"The best way to die, "Ms. Hayes, our Gender Equality teacher, closed her eyes, and then ever so solemnly, she continued, "is to die a virgin. Would you want to die knowing that you had sex with a man? That you fell as prey to their lying, their lascivious ways? That you were tricked by them? Will you let yourselves be secondary to them?"
"NO!" The whole school roared. I swear, it was so loud it seemed like a wave of sound moved me a centimeter forward.
"Long live District 2!"
I covered my ears, bracing myself for the usually deafening cheer. "Long live District 2!"
"Long live Mayor Olympe!" Ms. Hayes punched the air.
"Long live Mayor Olympe!"
Before the anthem of District 2 blared from the speakers, I already made a run for the stadium's exit. At last, the day was done, and the worst, most boring and most preposterous part of it, which was the just concluded weekly talk on "gender equality", marked the end of the school week. When I reached the house after walking for an hour, I immediately stripped off my suffocating pink school uniform and threw myself on the bed.
My brother, Basil, abruptly interrupted my supposed nap by entering my room and yanking my arms. "Hey, get up!"
I forced my arms out of his grip. "It's Friday! What the hell am I supposed to get up for?"
"Mayor Olympe's messenger came here. She said the mayor needs you to report to her."
"But it's not a Tuesday today! It's not a Thursday either!"
"President Frost is coming tonight. They'll eat dinner together and she needs you."
Unwillingly, I forced myself out of bed. It took so much strength to overcome all the gravity my bed was emitting. Basil handed me my chef uniform and left the room so that I could put it on. The fetcher would probably take a while before she arrives here since the Mayor's mansion was several kilometers away, and so I sat on the living room couch with Basil, who was watching the live telecast of President Snow's Public Service Announcement, reminding us that the Reaping for the 74th Hunger Games would take place next week. I didn't really care whether I'd be a tribute or not, and so I just watched other things.
I will never get tired of watching Basil, no matter what he does. In fact, whenever I have nothing to do, I just stare at him or generally at any man in amazement, not because they amaze me but because it amazes me that I could see them.
If there would be an award for "Most Sexist District", no doubt, it would go to District 2. Actually, the place was not any different from the other districts, until Mayor Olympe took office.
Her name became a household name some 17 years ago, when she was the chosen female tribute of the district for The Games. I wasn't born then, but my mother told me that no one ever thought she'd be the victor. They say that she didn't stand out in interviews, causing her to have no sponsors at all, because she was so boring. There was nothing so special about her, in fact, she was deemed by the Capitol as "a girl with no personality whatsoever". Her appearance couldn't even make-up for her lack of depth, because back then, they said she looked like a common girl—black hair, gray eyes, olive skin. "I could name a hundred girls who looked exactly like her," mother said when she was talking about Mayor Olympe as a tribute. Everyone also thought she would die first. The whole of Panem was wrong, and she proved so when the games started. During the first five minutes of the games, she already killed 11 tributes, and what made it all so peculiar was the fact that all the 11 tributes she killed were boys. Other than the fact that she won, that was all we young people know. The elders of Panem know what happened from there, how the games turned out and how she became the victor, but whenever we'd ask them, they wouldn't tell. It sounds absurd, but it's stated in the Constitution of Panem, Chapter 17, Article 4, that no one should speak of the events that took place in the 54th Hunger Games. It was only made into a law when President Snow, Mayor Olympe's brother, became the president.
When President Snow was appointed, people dreaded that he might choose his sister to be the district's new mayor, especially the men. She wasn't admittedly a man hater, but her deed of eliminating nearly all the male tributes when she was in the games made it obvious. And then what everyone feared happened—she became the mayor. They say she was fine during her first few months. District 2, one of the poorest districts, became one of the richest in her term. The deteriorating armaments industry boomed into the leading one in the whole Panem, becoming the lone supplier of weapons of all sorts to the twelve districts. The many citizens who made weapons eventually mastered how to use them in battle, and so the district became known as the District of Fighters. This coincided with her vision of making her nation a nation of victors, since she was a victor herself. She made combat a mandatory subject in all schools, breeding us to be very competitive. "It's either you're the best or you're nothing," she once said in her speech during last year's Reaping. I guess fulfilled that goal, because majority of the victors of the following Hunger Games came from the district.
