Part 2

On the fourth morning after Katniss and Peeta's amazing win, Madge wakes up to a cheerful tune filtering through the house from the piano downstairs. She feels herself smiling at home for the first time in days, and burrows into her sheets to enjoy feeling safe and comforted… If her mother is feeling well enough to play again, it means some of the strain of the past weeks is starting to fade. Her mother's headaches have always been most severe during the Hunger Games, and ever since childhood Madge has blamed the Games for her mother's pained disappearances. Add in her father's anxiousness during the Games — tense before the reaping and distant until the District 12 tributes died — and Madge thinks it's no wonder she usually feels like an orphan during the annual horror show (not that she needed any additional reasons to loathe them beyond their own awfulness).

Madge would be willing to bet anything that the reaction to the surprise, two-person District 12 victory was more subdued in the Undersee house than anywhere else in the district. She and her father had been watching the broadcast — her mother was upstairs suffering in a darkened bedroom — and Madge had been ecstatic about getting both Katniss and Peeta back, overjoyed that neither of their families would have to go through the kind of pain and loss that Madge's mother has had to endure. And what a proud moment for District 12, so long disregarded by the other districts. As far as Madge knew, no other district had ever gotten both of their tributes back — maybe Twelve would finally start getting some respect!

Madge's father had not been excited, though. He had remained stone-faced, staring at the television screen, and only snapped out of his trance when Madge started to open the front door so she could join the beginning of festivities in the town square. Upon hearing the door squeak, he had yelled at her to close it, used what Madge thought of as his 'scary mayor' tone to order her not to leave the house, and blockaded himself in his study upstairs. Madge had parked herself in her usual window-watching spot on the living room couch, sitting on her knees and resting her head on her arms on the back of the couch, watching everyone else celebrate. (How much of her life did she spend watching life through that window? She didn't want to think about it.)

Madge had eventually ventured upstairs to find out why her father wouldn't let her leave, but he was on the phone so instead she had tiptoed into her mother's room to relay the good news about Katniss and Peeta. Her mother's reaction had been even more disconcerting than her father's: she looked terrified and confirmed that Madge was not to leave the house. No amount of pleading had had any effect, and Madge was forced to wait for her father to get off the phone, watching the celebrations from the window in her bedroom, feeling sorry for herself and thinking that this was why people thought she was a snob… Eventually her father had gotten off the phone and, after Madge pestered him, let her join the celebration. She had felt shy as soon as she was finally on the street — she didn't actually know many people well enough to start dancing with them or celebrating. But Gale, transformed from the hostile, worried version of himself from the past weeks into an exuberant, lighthearted version, had pulled her into a group of dancing people and showed her the right steps, and soon she was having so much fun she was able to lose herself and feel like just one of the sea of happy celebrants, not the girl whose parents reacted strangely to joyous news.

At some point, her father had retrieved her because her mother was having a panic attack and refused to believe him that Madge was safe. Even after Madge had quietly assured her that she'd just been outside dancing with the other townspeople, her mother had started crying even harder and yelling about how they would never be able to keep both of them and look what they did to Haymitch! Madge had been scared, not to mention confused; she was pretty sure that Haymitch was what had happened to Haymitch. Nobody was holding a gun to his head forcing him to drink all that white liquor. She wasn't sure who 'they' was, either — the Capitol? Madge's father's reassurances accomplished nothing, and Madge suspected he'd given her mother a shot of morphling when Madge was out of the room getting some water because by the time she returned her mother was drowsy and subdued.

After deflecting all of her questions about why her mother was upset – not even confirming that missing Aunt Maysilee was part of it, when that seemed obvious – her father had finally suggested she go back to the party outside. Feeling a little bolder than before, Madge had wandered through the knots of people and didn't realize she was looking for Gale until she spotted him, sitting on the side of a mini-hill listening to a boy his age play a fiddle. He was smiling and tapping his foot to the music and gestured for her to come over when she caught his eye. It was almost like having a friend. She had joined the group of people listening to the fiddle player and became entranced with the fast notes and swirling melodies, trying to forget the heavy darkness of her own house.

