~2~
I feel as though I have only been asleep for a minute when I wake with a start. My mother sits on my bed. Her graying hair that was once the same sandy-blond as mine is pinned up and she's in her work clothes even though we all have the day off today. A rare treat for a sour occasion.
"I let you sleep in a bit," she says softly. Her fingers play with the pattern on my bedspread. The sight of her all taught and nervous sends a rush of hot dread through my own body, and I lay there a minute, wondering if this will be my last time lying in my own bed. But I soon get up. I have to be strong for my mother, for Kearsey.
My mother drifts towards the kitchen as I dress in a clean button-up shirt, try to tame my curly hair that has a tendency to stick up in weird ways. I watch the boy in the mirror carefully. Does he look scared? Maybe a bit. The summer sun has brought out a lot of my freckles. I have my father's strong cheek-bones, but I didn't look much like him.
The thought turns sour. Paisley looked like him, I think.
A couple years ago we lost my little brother in a factory accident. Paisley was ten. There was no question that he was my father's favorite. I, who have always been more like my mother had never really connected with my father. In his opinion, Paisley was the ideal son: the perfect combination of whit, cunning and adoration for my father. I was always too quiet, too absorbed in reading or wandering off on my own, and always too quick to disagree with my father's views of things.
When I walk into the kitchen there is no change in the behavior of my father, who, since the accident, seems to care more about working than he cares about rest of his family. Maybe that's why I spend more and more of my time with Kearsey's family. Her brothers remind me of Paisley.
My parents sit at the plain, district-issued table and eat the plain, district-issued oatmeal. When I take mine, my mother surprises me by sprinkling some of the dark, grainy sugar we had been saving on top of it for me. I thank her, grateful. My father hides behind a book.
My mother tries to make conversation. "I wonder what wild costumes the stylists will come up with this year. It's always so fascinating."
"Yes, fascinating," my father's voice rumbles from behind his book. "Children getting murdered."
"You don't have to be like that," my mother says weakly. "It's just interesting because Tom and I work with this kind of thing. Don't you agree, Tom?"
During the day, when I'm not in school, I'm in the design sector of the District working with my mother. And it is fascinating. Something about the Capitol is intriguing, and if it didn't have to mean the certain death of the Hunger Games, I want a chance to see it for myself one day.
When I agree, however, my father puts his book down.
"I don't understand you," he says, and I know that he knows exactly what I was just thinking. "Neither of you. The Capitol is a place to be abhorred, not admired."
"That's not what we-" I begin but he's not listening.
"They take our children and force us to watch them be killed and they enjoy it. And here you two are prattling along like flaky Capitol citizens wondering what kind of dressing they're going to put on their next meal."
My father leaves the table without another word. My mother and I look at each other.
"He just doesn't know how to make the best of a bad situation," she says somewhat tearfully, pushing her oatmeal around with her spoon.
At that moment I know we're both thinking of Paisley. And I want to say something, anything, because it's Reaping Day and I'm scared and all I want is to be a little kid again and curl up in my mother's arms and feel safe.
But I can't.
~.~
The streets are crowded but there is no rioting. Everyone is headed to the town hall. It's noontime and the concrete and tarmac are unforgiving in the heat that radiates from every angle. I'm sweating in a couple minutes, and I push through the crowd as I search for Kearsey.
"Tom! Tom!" I hear a voice and see my friend, Jean, push his way toward me.
"Have you seen Kearsey?" I ask him.
Jean falls into step next to me. He's tall and skinny with dark hair and large calloused hands from working in the mills. He squints in the bright sun.
"No, I haven't," he says, "but I'm sure she's fine." He puts extra emphasis on the word fine. But it doesn't make me feel much better. I'm just hoping and praying that the heat and the stress hasn't brought on another of her episodes.
"Oh, man," Jean says, shielding his eyes from the blaring sun. "Standing out here is going to be torture."
The town center is, if possible, even hotter. A podium and chairs are set up on the large stone platform at the entrance to the town hall, overlooking the neat rows of ropes sectioning off areas for all the twelve to eighteen-year-olds to stand. Most everyone is already there. I'm searching over the heads of all the assembled girls when I notice Jean giving me a look.
"I'm sure she's here. You can see her after the Reaping." Jean attempts a smile and jokes, "But for goodness sake, it's like you two are sewn together at the hip. What happened to those days when girls were icky and we'd have to hide from them in the dumpsters or else they'd rope us into playing dollies with them?"
