CHAPTER TWO
I fall to my knees on dry needle like leaves that I've never seen outside of arenas. My ribs are bleeding where I was sliced with a thrown dagger just a few moments ago, but I've lost the ability to keep running and my pursuer is upon me. I know I'm about to die so I just stare at the sky and the tops of the tall trees and wait for my life to be over. Titus attacks me but does not kill me and the wait is agonizing. I don't fight back because he's seven years older than me and there's no way I can overpower him so I just go limp. When he does pull out his big knife, I feel everything as he cuts open my chest, pulls out my heart and eats it. I'm alive and my eyes are wide open until the hovercraft drops in and picks me up in its claws.
I wake up shaking uncontrollably in cold sweats. It's the third night in a row I've dreamt about the most recent Hunger Games' worst death. It doesn't even matter that they ended up killing the cannibal tribute, because they let him eat significant portions of two tributes before they started flying hovercrafts in as quickly as possible. I can't believe some of the older boys at school talked about how cool it was to watch, it disgusts me and I can't imagine admiring an inhuman monster much less becoming one. Titus ended up killing the District 8 girl, a thirteen year old, so any inclination towards him was shot after that. I'm glad the Gamemakers took him out with the avalanche, or so my parents suspect, I'd be terrified if he came through for the victory tour.
The victor ended up being a way more attractive, sane boy, a 18 year old from District 1 named Gloss. All the girls in my class fawned over him when he came through, but I couldn't feel anything positive towards him at all. I just wanted the tour to be over already so it would be Harvest Festival again. The start of these games marked the beginning of the second year without Parcel Days. District 8 tended to get a decent amount of food, but everyone had gotten used to larger portions and had a bit harder time going without for too long. My parents were decently stationed in separate textile mills and we could afford luxuries like fruit and beef, but I still aimed to gain as much weight as possible during the feast.
Now it's the day after the feast and I'm kicking myself wishing for time to pass and holding on to every minute of my childhood, because now I have less than a year until I'm in the reaping bowl. I can't stop having Hunger Games nightmares. Of course I've had them ever since I started watching them in school, but now the terror is more immediate because every night the possibility is closer. I find myself imagining strategies and thinking about what I would do in a tribute's position when I have to watch the Games. I don't like thinking about killing people but I'm doing it all the time lately and my own brain scares me. I talk to my classmate Elaine about it sometimes. She has three older siblings, all eligible with maximum tesserae. I feel stupid for even thinking out attack scenarios when the odds are clearly in my favor compared to most people around me.
My most frequent nightmare is that I'm picked as a tribute for the first Quarter Quell. That Games' one of the most tormenting to watch because it's the only one they bother to show the reaping for. The reactions were pretty predictable by District though, Career districts picked eighteen year olds they knew had a great chance of winning; poorer districts either elected the strongest and least relied upon candidate or a kid with no family left. The Quell ended up being mostly eighteen year olds anyway, but in my nightmares I'm the only twelve year old in the arena and everyone's trying to kill me first. Sometimes I succeed at being evasive but a lot of times I'm stupid and just run straight in. At least I have plenty of visuals of myself dying to help me plan my attack in the rare chance I do get reaped.
By the time spring rolls around, the Hunger Games is an absolute obsession. I can't worry about anything else, my sleep is so erratic and I'm doing terribly in school. I even start dozing off in class and rack up a ton of demerits, but at this point I've heard the textile drivel and seen the Games clips so frequently it's hard to stay present.
I go through phases with my anxiety. Sometimes I'm so optimistic about being a first year entrant with only one slip, and then I think about how there's almost always a twelve year old every year and they frequently don't have tessarae. And maybe I'm just paranoid, but it never seems like districts 1 through 6 ever have twelve year old tributes.
