a/n [Uses Caesars Palace's prompt 'starlight'. For Brookie in July. Happy birthday, dear.
Warning: Mention of suicide.]
There's something delicate to the way starlight falls.
In the crowded streets many, many floors below the opened window, people dance under a night sky and blaring city lights. The starlight can't reach the ground at all. Instead, a little girl with her hair braided around her head like a crown reaches for the party. Her arm isn't long enough, and her eyes can barely make out the details this far away, but she puts her hands through the crack in the window and into the warm air, letting them float on the wind. She wants nothing more than to be down there, dressed up like one of her dolls, swaying in time to the music.
She closes her eyes and imagines it; a day when she will be allowed to float through the crowds. A day when all of the gentlemen ask her for a dance. The girl takes her hands back inside the apartment, and uses them to help her scoot backward off her bed. She lands on the floor with an ungraceful thump, and tears well up in the corners of her eyes. No one will ever let her dance in the shape she's in now.
.
Her mother comes home early in the morning the next day and is immediately pelted by questions from her daughter.
"Slow down, Effie," her mother says, her voice soft and tired. "What is it you want?"
"I want dance lessons. To be a dancer," Effie answers. "Mama, can I be a dancer? I'll be the best dancer."
"Effie, dear, are you sure?"
The girl nods excitedly, her pigtails dancing. "Yes."
"But wouldn't you like to be a doctor like Mama?"
"Um," Effie says.
"Of course you would, dear," her mother smiles, all red lipstick and no bright eyes, and hugs the girl.
Effie's heart falls somewhere very close to the floor. "Yes, Mama."
.
Her father works in a big building in the center of the Capitol and doesn't come home very often. Sometimes Effie will sit on her bed with her legs folded underneath her and stick her hands into the night to try and reach for him. The stars are reaching for him, too, but they can't shine bright enough.
The little girl wonders if her father knows how to dance.
.
Her father is important, but Effie already knew that, of course. He would tuck her into bed with a gentle kiss to her forehead every night and tell her stories about the moon. He would make her pancakes into heart shapes. He taught her how to dance on her sixth birthday when her mother was out of the house.
He's important in the Capitol, too, and Effie isn't sure why. Her mother doesn't talk about him a lot.
She sees him on the television, though. He's on the boring channels that she has to skip through to get to her cartoons. Sometimes she watches him just to hear his voice, just to see his warms hands move through the air as he talks. She doesn't let her mother know she watches him.
.
There's a party almost every night below Effie's eighteenth-story window, and she stays up, always, to watch the dancers swirl with their partners. There are colorful lights, loud music—she can faintly hear it even with her window closed—and people standing on the edges, in crowds, not dancing. They mystify Effie, and she wants to know more.
She climbs off her bed and skitters across the floor to the center of the room. She turns once, slowly, experimentally. She turns faster. Her cotton pajama shorts do little flaring with her twirls, and she's irritated with them. She needs a skirt.
Her closet looms over her as she steps up to it, and grabs the handles that stare down at her. She pulls open the doors, at the contents of her closet are in her grasp, color-coordinated and arranged by type. Effie grabs at a skirt, not caring which one, and shimmies it over the clothes she's wearing.
"Effie, dear, what are you doing?" Her mother stands in the doorway with tired, disapproving eyes.
"Spinning," Effie answers, grinning her jewel of a smile.
"But it's bed time."
Effie points to the window. "They're spinning."
"They're grown ups," her mother says.
"Like you?"
"Like Mama," she agrees. "Let's go to bed now, all right, dear?"
Effie allows the skirt to fall back down her legs and be hung up in the closet between the blues and the reds. She climbs back into her bed, and her mother straightens the covers over her but doesn't tuck her in.
"Why aren't you spinning, then, Mama?" she asks.
"Goodnight, dear," her mother says, and turns out the light.
.
There's an argument and yelling. Effie stays in her room trying on skirts, seeing which one is the best for spinning, and ignoring the angry voices. She's so used to the voices sounding calm, forgiving. She doesn't like this at all.
After dinner, her mother speaks to her.
"Your father's going to leave soon," her mother says slowly.
"When will he back?"
"He's not coming back, Effie, dear."
The little girl folds her hands in her lap, like a lady, and doesn't say anything to that. She's seven now, a big girl, and she knows what those words mean.
"Can I go with him?"
"You're staying with Mama," she says, smiling a bit like that makes everything better.
"Why?" Effie asks, desperately searching for an answer as to why her father would leave them. Leave her. She thought he loved her. When her mother doesn't answer, it's clear to Effie. "It's because you don't spin, right, Mama?"
.
There's a bowl in the lobby many floors downstairs that's full of candy. The girl, not quite as little as before, sits in front of it, unwrapping and eating the sweets by the handful. The doorman notices but doesn't say anything.
Her mother finishes up talking to the big guy at the desk and gets her things ready to go outside for some time while their apartment is fixed up. She walks over to Effie, and the girl stops chewing and shoves the candy and wrappers into her pocket.
"You ready?" he mother asks.
Effie nods her head too fast and jumps to her feet, trying to look like the perfect girl her mother wants her to be.
.
Her father is dead. It's on the news.
Heart attack, some say.
Seizure, others say.
Poison, her mother says.
The girl, not little anymore but still wanting to be held as if she was, turns off the television and curls up on the couch. Her mother sits in the kitchen and drinks something red, as red as blood. Effie doesn't cry because she's wearing some new mascara and would stain her skin if it started to drip.
.
She's not sure when she became an orphan. The call came in during school on a Tuesday. Her mother had been missing since Saturday.
Effie was naïvely relieved when the man in the suit standing in the principal's office told her that her mother had been found. She should've guessed that 'found' meant she was discovered hanging by her neck from a rope in a storage closet in the basement of her building.
.
For her sixteenth birthday, she gets foster parents.
.
For her eighteenth, she sits in front of her bedroom window, which isn't as high as her old one, and watches the party in the street. Boys and girls dance on sidewalks and across the fat yellow line tracing the center of the asphalt strip.
She's wearing a dress, pink and covered in glitter, and she's free, starting tonight. She's a grown up, she thinks, but she doesn't quite feel like one.
She's supposed to be down there in those streets, dancing.
Instead, she slips off the dress, puts on her white pantsuit with bedazzled pockets, and adjusts a baby blue wig over her tied up hair. She steps out of the house, past the party, and hails a car to take her to the center of the Capitol.
.
Two years after she submits her escort application, she's finally assigned a position. District Twelve. It's the eve of the Reaping, and that's where the train takes her now.
It's not Effie's first time leaving the Capitol, but it's her first time going this far. She sits in a chair by the window, in a train car all by herself, and watches the land that the train leaves behind until the sky turns too dark to see and there's an announcement of their arrival in five minutes.
Effie studies her surroundings and takes it all in. The pristine fabric, the glass fixtures, and the orderliness of the car. She prepares herself for facing the roughness of the District. The dirt, the rubble, and the drab colors.
She takes deep breaths and tells herself that it's just a couple of years working as the escort for this District before she's moved up in the ranks. She might even be up to District One by the next Quarter Quell.
.
The first time Effie sees the stars alight and shining in all their glory is on the dingy train platform. The sky is full of them, so many she could never count them all. She knew, of course, that this is what stars did—the city lights don't block everything, just most of it. They're so bright, though, even sitting millions of miles away in the sky.
"Miss Trinket?" a voice asks. Effie scowls, turning her eyes to the District and the peacekeeper in front of her. "I'll guide you to your room for the night."
She hands him her bag to carry and crosses her arms, waiting for him to start walking. The sooner she's inside again the better.
The starlight illuminates her as she goes.