Katniss

I was walking home in the rain behind the shops in town looking through the garbage cans. It was six months after my dad had died in the mining accident. My mom had yet to find a job and sat at home staring at nothing while my younger sister, Prim, and I waste away from hunger. I had been trying to trade some of Prim's baby clothes for food, but no one wanted them. It was when I stopped behind the bakery that I had seen him for the first time.

I was looking through the garbage cans for anything we could eat, but they had been emptied earlier that day. Sure enough when I lifted the lid, the bin was empty. I looked up as the light from inside the bakery was suddenly much brighter. "Get out of here you Seam scum!" the baker's wife yelled at me. Behind her I could see the younger of the baker boys. I backed up to sit under a tree behind the bakery.

I was frozen to the bones. The rain had soaked through my father's old hunting jacket. Prim's old baby clothes lay in a mud puddle to my left. Inside I could hear the baker's wife yelling and the door was thrown open again. "Throw them to the pigs. No one decent is going to buy burned bread. You stupid fool!" The younger boy began breaking off pieces of bread and throwing it into the pig pen. Someone came into the bakery and the wife returned to the front of the store.

As soon as she was gone he through both loaves of bread one at a time at the tree landing at my feet. It was only when he opened the door that I saw the red mark on his face showing how much that bread had really cost him. I quickly shoved the bread inside my jacket and walked home quickly. Except for the burned crust the bread was good and would feed us for weeks maybe longer.

The next day at school I saw him with some of his friends from town. The red mark had turned into a huge bruise and his eye was almost swollen shut. Every time I had seen him that day he wasn't alone and I never had the chance to thank him for what he did for me and my family. To thank him for saving us from starving knowing what would happen to him.

As I waited for Prim after school I saw a dandelion in the grass. Seeing that gave me hope. Hope that from now on my family wouldn't starve. Hope that the boy with the bread had given me.