I was only 8 years old when my brother Rowan was reaped. I can still remember the capitol airhead whose pink fake nails grabbed the folded piece of paper that sentenced my brother to his death. I watched the deep purple lips make the shape as Hestia (that was the escort for District 7) read out his name, Rowan Mason.

I might have been young but I still knew what it meant, the Hunger Games was something that I was brought up with as a child, all of the children in the districts were. I let out a strangled cry and I felt my eyes sting but my father pulled me tight up against him, his warm wood scent calmed me as he leaned down and whispers in my ear "You can't let them hurt you, that gives them the power and you are the powerful one Jo".

It was certainly a weird thing to say to an eight year old and I had no idea what he meant, but it made me wipe away the tears and I just stared at the ridiculous green mop wig that Hestia had plopped on the top of her head. I did not want to see my brother standing on that stage being taken away into the Justice Building for his slaughter. Later when me and my father visited him for goodbyes he told me that he is going to win and that when he comes back we'll be free and I can have a feast and there'll be no need to worry.

But he does not come back and we aren't ever free because he's betrayed by a member of his alliance on the second day of the games during his sleep because he was 'too much of a threat.'

"Ugh!" My rage rips through me and I throw an axe straight and its buried deep into the trunk of the tree about 30 feet away from where I am standing. It was a good shot, I was certainly getting better. After Rowan's games my father took me out and taught me skills with the axe as well as a little bit of knives. After a while I began to practise on my own and found that I started to like it more and more. I guess that it was my own therapy, it released the anger that I always felt was bottled up inside me.

I walk forward to retrieve an axe when a voice startles me.

"Nervous for the reaping today, are you?" I turn around to find the messy dark brown hair and green eyes that are accompanied by a smirk which lets me know it is Linden Barker. He's the only one apart from my father who knows about this, well I don't really know what to call it but I guess 'training'. He's the only one who really knows anything about me.

"No." I answer much too quickly for my liking. "Are you?"

"Yes, and it's pretty obvious you are too. Don't lie to me Jo." I look up into his deep green eyes for a while before my eyes snap away and I pull out my axe from the tree.

"Of course I'm nervous. Today some prissy ditz with the most bizarre bright coloured everything from the capitol is going to pick a piece of paper from some stupid glass bowl, which could condemn me for a fight to the death with 23 others!" I suddenly realise how I had become so loud that practically every living thing within a 100 yard radius had run away in terror. I calm myself and continue, "All the while remembering very clear that it was my brother being called out just eight years ago." I am sixteen now, my brother was fifteen when he was reaped and last year was probably the worst because of that, because my brother was in the exact same position that I was, except instead of going home after the reaping he was ushered off to the capitol.

"Well I better go get changed into my best clothes because if my name gets reaped I definitely want to look good even though soon enough they'll most likely see me covered in mud and blood and possibly dead." I say to Linden.

"See you at the reaping Jo." Linden says as he begins to walk home. I turn and make the familiar trek back to my house. It's just me and my dad now, my mother died giving birth to me. Maybe I would do well in the Hunger Games if I was to be reaped, I am a natural born killer. I smile at my own little joke and open the door to my quaint house. I yell for my dad but it does not take me a long while to figure out that he isn't here, especially with the very limited amount of places he could be in our house. I assume that he's just at Ainsley Barker's (who is Linden's mother) house. My father and Ainsley had been friends for years, even at school apparently they had always hung out in a three with my mother. Ainsley's just about the sweetest woman I have ever met and she's the closet I ever had to what I would imagine a mother to be like. She has two other children along with Linden, Ava who is 10 and Penn who is 12 and there's also Ren who is her husband, who is just as nice an lovely but I don't really see very much because he works long shifts from dawn to dark being a lumberjack.

I especially don't see as much since a few years ago the Capitol put a curfew on District 7 for all to be in their own houses by dark. This was due to a group of lumberjacks that would go into the woods during the night and chop wood off the trees, considering that Mrs Havinn, who was in charge of all axes used by the lumberjacks, most of the time in her old age forgot to the lock the door to the room in which they were kept. The group of lumberjacks continued this for quite a while until one night when the lumberjacks weren't being as careful as they usually were and the peacekeepers followed them and later arrested them for having illegal weapons and for stealing from the capitol. They were later publicly executed along with Mrs Havinn in the town square, the peacekeepers made sure no one tried to removed the stains of their blood as a reminder of how they had stained Panem.

