Chapter 2

*This chapter has a trigger warning. Please scroll to the end for details.

Katniss wrapped her arms around herself, tucked both hands into her armpits and jog-walked the two blocks to her appointment. The squat one-story building was hunched down, a rejected relic squished between two newer, taller skyscrapers, the overall effect depressing.

She pulled open the door and stepped inside.

A row of three faded blue chairs sat vacant in the waiting room while Good Morning America blared from the television anchored to the wall.

Effie Trinket dressed, as usual, in eye-squintingly bright colors, sat behind the reception desk, flipping through the latest gossip rag. Katniss signed her name on the clipboard. She checked the time on the large clock behind Effie and wrote in 8:52 a.m.

"On time today, my poor dear," Effie said. "Much better than before." Effie always called Katniss 'my poor dear' as if her saccharine—probably fake—pity could make Katniss feel better. It didn't, but Katniss never bothered to tell her. When dealing with Effie, Katinss' goal was to make every conversation as quick and painless as possible.

The woman reached out with her fire-engine red nails to pat Katniss' hand. Katniss forced herself to keep still under the woman's touch. She didn't like anyone touching her, but he claimed that she had to adapt.

Effie waved her into a seat. Ten minutes later, he opened the door, looking as though someone had scraped him off the floor the night before. He wore a grayish shirt that, once upon a time, was probably white, paired badly with brown cargo shorts. Stains and scorn clung to him in equal measure.

Katniss despised him.

Dr. Haymitch Abernathy served as her psychologist. She said served because, despite the degrees hanging in his office, Katniss couldn't believe anyone would certify this man to counsel human beings.

Her pet-theory was that Haymitch was really an ex-patient and had somehow killed the real Dr. Abernathy, but, she tolerated him because he was the only psychologist within walking distance. Weekly meeting with a psychologist were required for her to receive disability payments and so she showed up, simple as that.

In the hospital, she had seen a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Aurelius, but Katniss was never going back there. Anyway, he hadn't been any more helpful than Dr. Abernathy, just nicer in his uselessness, all "I'm-here-when-you-want-to-talk" and "the-healing-process-takes-time". She still had to talk to him, but only every few months or so because he prescribed her medicine. They did it through her computer.

Dr. Abernathy dropped onto his ratty plaid couch and Katniss perched on the leather chair that had been repaired several times with black duct tape.

He watched her while Katniss watched the scattered books on his desk. The titles changed every appointment. The first time Katniss saw him, the stacked books read like a laundry list about addiction. After she came back the second week, the bookcase included Treating Psychological Trauma & PTSD, Sibling Loss, and Resolving Difficult Clinical Syndromes—little cheat sheets on her. All these months later, he'd rotated back to addiction.

Like everything else Dr. Abernathy touched, these books were battered, dog-eared with damaged, crumpled spines. A few looked as though they'd been sent flying at walls, their pages sticking out at odd angles. A librarian would have fainted at the sight of them.

"Are you going to say anything or am I getting paid for another hour of silence? Not that I mind, sweetheart. It's just that I like to know when I should bring in a magazine…or a pillow."

His eyes bored into Katniss' for several more silent seconds and then he leaned back. "Let's talk about Peeta Mellark."

Katniss picked at a curling edge of duct tape, sticking and unsticking it to the pad of her thumb. "No." she said to his stack of addiction books. Inside she was wincing. She knew he would know. Was she so transparent that he could read everything in her face?

"Okay, then we can talk about Primrose."

Katniss gasped against the pain of hearing her sister's name. It was a kind of phantom pain, a throbbing ache caused by the loss of something that should be there, but wasn't. Two blonde braids, a pair of knowing blue eyes in a too young face rose in Katniss' mind. Then the sound of screaming.

"Prim or the boy. Your choice."

"I saw Peeta Mellark, okay." She spat out the words like spitting out grounded glass.

"And."

