Part One: The Reaping
1
I awake to the noise of someone lightly tapping on my dusty, tiny window. District 11 doesn't have very good windows; it's hard to put glass in straw huts.
I sit up on my scratchy mat and rub my eyes. By this time most residents of the Flower Trail, which is what we call this area, would be in the fields and orchards. I would be sorting fruit in the orchard until nightfall, when I climb the tallest tree and pluck the best fruit that only grows at the top. I'm very good at it; I can do what is known as the 'monkey dance', when you look like you're running across trees. The knocking comes again. Opening the rough cotton curtain, I see the dark faces of Taegan and Prue, my best friends. Taegan is the same age as me than me and Prue is two years older; this is Taegan's first reaping. It is mine too. I get up and pull a purple coat over my white shirt and spotty skirt that I accidentally slept in. Sliding my feet into the pale grey boots that qualify as matching my skirt, I open the door quietly as so not to wake my siblings.
"Hey, Gardenia." Prue says. "Taegan can't sleep. We should go play fruit slice."
"We shouldn't risk it. There are Capitol-goers everywhere. Anything else she likes?" By rights, we could be whipped for playing fruit slice. But most children in District Eleven play it anyway. There aren't many ways to entertain yourself here. I've been whipped once and I'm not too keen to be whipped again.
"Hopsc-sc-scotch." stammers Taegan in a tiny voice. Prue puts her arm around her.
"Okay, sis, let's play hopscotch." she soothes. We choose an extra-long road of bricks and start leaping. If I can monkey dance, this is nothing. But it's fun. For my benefit, Prue uses a stone to scratch a small circle in the middle of each square.
"Hop on those, Dee-nee."
Dee-nee. My nickname. It came from when Prue was seven and couldn't say 'Gardenia', saying 'dee-nee' instead. It sort of stuck.
I leap, landing on tiptoe on each circle. We do this for hours until a gonging bell sounds. Taegan's face turns white and she starts sobbing. Prue reassures her; I wave and leap from brick to brick away, to my family. Mum feeds me a bit of melon and hugs me tight. The odds are not in my favour, with my name entered twice mandatory, and eighteen more for the tesserae. That makes twenty entries. It's not too bad, compared to Sage, a sixteen-year old who has a family of twelve. Plus her five mandatory entries, she's in one hundred and ninety-seven times. Owch.
The reaping system is so much more unfair here than in other districts. There are one hundred sacks. You spread your name and tesserae between the four and if a sack with your name in it is chosen, then your name goes in the reaping balls. If the majority of the members of a sack want to volunteer, then that sack goes in instead. It barely ever happens. Being reaped is a horror no one wants to face. I was in the thirty-eighth bag. So were four of my siblings, along with Prue and Taegan.
A white-suited Peacekeeper takes me by the arm, and I realise everyone else is in the rope squares. Mum looks like she might faint, dad look like he's going to puke. The Peacekeeper practically throws me into the thirteen-year-old section. As always, Petunia Welsh, our reaper, is trilling how lovely District Eleven is. Yeah, right. Capitol people don't consider fruit trees and vegetable bushes 'lovely.'
She beckons Turelian Zhang, our mayor. Adenah Lauren, the female victor from about five years back, sits beside him. She won entirely by chance. Adenah won by outliving all the other tributes when they shoved her off a cliff. She was hurt, but she landed on a ledge too far down to return upwards and was forgotten about, so she ate what she could find and waited for the others to die. Even now she's missing half her innards from when she cut herself on the rocks.
The aging mayor stands and begins to ramble about the Dark Days, and more importantly, the War of the Mockingjay from only twenty-five years ago. I can see most of the girls tune out. In fact, so do I. I hum a song that I normally sing to the mockingjays in the orchard when I see the quitting time flag, an age-old tradition. Through a haze I see Petunia reaching into a glass ball. Only one thing could snap me from my daze. And she says it.
"Gardenia Bartini."