Eventually, her sexism manifested. She ordered that all school be either for only girls or only boys, and then she mingled with the curriculum. The subjects taught to girls were History, Math, Science, Literature, Art, Music, Combat, Weaponry and Gender Equality. The subjects taught to the boys were just Combat and Weaponry, and occasionally, they'd have Basic Science and Math; hence, they usually grew up to be blacksmiths and smelters. Only the girls could be anything better, anything more convenient. The final blow came when she rearranged the whole of District 2. Because District 2 is a mountain, she set her mansion on the very top. Surrounding that area would be the girls' schools, the government buildings, business establishments, places of leisure and the houses of unmarried women and their daughters. A lot of people call it Heaven. Below that, in the middle, was where the families of married women stayed, so it was the melting pot of sexes. It was nicknamed Purgatory. That was where I lived. A few kilometers below, by the foot of the mountain, was where the men, their schools and their establishments, were found. The people from Heaven fondly called it Hell, and the people from where I am picked it up and called that area Hell too.
There are many oddities with the circumstances in which I live in. First, for some unexplainable reason, I attended school in the Artemis Academy, the most prestigious school in Heaven which Mayor Olympe was the principal of. I was the only one who lived in Purgatory, meaning I was the only middle-class one when one talks of economic standing, while all of them were filthy rich. It confuses me how my parents even earn money to pay for my ludicrously expensive tuition fee, since mother was just a tailor and father was just a blacksmith. Girls from the Purgatory usually go to mediocre, cheap girls' schools like Alpha Zeta Phi College or School of St. Angus, which I think I'd fare better in. At least there, the girls don't think of men as lowly beings or as beasts of burden. At least there, no one even understands why the government is trying to shove "feminism" into our heads since men aren't less human than women. And of course, at least there, the girls have already seen boys, people that Artemis students regard as creatures, or as species.
Because all of the Artemis students are from Heaven, they all are also Bank Babies. Bank Babies don't have what one would call a father, unlike us who are called Natural Babies, since their mothers were just given semen from the Semen Bank in order to have a child to keep the population growing. For all I know, I was made because of my father and my mother, not because of a woman and a flask full of sperm cells. Before, when the women find out that they're bearing a son, they usually have the fetus aborted, but when the government foresaw that the decline of the male populace will lead to a decline in sperm donors, the government encouraged the women to give birth to their sons and then later abandon them in Hell, where they were raised by The Commission of Males. They are a group of government officials, but that didn't mean they held any power. The Commission just existed for the sake of keeping the male populace growing just enough.
Another oddity was the fact that my mother and I had something to do with Mayor Olympe. The Mayor usually treated men together with married women and their daughters as if they had leprosy, and so she kept her distance, but here we were—my mother was her personal tailor and I was her cook on Tuesdays, Thursdays and on special occasions. Sure, she doesn't give us tessera, something she only gives unmarried women, but our salaries more than make-up for that. While the rest of Purgatory and Hell starved, we had more than enough, and so at times we would buy food for them. The law didn't state that helping men and Natural Babies from families was illegal.
After a few minutes, there was a knock on our front door. I opened it and saw the fetcher waiting for me outside. "Are you ready, ma'am?" I bade Basil goodbye, went with the fetcher into our horse-drawn carriage, which dropped us off the cable-cart station. What would take me two hours on foot was made into fifteen minutes by the cable-cart. Sometimes I wish I could just ride the cable-carts to school and going home if only I had enough money. Other than the fact that it would save me time and energy, I liked the experience. The vehicle was suspended around 50 meters from the ground, and the floor was made of glass, letting me see the houses set within the encroaching forests of District 2. As we got nearer our destination, the houses became bigger, nicer and grander in structure, with fountains, pools and flowery gardens within their perimeters. In fact, calling those structures houses was already inappropriate. They should be rightfully called mansions, and they were where all my schoolmates lived.
When we were dropped off the last station, we took another carriage to Mayor Olympe's which was technically a three-minute ride. If one includes the time it takes to travel uphill through her stretch of land, a land full of strawberry fields dotted with oak trees, wildflowers and ponds where horses and dogs run around freely, it would take around 20 minutes to reach her mansion.
Her mansion was quite small compared to the others in Heaven, probably because she lived alone. She only had the other rooms built for the politicians from the other districts because sometimes they pay her visits. It had three floors, with the outside made of cream colored bricks. She chose the color well because when it clashes with the sky's colors during the sunset, which I witnessed when we arrived, her mansion appears to be breathtaking. The front door was huge for it spanned all three floors, and so were the five marble pillars by her mansion's threshold.
The dinner was held in what she claimed to be her backyard—an open space beneath the sky intended for outdoor parties. Beyond that was a maze made of bushes that anyone could get lost in. After I finished cooking the appetizers, main course meals and desserts for the Mayor and President Frost, Mayor Olympe's personal assistant asked me to stay in the kitchen only. I could only leave once the dinner was done, just in case they wanted me to cook some more.