"And nothing," Katniss said. She tried to make out the title on the green book. The book's spine had peeled into a curly-cue. She tilted her head. It read The Uncharted Road: Recovery and Relapse.

"Did you speak to him?"

"No."

"He speak to you?"

"He said my name."

Dr. Abernathy crossed his arms over his chest. "And then you ran."

Katniss didn't say anything, just focused on radiating hate in his general direction. She hated that he even knew about Peeta, but Peeta had been around when she was hospitalized, when everyone still labeled her problem grief, and so his existence had made it into Dr. Aurelius' notes and then into the file sent to Dr. Abernathy.

Haymitch leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Okay, sweetheart. Tell me this. What do you see yourself doing next? How do you see the rest of your life going?"

Do? The future yawned ahead of her—sixty, maybe even seventy more empty years. The thought was suffocating, a cinderblock that pressed down on her chest, stole her breath, leaving her gasping and trembling.

"You're young and that's a lot of time to fill," he said, still reading her thoughts. "Friends make it easier…so I'm told. Don't know much about it, myself."

Katniss' lips curved, just a little, but she didn't look at him. Even before everything happened, she'd never been great at making friends and with his bad hygiene and horrible attitude, she guessed he wasn't either. Hopefully, that would be the only thing they had in common.

"I don't make friends," Katniss said to his stack of books.

"You told me Peeta comes from a rich family, has a decent job. Why do you think he's still living across from you? In this neighborhood?"

She knew what he was getting at, but Peeta wasn't her friend. She'd never thought of him that way. Their relationship had always been too complicated for a word that simple. "I don't want to talk about him anymore."

The silence built back up, weighed the room down until Dr. Abernathy let out a noisy breath. "You got something you do want to talk about, sweetheart?"

"No."

"Well, let's do ourselves a favor and end early, huh? Maybe next time you can work on having an attitude that won't frighten small children."

Finally, for the first time that day, Katniss looked at Haymitch, cutting him with her eyes. He didn't have to say that and he knew it, she could see it in the way his eyes slide from hers, regretfully, knowing he'd gone too far. "I thought you were supposed to be a psychologist, not a bully."

He rubbed his hand up and down his week-old stubble. "Maybe attitude's something we can both work on next week."

Katniss nodded. She found her messenger bag slouched against the side of the couch, slung it over her shoulder and headed for the door.

"Katniss," Dr. Abernathy called, "You've started taking the new antidepressant Aurelius prescribed, right?"

She nodded, still watching the light blonde wood of the door. This pill was pink and oval instead of orange and oblong like the last ones or the green ones before that.

As far as Katniss could tell, none of them did much, except make her a zombie, especially the green ones. One morning, she'd woken up face-down in a bowl of soggy cereal she didn't remember pouring. Dr. Aurelius kept prescribing them anyway, convinced that one of the brightly colored pills would drag her back into the world.

"And you're not having any side effects? No hallucinations, like before."

"No."

"But it's not helping."

It wasn't a question.

Katniss grasped the knob and opened the door. She waved to Effie who continued to flip through her magazine and then pushed the clear glass door open. It was easier to leave here that to leave her apartment, probably because Haymitch's office wasn't anywhere she wanted to spend time.

She headed out onto the street, working hard to block out the sounds of the city, the crush of noises that threatened to smother and choke her. She listened to her own breathing instead, trying to keep it even as she slipped around the dog-walkers and the joggers, the mothers with strollers, the homeless man on the corner.

She made it back to her building in record time, back up the elevator, back to the safety of her apartment.

Something dropped to the ground when Katniss opened the door. Rolled into a tight spiral and secured with a green rubber band was a sheet of drawing paper. It was thick under her fingertips, cream-colored and slightly textured.

She didn't have to open it to know who it was from.

Katniss took it with her into the apartment, rolling it gently between her fingertips. She took it to her bedroom.

Not opening it seemed harder than opening it, even though she wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was. Sitting on the bed, she pulled the rubber band off quickly and let the page unfurl.

