"Peeta! Wake up!"
My mother's nasally voice was what I woke up to every day of my life. Not the nicest way to start the morning.
"Peeta!" she shrieked, banging on the door.
"Coming Mother." I sighed, sliding out of my warm bed and getting ready for the day.
The whole house was bustling, being way too busy for 6:00 in the morning. But it's that way at our house everyday; we have to get up early to bake the bread for the day. And today was particularly busy, because it was Reaping Day. For those of you who don't know, the reaping is the annual selection of two teenagers to be sent to their deaths in a television show. Sounds like a picnic, right? But that's the way things are in Panem. The Hunger Games is the yearly way to remind us, the districts, that we are nothing compared to the Capitol. They have the power to destroy us, taking our children and forcing us to watch.
As for me, I live in District Twelve, the poorest of them all. Luckily, I don't have to take out tesserae, which gives you food for a year, but requires you to put more slips in at the Reaping. However, there are some people that I know who have to get tesserae. Well, to be entirely honest, one person in particular worries me more than all the others.
I walked downstairs and saw my father kneading some bread. He gave me a small smile. My dad is one of the only people I actually like in my household. My mother, as you have already seen, is ray of sunshine. (Please detect the sarcasm) My eldest brother, Blaine isn't bad; he just has no time for me. And my other brother, Rowan, is too similar to my mother for me to enjoy his company.
My father passed me an icing tube and I grinned. He knew I liked icing cakes. Hardly anybody bought them, but I liked brightening up the bakery window. In a grim place like District 12, God knows we could use some beauty.
Rowan clopped noisily down the stairs, snickering at me holding a bright pink cookie.
"Morning Peeta Bread."
I sighed. I hated my name. Living and working at a bakery, you'd imagine that my parents had more intelligence than to name me after a type of bread, but I guess not.
"Worried about the Reaping?" Rowan asked, snatching a piece of fresh bread and eating it.
"You aren't?" I asked calmly.
"No, it's my last year."
"You can still get picked."
"I only have six slips. There are twelve year old Seam kids with more than that. My money's on one of them."
I clenched my teeth and gripped the knife I was holding harder.
"It's not their fault, Rowan."
"Not their fault they're lazy and poor as dirt?"
I rolled my eyes and stalked past him, picking up a bag of flour. I needed to stop talking to him. Because I'm in love with a girl from the Seam.
Her name's Katniss Everdeen. And she has no idea I exist. Which makes the whole "love thing" sort of difficult. I've had a crush on her basically since the moment I saw her, when we were five years old. I've tried constantly over the last eleven years to get her to notice me, but so far nothing's worked. And I don't expect it ever will.
The bell on the front door of the bakery jangled and I looked up. Only to be met with the gray eyes of they guy I hate most on the planet.
Sorry that a lot of it was just rehashing the Hunger Games plotline, which I'm pretty sure almost everybody knows at this point :) Please keep reading this, I swear it will get better!