Chapter 1: Anxious

I open my groggy eyes to the still dark room. I roll onto my side on the small cot and find that the space next to me is cold and empty. Prim must have had a bad dream and went to sleep with my mother in the middle of the night. Of course she did, today is the day of the reaping.

I roll out of bed and slip my feet into my old leather boots, then walk across the room and grab my forage bag and throw on my Dad's old hunting jacket.

The sun is still below the horizon and the sky grey as I walk out the door into District 12. My mother, my younger sister Prim, and I live in a part if the district called the Seam. It is the poorest part of town, filled with squat grey houses. Usually at this time of day the streets are filled with coal miners heading out for their morning shifts, but today they are empty. The reaping isn't until two, so most people are sleeping in, or at least trying to.

Our house is near the edge of the Seam, so I only have to pass a few houses before I get to the Meadow. There is an electrified fence with barbed wire on top that separates the Meadow from the woods, supposedly to keep large animals out. 'District 12, where you can safely starve to death.' That is why I take the risk to go into the woods and hunt. If I didn't, my family and I would have starved to death years ago. The only reason I can hunt is because my father taught me how, years ago before he was killed in the mine explosion. He knew how to make bows and arrows, so he used to take me into the woods to hunt with him. I got quite good, but not nearly as skilled as he was.

The fence around District12 is supposed to be electrified 24 hours a day, but are were lucky if we get a few hours of electricity each night, so most of the time it is safe. There are a few holes in the fence that I could use to get through, but most days I use the one by the meadow. It was close to my house and people rarely came by here, so it was unlikely I will be seen.

Just as a precaution, I listen for the humming of electricity. It is silent, so I get to my hands and knees and push my bag through the hole in the fence. Then I crawl through, and come up in the forest. This is the only place where I can actually speak my mind. And waiting for me here is the one person who I can be myself with. Gale. Just thinking about him and I feel my pace begin to quicken. I climb the hill to our place, a rock ledge overlooking the valley. Seeing Gale sitting there makes the corners of my mouth lift up in a smile. I usually don't smile much, unless I'm in the woods with Gale.

"Hey Catnip!" says Gale. My name is actually Katniss, but Gale always calls me by my nickname. When we first met, I'd told him my name so quietly he'd thought I'd said Catnip. So he's called me that ever since.

"Look what I shot" he says as he holds up a loaf of bread with an arrow through it, and I laugh. Real bakers bread, not just the flat tasteless stuff we make at home with our grain rations. We only eat bread like this on special occasions. "Mmmm, still warm." I say. "What did it cost you?"

"Just a squirrel. Think the old bakers feeling a little more giving today." Gale says "He even wished me luck."

"I guess we all feel a little more close to each other today." I said as I took out the little ball of cheese from Proms goat. "Prim left us cheese.

"It looks like we'll be eating like Capitol people today!" Gale said as his expression brightens. "Happy Hunger Games!" he says in Effie Trinket's, District 12's Capitol representative for the Hunger games, too-happy tone and thick capitol accent. He picked a few berries from the bushes around us, "And may the odds.." He tosses one towards me, and I catch it in my mouth.

"Be ever in your favor!" I finish in the same capitol accent. The capitol accent is so odd sounding, anything we say in it sounds funny. We are joking around about the Capitol today because we are trying to mask how we both truly feel…terrified.

Gale pulls out his knife and begins slicing the bread, as I watch him. I think about how much we look alike; straight black hair, olive skin, and grey eyes. We could be siblings. But then again nearly everyone in the Seam looks like this. Except my mother and Prim. But that's because my mother was born into the small merchant class of our district. Her parents ran an apothecary shop in the nicer part of the district. My father met my mother because he would sometimes gather medicinal herbs on his hunts and sell them to the shop to be made into medicine. My mother truly loved my father; she had to in order to leave her nice life to move into the Seam. I try to remember that and forgive her, for my father's sake, for just sitting and watching as her children starved. But truthfully, I am not the forgiving type.

