I'm back, with the next installment of Numbers. This chapter's a bit longer and covers a surprising amount of ground, all coming back to the number 6.

But first, some business:

Firstly, I'd love to thank Chapter 1's reviewers, KTstoriesandstuff and Pinkbookworm7. Reading your reviews made me so happy! I'd usually PM my thanks, but I stupidly deleted the review emails from my inbox and wasn't at my computer yesterday. It gives me something to remember for next time.

Secondly, the disclaimer: I do not own The Hunger Games...though as of next week, I finally own my car, after several long years!

In response to a reviewer's question, the narration in these chapters (especially the early ones) is kind of atemporal. I figure you can't narrate your own life before you can speak, so it's hard to do first-person narration for a small child. However, the later chapters worked so well in first person narration that I applied it to the whole story. All in all, the narration exists outside of a specific place or time. We can assume that Wiress is looking back on these episodes, piecing her narration together with her own recollections as well as the details she picked up from others who were there and perhaps even a little embellishment, for poetic reasons. She may not even be narrating each chapter at the same point in her life. One chapter, later on, will not be narrated by her at all, but more about that later. In the meantime, enjoy.

One last thing-this chapter and the next chapter overlap somewhat in timing. They can technically be read in either order. I have a couple of reasons why I put this one first, but switching them won't hurt the arc of the narrative.


Six

The number six figures prominently in my childhood.

Six is the number of letters in the name they give me. Wiress. A good, strong District Three name.

My name is pretty run-of-the-mill; I'm not the only Wiress in the district, and I won't be the last. My name, like everything else about me, is nothing that really stands out in a crowd. Because that's how to survive in Panem: by keeping your head down and blending in with the crowd. To stand out is to stand alone, when everyone knows that safety lies in numbers.

My parents know this. They teach us from a young age not to stand out, not to say or do anything that might attract the wrong kind of attention. It turns out the list of things that could attract the wrong kind of attention is nearly endless. I'm six years old the day my mother drives this lesson home for me. We're standing at a stall in the public market on a breezy spring afternoon. My mother's buying bread and Electra and I are taking turns begging her for a surprise—ribbons, maybe, or even the impossible luxury of a piece of fruit to share. This last idea seems almost too good to be true; fruit has to be imported all the way from District 11, so it's prohibitively expensive.

"Not now, girls," she says through gritted teeth, rummaging in her change purse for a few coins to give the baker.

"How many rolls was that, then?" he asks my mother, piling the little square rolls on the counter.

"How much was it for ten—what, Electra? What is it?"

"That's only two each!" my sister pouts. I nod my head in disgruntled agreement.

"And your point is?"

"They're so small," I add, pointing out what should be blatantly obvious to everyone involved. An ominous crease appears between my mother's eyebrows; it's clear she's getting annoyed, but we foolishly press on.

"We don't have enough money for three each," she says in a low voice, leaning in towards us so the baker won't hear this embarrassing confession.

"It's not fair!" whines Electra, much to my mother's consternation. "How come he has enough money to buy as many rolls as he wants?" I add mutinously, pointing to the customer who's taken our place in line. It's Marcellus, one of our local Peacekeepers, and he's placing a big order that drives all thoughts of my mother and her ten paltry rolls from the baker's head.

My mother looks over her shoulder, realizes who I'm pointing to, and promptly slaps me right across the face. I stare at her, dumbstruck. I feel shock at first, shock at what my mother's done; then a slow, smarting pain starts to creep across my cheek where her hand made contact. My mother fails to acknowledge this, though. Abandoning her rolls on the counter before she can even pay, she grabs my sister and me painfully by the arm and marches us up the street without a word. She doesn't speak to either of us until we're back home in our kitchen and she's locked the door behind us.

"Are—you—crazy?" she hisses, sounding less like our mother than some sort of nightmarish, child-eating monster. Electra and I, too frightened to be sullen and stubborn, exchange wide-eyed glances.

"How dare you say something so stupid in front of a Peacekeeper!" Mother continues, and she raises her hand again, but this time we draw away in fear.

"Please—we didn't mean to; we won't do it again!" Electra apologizes rapidly, as I nod fervently behind her. Our mother never really hits us, so we're both shocked and upset by the afternoon's turn of events. My mother lowers her hand, sighs and when she speaks at last, she sounds tense, but a great deal calmer.

"Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to complain in front of the Peacekeepers?" she asks wearily. "You need to be more careful. You need to keep things like that quiet."

"We were just hungry," I say in the smallest, least threatening voice I can muster. "We just wanted more rolls."

My mother sits in silence for a moment, clearly thinking deeply, choosing her words with care. Finally, she takes us gently by the shoulders and turns us to face her. Her face is set with purposeful determination. "When you walk out the door of this house," she begins carefully, "you need to do your job to protect this family. Part of protecting this family is always showing how good things are here, and how you have everything you need. Because if you're foolish enough to let the Peacekeepers think you're unhappy with the way things are…well, then they'll give you a real reason to be unhappy."

"But it still isn't fair," supplies Electra matter-of-factly. My mother takes her hand, her face inexplicably sad. "No, it's not," she agrees, "but when did anyone ever tell you that life was fair?"