It was a drawing, beautifully rendered in pencil and ink, of a many-branched oak tree stretching out from one window to another. There was a little girl in the drawing, leaping from the extended branch of the tree to the window, a long braid whipping out behind her. Underneath were fours words: My door's always open.

Katniss traced the words, going over and over the crooked loops of his handwriting. Peeta. He would use the day, the official day they met like a lure, making the longing for his presence sharp and new in her chest.

But the official day also brought with it the memory of the real day they'd met, the unofficial day, the day both of them almost died.

She'd seen Peeta at school for six months before that, of course, another of the hundred anonymous kids who didn't talk to her. That school wasn't her school, where she'd gone from kindergarten to fifth grade, but the school she'd been forced to attend after the first worst day of her life, the day her father died, blown to bits fighting in a war she didn't understand.

He had died a hero, so everybody said, and that she should be proud, but all Katniss felt were the endless waves of anguish and anger that engulfed her because he hadn't keep his promise, that he'd lost his life in some dusty, distant place and didn't come home.

So they'd left the house by the woods her father had loved, she, her little sister Primrose, and her mother, and moved into the house where her mother had grown up to a place called Victory Village. Her grandparents had died years earlier, died never having spoken to Katniss or her sister, or even their own daughter in the last fifteen years because they'd hated her Katniss' father. He was too dark, too different from their expectations that they'd preferred to pretend their own daughter was dead and that their grandchildren didn't exist.

The house was in a better neighborhood, her mother had said, and had better schools. And it would save money in the long run. They wouldn't have to pay a mortgage.

Along with a casket, a medal and a folded flag, the government had given out death benefits to Katniss' family, but somehow, the at-first huge number began to shrink and then there were bills, bills and nightly phone calls her mother answered in hushed tones in the back room. This happened over and over until there didn't seem to be any money left at all.

The better neighbors in this upscale little village would have hated them for having the most rundown house on the block and no money to repair it. There had been the tiniest chance that they could have forgiven Katniss' mother and Primrose—they at least looked the part with their blonde hair and blue eyes, but her mother had also brought the dark-haired girl who took after her father into their fair community—another unsightly eyesore for them to endure.

The better school her mother promised excelled at teaching what it felt like to be a leper. It was an everyday lesson, walking into classrooms where the students alternately erupted in giggles or fell silent, being ignored by teachers, sitting alone every lunch period, completely invisible.

The day she met Peeta was cold, with just the barest begins of spring. Some mornings, after nightmares of her father dying, of the charred and ruined body that must have been in his closed casket, Katniss would slip out of the house and walk to the park at the corner of Breedlove and Seam.

There was a closer park in Victory Village, but it was smaller, more regular with its well-maintained fountains and wooden picnic tables.

Seam Park was wild, full of old trees and winding trails and it reminded her of her father, the times they spent in the woods together. It was a long walk in the faint dawn light, but worth it to be somewhere she didn't feel watched.

Katniss walked along the graveled paths before moving out into the more wooded area ringed with tall and elegant pine trees where there was a structure some city planner had decided was modern art, a golden funnel, huge, its wide mouth curved upwards towards the rising sun. Katniss liked to sit on the bench inside and wait as the sunrise lit the whole structure in flames that she could see even through closed eyelids, the oranges, reds, deep purples dancing and shimmering.

In two hours, she would have to be back in the airless school, but at that moment, leaning back in the light of a new day, bathed in gold, she home with her father and everything was right with the world.

Rough arms grabbed her from behind, pulled her up off the bench and flush with a body that smelled of old sweat and urine. Katniss arched like a cat, jerking sideways, but the hands held firm, the left lifting to clamp over her mouth, the right a hard band around her waist. The man started to move, flying through the park, holding her off the ground.

He slowed as he got farther away from the trail. The hand around her waist started to move and fingers crept down into her waistband. Katniss tried to squirm away from it, to scream, but he held her firm. She was breathing hard, her lips and nose held flat and closed against the dirty flesh of his hand that smelled vaguely like overripe bananas. He was breathing hard, too, excited, foul pants against the side her head.