I'm tempted to smile but instead I set my jaw and try to focus on something else. Besides, the heat is making everything kind of foggy. I need a clear head.
"We better move before it starts." I say. I'll just find her after the reaping, I tell myself.
We duck under the rope for the sixteen-year-old boys and quickly find some of our classmates.
"Don't look now," Elias tells us in his deep, morose voice, "but Sunshine is trying to burn out all of our eyeballs again this year."
I take my first good look at the stage. It looks like it always does. Our mayor stands off to the side, as boring and gray as usual in her drab pantsuit. Behind her sits one of the three past victors: the only one who ever shows up (the other two are probably too drugged up to be bothered to show). His name is Zeb and he's a big man with a hard face and permanent scowl. His eyes never move from something off in the distance, above everyone's heads. He is as motionless as the stone pillars behind him.
But Zeb's not nearly as eye-catching as the woman who skips up and down the stage in giddy anticipation in front of him. This is Sunshine, District 8's escort for the games, in a tight, startlingly orange dress and spiky yellow hair. In the bright sun, she literally glows to a point where it hurts to look too long. She changes her get-up each year but rarely strays from those colors suiting her namesake. This year her hair sports a large flower to match her dress. She's rather chubby with a baby's face and an enormous tattoo of a sun emerges from the top of the low neck of her dress, taking over her collarbones and most of her shoulders. She is the epitome of Capitol fashion and even in the district which serves as the grounds for all clothes, she could never look more out of place amongst us.
The mayor gravely takes the podium and begins to speak. I've heard all these words before, and my mind soon drifts back to Kearsey. She is hopefully somewhere in the the crowd, waiting in dread and anticipation. I try not to think about the possibility that the next time I'll see her she might be climbing up those stone steps to her death. I try not to think about how her family would suffer without her. How I would...
I try not to think, but I do. The thoughts are toxic and I feel sick. But maybe it's the heat.
I try to focus on the stage again. My stomach drops as I see Sunshine bounce forward to the microphone, and her high, Capitol-accented notes fill the boiling air.
"Good morning ladies and gentlemen! I'm glad to see that you've all sewn up!" She giggles at her pun. We all know this routine and we all stay silent. There's a mirage that makes the stage look like water. A young child is crying shrilly somewhere at the edge of the square.
"Now, I know that this year may not be nearly as exciting at last year, our dear Emiline was so close to coming home, wasn't she?" Sunshine says, referring to the last year's games where a girl from the raw fiber's sector came in second to a District 1 career. In general, District 8 often has a disadvantage in the arena because tributes rarely have any experience with woods and nature, wide open spaces and isolation. But in the case of last-years games, however, the arena was a rickety old city, with narrow, suffocating alleys. Almost like home, but a nightmarish version where buildings would collapse without warning and fire was a common threat.
"Well, I'm sure that the fifty-eighth Hunger Games will be a spool of fun all the same," Sunshine continues brightly, "and I just can't wait to see which lucky young persons get to compete this year!" She looks around, unfalteringly beaming. "So I say we get started!"
And her hand like a claw is grabbing at the paper slips in the great glass bowl marked girls, and not a soul breathes except that one child who hasn't stopped crying and all I'm thinking is not Kearsey. Kearsey. Kearsey.
Sunshine reads the name and it's not Kearsey's, and I'm so relieved that I miss the girl tribute's name entirely. Everyone around me sighs collectively. Their sisters, friends, and girlfriends are spared another year.
The girl emerges from the eighteen-year-olds in a heavy, sympathetic quiet. It takes me a minute but I recognize her face from the design sector. Esther Tulley.
I don't remember if I have ever spoken to her. I had gotten the impression that she wasn't an outgoing type. She is tall and skinny with long, lanky arms and legs. She walks up to the stage, shaking, with an awkward gate and shakes Sunshine's hand. She has a small, round face, emphasized by her plain brown bangs. She moves her head and her thin glasses catch the glare from the sun and they flash. She looks positively terrified.
The crowd is silent.
"...Annnnny volunteers for this young lady?" Sunshine recites out of habit. There are none. There never are.
There's a nervous burning starting up in my gut. And again I crane my neck around to try and spot Kearsey in crowd of girls adjacent to us. Out of the corner of my eye I see Sunshine dig around in the second bowl of names. Here it comes.
The slip of paper flutters in the furnace-like breeze that sweeps across the square and I wish for her to loose the paper to the wind, have it blow away into the smog. But she holds it fast.
And the name she reads is Tom Annic.