Our home is as typical of District Three as you can possibly get. We live in a little apartment on the third floor of a brick building that looks exactly like all the other brick buildings on our block. We have four rooms: a kitchen that doubles as living room, a bedroom for my parents, a bedroom for us kids and a tiny little bathroom with no windows at all. This last bit, about the windows, matters very little, though, because the windows we do have—one in our bedroom, one in my parents' and two in the main room—are so caked with grime and soot that you can scarcely see out, and when my mother does manage to get them reasonably clean, you're greeted with the thoroughly uninspiring view of a brick wall.

No matter what time of the day it is, our apartment nearly always seems too crowded. In the morning, our elbows touch at the kitchen table as we eat a quick breakfast before heading out to school and work. My mother's chair is so close to the stove that she could actually cook while sitting down at the table, if she chose to do so. In our bedroom, Electra and I share a bed, while Bolton's bed on the opposite wall is so close that if I were to stand on the bottom edge of my bed, I could easily step across to stand on his, even with my short little-girl legs.

The hardest part was that, even though we grew, our apartment stayed the same size. It seemed almost too small to accommodate five, so maybe that's why we were all so bemused to learn, years later, that it was once mean to house six…


At seven years old, I took great pride in being the first one who noticed the details. So it's a little sobering when Electra spots the changes in Mother before I do.

"Does Mother seem…different, to you?" she asks me one night, once the lights are out and we're lying, side-by-side in bed. We've just had our baths and we smell like soap. Electra's face is shadowy in the dark, and somewhat older-looking than her eleven years.

"Different how?" I ask. In a way, I'm biding for time; giving myself an opportunity to run over every encounter I've had with my mother today. Does anything stand out as being unusual?

"She was singing today when she made dinner," Electra whispers, casting a quick glance across the room at Bolton to make sure he's asleep. Bolton can't keep a secret to save his life.

"So? She always sings when she works."

"No, Wiress, that's you. I haven't heard Mother sing in a while. Not since there was that big thunderstorm and Bolton started screaming and she sang him the song about the lighting and the thunder…"

I think about this for a minute. She's right, Mother hasn't sung in a while…at least, not until recently. This prompts another startling realization.

"She's smiling a lot more, too," I add, matching Electra's low, confidential tone, eager to be sharing secrets now that she's shown that she's not too old to share secrets with her little sister. "It's a different smile than usual. It reminds me of the color yellow."

Electra snorts. "The color yellow? Sometimes, I wonder where we got you from, Wiress. 'The color yellow,' really…"


Our mother keeps smiling her new smile. She keeps singing. She writes little notes and packs them in our lunches and somehow, reading them makes up for the limited quality of the food. This goes on for a few weeks, a couple of months…then, as suddenly as it all began, it was over.

I sense something's different the minute I walk into the apartment. It's very quiet, except for a strange, low sound coming from one of the back rooms. This isn't right; no one should be home right now. Bolton's at a friend's house until six and Electra and I are supposed to stay in the apartment and start our homework until our parents get home. I turn and look up at Electra, who cocks her head to the side to listen, then looks alarmed.

"Stay back, Wiress," she says, lowering her schoolbag to the floor and stepping protectively in front of me.

"What is it?" My curiosity is doing battle in my head with my fear of a possible intruder.

"Shh! Take your shoes off. Don't want whoever it is to hear us," she mutters as she loosens the straps on her worn school shoes and slips them off by the door before helping me with mine. It's a mark of how anxious she is that she declines to mention that my knee socks are now drooping around my ankles; she's forever reminding me to pull them up.

Like two cats on a back fence, we tiptoe noiselessly through the apartment. The sound has a muffled quality to it, almost restrained, but it gets louder as we grow closer.

"It's coming from in there," I say in an undertone, pointing to the door of our parents' room, which has been left slightly ajar.

Terrified of what we might be faced with, we creep forward and peer through the crack in the door.

Our mother, who should be at work right now, is curled up on her bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, like Bolton during a thunderstorm. She's not wearing her work clothes. Her face is buried out of sight in her pillow, but from the shuddering of her shoulders and the soft sound of sobs, we can tell that she's crying.

Electra steps back from the door to face me. Her eyes meet mine and we know we're thinking the same thing: that we don't want mother to know we saw her crying. Putting a finger to her lips, Electra beckons for me to follow her. We steal through the front room, pick up our shoes, carry them out to the hallway and close the apartment door inaudibly behind us. Sitting on the landing between the second and third floors, we put our shoes back on and Electra fixes my socks like I knew she would. Then, figuring we've given our mother enough time to pull herself together, we tramp noisily up the stairs, rattling Electra's keys in the locks with as much noise as possible, then loudly drop our schoolbags by the door and draw up chairs at the kitchen table, discussing school much more noisily than we'd normally do.

Our mother emerges from the bathroom fifteen minutes later. She's paler than usual, but other than that, you can't tell that she'd been crying. We feign surprise at seeing her home so early; she smiles a sad little smile and claims she'd been sent home sick. We never mention how we found her weeping disconsolately like an orphaned child, and she never tells us how an electrical accident at work caused her to lose the baby she'd been carrying, our little brother or sister. We find this out much later, from our father, when the apartment that should've been home to six of us was reduced to house four.


Lots of sixes...perhaps I should play the number...

Well, I'd love to hear what you think of this latest update. Our next chapter provides more background information and a little less narrative, but it fills in some of the gaps, I hope. Tune in tomorrow to find out what I mean.

Fun bit of trivia: I grew up in an apartment where the windows looked out onto a solid brick wall, very much like Wiress' family has in this chapter. Ours was a bit bigger, but my parents had 5 kids...

Yours,

Delilah