Eager fingers slipped into her panties, probing, until there was a burning, ripping pain.

Tears stung at the corners of her eyes. No. Katniss wasn't going to let this man see her cry; she was going to fight. She put all her energy into one last twist away from his groping hand and she felt him almost lose his balance.

Something hard hit the man, knocking both of them to the ground. The hands released her and Katniss scrambled up, turning to see the man for the first time. He had a face like a bulldog with none of the charm. Deep, ragged wrinkles sank his jowls and hid his neck. His eyes, small and dark in his ugly face, shone with mirth.

Behind him was a boy about Katniss' age with ash-blond hair and blue eyes. She thought he was one of her neighbors, one of the trio of blond boys who lived next door. He'd pushed the man over.

His eyes locked with hers.

"Run!" the boy screamed, but Katniss was frozen in place as the man rounded on the boy, shoving him to his knees. He reared back and kicked the boy, hard, square in the chest. The boy curled up, trying to protect himself and the man kicked again, then a third time and fourth time, kicking with a kind of furious joy. The man seemed bent on stumping the boy into the ground.

He's going to kill him. He's going to kill him and then come for me. The thought drifted through Katniss' mind, as gentle as a leaf on the wind, no urgency behind it. Everything, the man's attack, the boy being beaten in front of her, had taken on a nightmarish unreal quality—even the wetness seeping from the bruised flesh between her legs didn't seem real.

The boy groaned, jarring her back to the present and to the fact that she couldn't just stand there and let this happened. Katniss looked around, struggling to think of anything she could use as a weapon.

Scattered among the outcrops of rocks and scraggy grass were empty liquor bottles. Someone or a lot of someones must have used this isolated part of the park for a party.

Katniss crouched down and snatched the closet bottle, mashing it against a rock, the sound louder than the dull thud of the man's booted foot against the boy's body.

The man stopped, startled, and glanced at her, almost like he'd forgotten she existed.

"Get away from him," Katniss screamed. She held the broken bottle out like a knife, jagged edged pointed towards the man's face. Dark eyes traveled from the broken bottle to her face and Katniss held her breath.

Even with the bottle, she might not be able to win a fight with him. He was a grown man and she was a kid and small for her age, too, but she steeled herself. The moment dragged on, her holding the broken bottle and the man standing, foot poised over the boy crumpled on the ground.

And then, the man smirked, like the whole thing had been a huge joke, gave a little tiny, ironic wave and sauntered down the path, leaving behind the girl he kidnapped and the boy he almost killed.

Katniss sank down beside the boy, kneeling in a patch of puckered dandelion flowers, their yellow faces still closed against the cold. She could hear his breathing, a high, ragged wheeze.

"Katniss." He said her name—she didn't even know how he knew it.

Katniss found his hand and squeezed, there was nothing else she could do. "You're okay."

"Don't…feel okay." A cough crackled up from his chest, spattering his lips with blood, lips that were already turning blue. "Look, you…get out of here…might come back…."

"No." She couldn't leave him to get help, not with that man still around. And the boy needed help. His pale skin was blooming with bruises and he probably had internal wounds she couldn't see.

"Help!" Katniss started yelling the word over and over, wailed it, prayed it. It was all she could do. She screamed and screamed until her voice wasn't much louder than the rustle of the wind through the trees. And then they waited, the boy drifting in and out of consciousness, her trembling with cold and shock.

It took twenty-five minutes for someone to find them. At first, it was a jogger, a woman who stopped and stared at them, open-mouthed for a moment, before pulling out a cellphone and calling emergency services. Then the police came swarming, followed by paramedics. They came with their official-looking uniforms and insistent questions, but Katniss ignored them all. Strange how their presence didn't fill her with relief, just more fear. They were more adults, more unpredictable monsters and who knew what they'd do next?

As soon as they'd strapped the boy onto a stretcher, she let exhaustion and darkness take her.