The tense atmosphere at home had persisted after that night, although the intrusion of workers and representatives from the Capitol had somewhat masked it. But the light clinking of notes on the piano this morning signifies the end, or at least promises that today marks an improvement… Madge hopes it lasts, and that the extension of Hunger Games festivities — even for something as happy as having both victors returned safely — won't trigger her mother to have a relapse…

By the time Madge pulls herself out of bed and gets ready for the day, her mother has relocated from the piano to a desk where she's sorting through a box of index cards. Madge recognizes the box as her mother's method of keeping track of which Capitol visitors she usually assigns to each of the guest rooms. Madge hugs her mother in greeting and asks if she's feeling better.

"Yes, sweetie. Thanks for asking." Her mother doesn't look up, which is normal. Madge knows her mother prefers to think of her headache spells as isolated incidents instead of a chronic condition, and wants everyone to just forget about them as though they never happened.

"Are more people staying here?"

Her mother nods. "We'll need to start using the third floor rooms today. The Victor Presentation broadcast has been announced for tomorrow, and at least ten more Victor Committee members are arriving on the afternoon train."

"Ten? Really?" It seems like a lot of people to Madge, even for the Capitol.

"Double the victors, double the handlers," her mother murmurs, digging through the box again. "And that's just the people arriving today. There will be more after the events conclude in the Capitol. Some will stay in the empty houses in the Victor's Village, although I'm sure we'll hear plenty about the lack of amenities out there."

Madge thinks they always hear plenty about the lack of everything in District 12 when Capitol people visit, which thankfully isn't often, but she doesn't say anything and asks her mother how she can help. She's assigned the task of retrieving the extra bedclothes from storage in the closets in the guest rooms on the third floor. She has to go into some rooms that she suspects nobody has been in for years.

In the closet of a room on the third floor, she comes across a worn blue box with her father's name on it. Opening it, she finds yellowed papers and fraying booklets. She flips through the papers and recognition slowly dawns: these are the articles he used to read to her when she couldn't sleep.

Madge pulls the box with her onto the bed to look at them more closely, feeling a comforting sort of nostalgia envelop her. When she was little, her father used to read aloud from these papers to her when her mother was feeling ill. Now that Madge is older, she suspects he didn't know what to do with her as a child, functioning effectively as a single parent so often due to his wife's ailment. He could read to her from his own reading material and she'd be so happy to have one of her parents paying attention to her, she didn't care that she had no idea what the words meant. She just liked sitting with her father on the big couch in his study, and listening to the gravelly sound of his voice. It all seemed government-related somehow — very boring — and usually she'd end up falling asleep… When she got older, she'd started demanding that he read the bedtime stories her mother typically selected, featuring fuzzy farm animals or talking trains. But sometimes when her mother was in particularly bad shape and Madge couldn't fall asleep on her own, he would pull out the old articles, which had always had a soothing, soporific effect on her.

She wonders why they're being stored in this dusty guest room on the third floor, not in his study, until she starts reading a few of them and realizes that they're probably not something the people from the Capitol would be happy to see. The one she's holding is about the virtues of citizen participation in government decision-making. Madge has a feeling these articles don't recommend using a lottery to force children to kill each other once a year on television.

Madge becomes aware of Lulu calling for her from the stairs, so she stows the box back in the closet and grabs the sheets she was supposed to be retrieving. But as soon as she gets a free moment later, she returns for the box, intending to give it a new home in her own closet. Better that way so no one from the Capitol sees it, she justifies, because, of course, Madge is curious herself about the articles.

She hesitates outside her father's study — she wants to ask him why the papers are hidden away and if he can explain to her some of what it all means. A lot of the words she saw are unfamiliar. But she doesn't want to risk him confiscating the articles before she has a chance to read them, so she continues to her room and hides them safely behind some old dolls in her closet.

Maybe the articles will describe something interesting she can tell Gale about. She isn't sure yet what kind of plan he might be coming up with to avert the next reaping in District 12, but he seems to be thinking big and surely will come up with something soon. He's smart and strong and, most importantly, would never stand by passively while his loved ones spend their days crying into pillows, debilitated by past traumas. And Madge is determined to be like that now, too.