Gale and I sit back in our little nook in the rocks, eating berries, goat cheese, and fresh bread. This moment would be perfect, if today was any other day. But instead, there is an air of tension surrounding us, all because we have to be standing in the square at two o'clock for the Reaping.

We decide to go down to the lake and fish, to get food for tonight's supper. Hopefully we will be able to celebrate the fact that no one in our families got chosen during the Reaping. I don't want to imagine the other possibility.

It turns out to be a pretty good day fishing. By late morning we have a dozen fish, a sack of greens, and a gallon of strawberries from a patch I found a few years ago. On our way home we stop by the Hob, or the black market for our district. We trade some of the fish for bread and salt, and half the greens for some paraffin. After we're done trading at the hob, we go to the back door of the mayor's house to trade half the strawberries.

Madge, the mayor's daughter is the one that comes to the door. She's in my grade at school, and I guess she's not too bad. She's quiet, like me. Neither of us really have any other friends our age, so we usually end up sitting together at lunch and assemblies and stuff like that. Today she's wearing a beautiful, expensive white dress, and she has a pink ribbon in her hair. She's all dressed up for the Reaping.

"Pretty dress." Gale says. Madge glares at him, trying to tell if it was an actual compliment or if he's just being an ass. The dress really is pretty, but she wouldn't ordinarily be wearing it. She half-smiles and says "Well if I end up going to the Capitol I want to look nice, right?"

"Don't be stupid. You're not going to the Capitol." Gale says angrily. "What can you have, five entries? I had six the first year I was eligible."

"Don't be mean, it's not her fault." I say.

"You're right, it's no one's fault. That's just the way it is." he says.

Madge's face is like stone. She hands the money for the berries to me. "Good luck Katniss."

"You too" I say as the door closes.

We walk towards the Seam, neither of us speaking. I'm not happy about how Gale was acting towards Madge, but he is right. The system for how they choose the Tributes is unfair. When you're twelve, your name gets entered once. When you're thirteen, it's entered twice, and so on. But here's the unfair part; if you're poor and starving like us, you can apply for tesserae. In exchange for a meager year's supply of oil and grain for one person, your name is entered another time. You can do this for each of your family members, too. So when I was twelve, my name was already entered four times. Now that I am sixteen, my name will be entered twenty times. Gale, being eighteen and feeding a family of five for seven years, will have his name entered forty-two times.

This is why Gale was angry. There is a very small chance that someone like Madge will be reaped, compared to people like Gale and I. It's not impossible, but very unlikely. Gale knows that he shouldn't be angry with Madge, it isn't her fault. It's the capitol's. But Gale has never been good at controlling his anger. Some days, in the woods, I listen to his rant about the capitol for hours. He thinks that the tesserae is just another way for the Capitol to divide us among ourselves, the poor against those who can always count on a meal.

We get near our homes, and divide our food. We each get two fish, a quart of strawberries, a few loaves of bread, some paraffin, salt, and a little bit of money.

"I'll see you in the square." I say.

"Wear something pretty." he replies flatly.

At home, I see that my mother and sister are already dressed and ready to go. My mother is wearing a nice dress from her apothecary days, and Prim is wearing my first reaping outfit. It's a bit big on her, and she's having trouble keeping the blouse tucked in at the back. I quickly bathe and wash my hair. When I get out, I find one of my mother's nice dresses laying on my bed with a pair of matching shoes.

"Are you sure?" I ask.

"Yes" she says. "Lets put your hair up, too." She braids it up on top of my head. When I look in our old, cracked mirror, I can hardly recognize myself.

"Wow, you look beautiful." Prim says.

"Yeah, but nothing like myself." I say. I hug her, and try to comfort her. I know she is nervous. This is her first reaping. But at least she's only entered once, I wouldn't let her take out any tesserae. Still, she's nervous for me, thinking that the unthinkable might happen.

"Tuck your tail in, little duck." I say to her as I smooth her blouse back in place.

"Quack." she says as she giggles softly.

I laugh lightly, too. "Come on, let's eat."

We decide to leave the fish, greens, and strawberries for supper, and instead eat some rough bread made from tesserae grain and milk from Prim's goat. None of us have much of an appetite though.