loathing, what he feels for Effie, a constant low-level hum of pity and disgust that makes him irritable and raw. It's exhausting.
But she keeps paying him. So he keeps coming back for more.