She woke in the hospital where they made everything that happened worse, because they made it real. They said words like assault and juvenile victim and, when she still couldn't tell them her name or where she lived, they said emergency protective custody.

Then, her body was swabbed, clipped, photographed while Katniss had lain, limp as a doll, doing her best to pretend she wasn't there. Her own words had been swept away, lost, and she endured it all in silence.

Another hour passed before they connected her and the boy to the two missing kids from Victory Village. And then her mother was there, pale and shaking, telling her that it would be okay. But she was a liar—nothing had been okay since the day her father had died.

People talked to her, but she ignored them, except to nod when they asked if she wanted to go home.

They took her home and her mother made her favorite lamb stew, but she couldn't eat it. She couldn't sleep, either, not with the new nightmares added to the old ones of her father's death. Even her little sister, cuddled soft and warm beside her, couldn't stop the pictures in her head. Her thrashing tossed Prim from the narrow bed onto the hard floor that first night. Katniss wouldn't let her come back after that.

It only got worse. They didn't find the man, even after the police called to say that the boy had given them a description and that they would keep searching, even after what had happened was on the evening news, her and the boy identified as "two eleven-year-old victims."

After that, she couldn't sleep even to thrash around. All she could do was lie there and watch her window, wait for the man with the bulldog face to find her.

A week later, in the middle of another unsleeping night, a light came on in the room directly across from hers. Katniss had never paid much attention to the neighbors. They all seemed to wear the same expressions whenever she saw them, like they were insulted by her very existence, but she knew now that the boy lived there and that his name was Peeta Mellark.

His mother had come over to yell at her mother, saying that it was Katniss' fault, that she must have lured her son out to the park, that maybe she set the whole thing up with the bulldog-faced man to rob Peeta. After all, everyone knows that Katniss' kind have criminal tendencies.

Katniss' mother, who'd been mostly out of it since her husband's death, rallied enough at that to tell the woman off and slam the door in the woman's face. Katniss had been proud of that.

The light had been off all week, but now it was on. That part of the house must have been an addition because it jutted out from the body of the building and was so close, only a large oak tree stood between the two houses on that side. Katniss had heard that one of the neighbors wanted to buy this house and build on the property. Maybe it was the Mellarks and that's why their house was almost touching hers.

Katniss got out of the tumbled sheets of the bed and went to see. The boy, Peeta, was standing framed in the light of his bedroom. He still looked injured, standing there with the window open to the cold spring night.

Looking back, Katniss was never sure why she did what she did, where the impulse came from or why she followed it. Opening the window, she threw herself out onto one of the long branches of the oak tree. It was easy. She had grown up climbing trees and this was a sturdy one. She edged her way from one branch to another, foot in front of foot like a tightrope walker until she was right under Peeta's window.

The boy stared at her. Katniss pulled herself up onto the ledge of his window.

"How are you?" The words came out sandpaper raw because they were the first words she'd spoken since the attack.

"You just jumped out the window. I mean…how did…why?" One of the boy's eyes was still swollen, but the other was wide with shock. A cast covered his left arm.

"I wanted to make sure you were okay."

"You could have used the door."

"It's after two in the morning…are you going to let me in?"

Still looking bewildered, Peeta moved back enough to let her into the room. His bedroom took up the whole length of the addition, but was almost empty of furniture except for a bed backed up against one wall and a side table.

The walls held all the personality in the room. The ceiling was an extension of the night sky, perfect with constellations and swirling, multicolored nebula clouds. On one wall, from ceiling to floor and across its entire length was a forest mural. A beach with ocean waves lapping at sand took up the wall behind the bed.

Katniss touched the forest scene, feeling the textured paint strokes under her fingertips. She traced a winding branch of a tree as it disappeared into a tangle of branches, just like on a real tree, just like in the woods by her house where she and her father would walk.

"You paint this?"