I change into the pale green dress I had laid out this morning and tie my hair up in a simple ponytail. Many people try to make an effort to look nice for the reaping but honestly I just do not care enough about what others think of me to bother. If someone thinks I look scruffy then so be it, I will probably just think that they are a self-obsessed idiot. I leave my house and start making my way over to Linden's house, I mainly just want to see my father before the reaping but I should probably also say a quick good luck and something reassuring to Penn since it is his first year. Although I am usually horrible at trying to say stuff to make people feel better, it is whole lot easier to be mean than it is to be nice. I open the door to Linden's house without even knocking, there's always someone home at their place anyways so usually the door is unlocked.

"Invite yourself in why don't you?" Linden says as I walk in. I just roll my eyes at him and ask whether my father is here. Then Ainsley pops her head out from one of the bedrooms of the house and greets me with her usual warm smile and optimistic "Hello dearie. Oh, you look lovely in that dress." I smile and a slight chuckle comes out of my mouth because I am certainly sure that I do not look lovely, considering that I did not even bother to have a bath even after being in the woods all morning.

"And to answer your question your father is just in here." Ainsley gestures towards the bedroom which she had just walked out of and I follow her hand into the bedroom to find my father kneeling softly talking to a very teary eyed Penn who is sitting on the bed. They both look up at me as I enter.

"Uh, sorry I didn't meant to, um, disrupt, um, well…" Oh great Johanna, just great, you really know how to save the situation.

"Johanna," A small voice coming from Penn calls to me, "Do you still get scared? For the Reaping?"

I walk over to Penn and kneel down beside my father and reply "Yes."

"You do not look very scared to me."

"That's just because I don't want them to know that I fear something that they created because that gives them the power and I can't let them have that."

I can feel my dad's sly smile as he looks to me knowing full and well that those aren't my words, there his. Penn is called by his mother out into the living room because she wants to fix up his hair before we all have to leave to go to the reaping.

"Good luck for the reaping." Is all my father says as he walks out of the bedroom with his knowing smile on. It's simple, and really not all too thoughtful for someone who is in the draw to fight to death but I know what he means by it, he knows that if I really just said what I had said to Penn then no words are necessary, anything he would say to me I have already realised on my own.

I walk with Penn and Linden until it is time for us to split up into our separate groups divided between boys and girls and then into age groups. I make my way over to the sixteen year old girls and slip in to the roped off area. A lot of the girls are just talking amongst themselves but I do not really have anyone to talk to nor want to talk to. At school not a lot of people like me as they find my personality 'cruel'. But I don't care, if people don't like me for who I am then they can go fuc –

"Welcome to the 71st Annual Hunger Games!" The escort for district 7 interrupts my thoughts with her loud booming capitol accent which has been amplified across the whole town square. Her blue hair is swirled up into some kind of curly plop on the top of her head and her dress looks like an upside down cupcake, with way too much icing. I look over to Linden in the boys section and at the exact same time he looks over to me and his deep green eyes flash up to the escort and then back to me and roll as he turns to look at her again. I laugh and a few of the girls around me give me a look like I was the craziest person they have ever seen and I just raise my eyebrows at them.

When I turn back to look at the cupcake she already has her gloved hand inside the bowl and I watch as she grabs the piece of white folded paper pulls it out and walks back over to the microphone in an excruciatingly dramatic way. She opens up the piece of paper and reads out the name.

"Johanna Mason."

I don't need to hear the name to know it's me though, every single girl around me turns their faces displaying sympathy, relief, shock, one girl that I once said that she look like a horse that ran straight into a wall and got its nose knocked in (I assure you I didn't say it to be mean though, it was honestly just the truth) smirked at me as I made my way up to the escort. My father and I had prepared what I had planned to do if I were in fact to get reaped. He had told me that sometimes to let someone have the power can be helpful as long as you always have the strength to take it back. And as I run over these words in my head that I start to cry. But they haven't hurt me and they won't hurt me.