I never liked the feeling that her kitchen gave off. It was humongous, lit so brightly by numerous fluorescent lights and made almost entirely of metal. It even creeps me out whenever I pass through the column of cabinets that store her mirror-like cooking pans because it feels like I'm being stalked by a zombie whenever I pass by a distorted reflection of my face. And that column was long, so I usually end up running to the end in order to avoid the reflections faster. I sat down by the corner and embraced myself. From that corner, I could see an outline of a square from across the room that I've never seen before. It was probably a trapdoor, and although curious, I didn't bother it. Soon enough I got so damn bored that I didn't care anymore. I got a knife, fitted the blade through the depth of the outline and lifted it up. The tile went up with it, and thanks to the fluorescent lights, I knew it really was a trapdoor. Replacing half the tile was the first step of a downward staircase that led to a small room. Wary that someone might see me, I rushed to the kitchen door and locked it, and then went back.
I know that anything could be down there, maybe a beast that the mayor keeps for a pet or something because the pit smelled stale, or perhaps, it's just a place that no one has been to for years. I took a closer look inside and saw something that made me decide to go down, regardless of whatever I'll face if caught. Materialized by the blinding kitchen fluorescent lights, I faintly saw a poster of the 54th Hunger Games plastered onto one of the small room's walls. I brought the emergency kitchen flashlight with me as I descended.
Inside was probably where all the answers to all the kids' questions about what happened in the 54th Hunger Games was. I suddenly remembered Guia, Mayor Olympe's trusted secretary and first cousin, and her daughter Dagna. In 4th grade, Dagna, who was my classmate, bragged to all of us that she knew what happened, how Mayor Olympe became the victor, because her mother told her. Mass hysteria followed. What started as a group of 4th graders turned into a swarm in which all Artemis students were in, all of us begging, pleading, crying for her to tell. We never saw her and Guia the next day, and all the days after that. Rumor has it that a spy reported what Dagna told us, and the government took action, abducted them and killed them. And now here I am, in the same room where a secret is hidden, a secret so grave that anyone who knows it, even a person so close to Mayor Olympe's heart, is killed.
On one side are the CD cases of the scenes from the Games, I could tell because they were labeled so. On another is a glass display with the clothes Mayor Olympe wore in the Games, spewed with blood, with her daggers, also stained with dried blood, on the floor. In the middle of the room were piles of metal boxes that were code-locked. Pinned to one of the walls was a corkboard with news clippings all about the Games. There were also mug shots and full body shots of the twenty four tributes.
It wasn't hard telling which one was Mayor Olympe's due to what I know she looked like then. There was at least something distinct about the facial features of the other girl tributes, but this girl in the middle was so plain. The hard part, however, was believing that the ordinary girl in the middle picture was now Mayor Olympe, the tall, beautiful woman with menacingly gray cat eyes, straight, long and pink hair with highlights of purple, and paper white skin. She must have been through a lot of procedures to change her look so drastically.
There was also another thing that shocked me. There was a picture of a boy tribute, I could tell because of his masculine build, which was damaged. Where his face should have been was a hole, as if it has been punctured by something sharp. Surrounding the edges of the whole were scratch marks.
Before I could even explore the room more, I heard someone violently knocking on the kitchen door. Quickly, I ascended, closed the trap door and attended to whoever it was. It was the personal assistant.
Instead of looking angry, she looked terribly worried and pale. "A-are you okay? What happened to you? Why did it take you a long time to open the door?"
"I fell asleep. So sorry."
"The dinner's done. You may leave. The fetcher will take you home."
I couldn't sleep back home. First, because I was mad at myself for not getting as much stuff as I could from the secret room. Second, because I really wanted to know who the boy tribute was, and why his picture was punctured. I turned to my side and realized that I was still in my chef uniform, and so I changed, but midway, something fell from my pockets. It was the picture of the boy tribute. I guess I brought it with me all along because I forgot to return it in haste.
After getting tired of staring at the picture, I decided to flip it to see if there's anything written behind it, and there was. Scribbled there were the words, "Thor Adnorof, Male Tribute, District 12, 54th Hunger Games". I darted to my parents' room and shook my father's burly body to wake him up.
He grunted. "What is it now, Sinta?" His eyes were closed. He was half-asleep. "Daddy, can I ask you," I adjusted my voice into a whisper to make sure the neighbors won't hear, "who is Thor Adnorof?"
"Thor…" he trailed off, probably went back to sleep. Disappointed, I walked towards the door to go back to my room, but he spoke again. "The 12th male tribute, the one Olypme didn't want to kill."
It dawned on me. Mayor Olympe killed 11 male tributes. How could I have not noticed that there was one more? And why was it that he wasn't included in Mayor Olympe's male killing spree? Did he avoid her attacks at first? But then what my father just said echoed in my head again.
"The 12th male tribute, the one Olypme didn't want to kill."