"Yeah." Peeta watched her as she moved around his room, touching his things. He was in sleep clothes, a t-shirt and pajama bottoms. Half his face was still the yellow and purple of healing bruises and, in the quiet room, she could hear a slight wheeze to his breathing.

"Spend a lot of time in the woods?"

"Not much chance around here. It's mostly just…." Peeta's jaw clenched, biting off whatever words he was going to say. "Well, you know." Seam Park was the closest thing to a forest for a hundred miles.

Memories came back and she was surrounded by the smell of pine trees and sweat and dirty skin and blood. Fear and adrenaline roared to life inside her.

Katniss suddenly realized that she didn't know why she had come here, she didn't know why she was in some strange boy's bedroom after midnight. To thank him? Maybe, but now, she couldn't find any words and shame began to slither in her chest, shame that he had seen what that man was doing to her, shame that she'd needed help in the first place, shame that helping her had gotten him hurt.

"I'm sorry…I should go," Katniss headed back towards the room. "I'm glad you're okay and everything, but I should go." She was about to climb up to the window sill when she felt Peeta's hand on her shoulder, warm and gentle.

"Hey, stop." He waited until she turned back to him and then he dropped his hand. "You shouldn't go climbing out windows if you're upset."

"I'm not upset."

He watched her for a long moment. "Fine, you're not upset. That makes one of us."

Katniss headed back towards the window, climbed up to the ledge and swung her legs out.

"It'd be okay, if you were, you know," Peeta said behind her. "Upset that is. Angry, too. I know I am. Every time I close my eyes I see everything that happened and I hate him, that he could come along and take…." He left the words to hang there and they both knew what those words meant. "Anyway if you ever want to come back, my door, err, window is always open."

Outside the window, it was still dark, but the streetlights were on up and down the street, so Katniss could see both her yard and his. She looked down at her legs still hanging over the edge of the window, swinging out into the open air, her skin glowing silver in the light of the moon. "Do you think he'll come back? Try to find us?"

A drawn out breath at her back, "No, with the cops hunting him, I think he'll try to disappear."

"Then he'll go somewhere else, do this to somebody else. And that's it? We live with it?"

Silence. A look over her shoulder showed Katniss that he's stretched himself out on his bed. "I could tell you some crap about not letting that jerk win, but he won't lose a minute of sleep about what he did unless he gets caught. I don't know about you, but I can't give up on life because some maniac decided to start his morning hurting a couple of kids."

Another pause, and then more quietly. "I do wish there was some way we could fight back, something that would count."

The wind picked up outside the window, shivering the remains of last fall's leaves left on the trees and sending gooseflesh across Katniss' skin. Across the yard, her vacant room with its crumpled bed lay waiting for her to toss in it and watch the shadows.

"Can I stay here, tonight?" It was stupid to ask. She couldn't stay in some boy's room. What would happen if her mother or her sister came looking for her? And he was a stranger, no matter how strongly this experience bound her to him, and it did bind, giving them a kind of kinship, allowing her talk to him when she couldn't even say one word to her own family. "It's just…I have nightmares," Katniss whispered.

"If you want," Peeta said after a moment. "No one comes up here, anyway, and all the rest of the rooms are on the other side of the house…and…I don't feel like being alone either."

She scooted back in through the window, bending her legs like pretzels to pivot through the small opening. She stood, hesitant for a moment before going over to the bed. It was wide, a queen-size or king. Katniss sat at the edge and looked at Peeta. "Just for a little while."

"I said my win-door is always open," Peeta said, his words muffled by the arm he had swung over half his face. His eyes were already closed.

"Okay," she said. She'd sat there a moment longer, watching the peaceful deep breaths of the boy before slipping into the warmth of his sheets and closing her eyes. This was the day Katniss thought of as the official day they met, the first time she felt him beside her in the dark, helping her fight off the monsters in her mind.

Now, in her tiny apartment, Katniss curled herself around the drawing he'd made, closed her eyes and tried to remember what is felt like not to be alone.

*Trigger Warning: This chapter contain a depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftermath.