Disclaimer: The Hunger Games isn't mine.
The first aspect of the name that Effie Trinket reads to register in my brain is that it is not, in fact, my daughter's. It may sound self-centered and uncaring, but I defy any parent of a Reaping age child to claim that their thoughts flow differently. I would call them a liar to their face, but I'm supposed to display more diplomacy – it's an occupational hazard. I find Madge's face in the crowd, but she isn't looking toward the little blond haired girl beginning to make her way toward the front. She is, instead, looking in her own section. She's staring, in fact, at a dark haired girl whose eyes have glazed over. Madge looks like she's waiting for something. It's then that the name registers. Everdeen.
The little girl (a twelve by the look of her and the restless murmuring of the crowd) must be the little sister of my daughter's friend. I knew there was a younger sister. I've heard Madge mention it in the wistful tone of voice she always falls into when she talks of people with siblings. It's the closest to complaining that she ever comes (when she's speaking to me anyway). I might suspect that she does her complaining to her friends, but she doesn't seem to have any – except for Katniss Everdeen. My heart twists for the heart scalding my daughter is about to experience. The one plus of my daughter's rather solitary existence is that she has, thus far, been spared the firsthand experience of watching someone she really knows going into the Games (she's had enough second hand experience to make up for it by leaps and bounds, but that isn't relevant to the moment).
Madge is still watching her friend's face with that expectant expression when the girl charges forward and pushes her sister behind her while calling out that she volunteers. I'm surprised. Madge is not. Her eyes drift closed and she bites her lip. It isn't shock that she's conveying; it's resignation. She knew. She fully expected her friend to come rushing to her sister's rescue when no one in this District has bothered since long before she was born. My mind drifts back to the joyful expression on my daughter's face when she came home one day bursting to inform me that Katniss had let her sit with her at lunch and hadn't minded at all. I had thought it was relief after nearly two months of trying to find where she fit in the upper school social hierarchy (a difficult place for a naturally quiet girl to navigate after years of lower school teachers directing your seating charts and project partners). I think, now, that perhaps my daughter is a better judge of character than I realized.
That's not going to do her any favors in this situation. She's not going to lose someone she knows tangentially to the Games. She's going to lose the only friend she has.
Effie Trinket is blathering on about protocol, and I find myself cutting her off short. I don't think I've ever done that before. No one cares about the proper format for processing volunteers. It doesn't matter. None of the rusty and unremembered steps for drawing out the show matter. We all know how this is going to end, and there is no need to put that crying little girl clinging to her sister through any more of a public spectacle. Besides, those regulations are for different circumstances. They are for those caught up in playing the Capital's game the way it likes it to be played. There is no place for that here in the face of the self-sacrifice we are witnessing.
The boy I've seen accompanying her when she delivers strawberries to Madge at the back door pulls the little girl away, and Katniss climbs the podium. Effie Trinket looks pleased as punch over the development, so maybe she will forget to get her feathers ruffled over the "incivility" of my earlier interruption. I can only hope.
My day of being surprised has not come to an end. The crowd does not give their usual token (if admittedly half-hearted) applause. Silence descends on the square for one brief moment. I didn't know District 12 still had it in them. I meet Madge's eyes again and notice that she (along with the rest of the population) is giving Katniss a traditional salute. I can only hope that the Capital commentators decide that it is some backwards tradition that isn't worth noting.
Haymitch decides to interject himself into the proceedings at this point by openly taunting the Capital before taking a dive off the front of the stage. He can play his drunken victor card and get away with it. The rest of us have no such protection. I can't decide if he thinks he was helping or just couldn't resist the opportunity. I can't decide if all of 12 are actively attempting to bring the Capital's attention back on us full force, or if I am merely being paranoid.
Things have gotten so much better. It took so long for us to get back to this place. I steal a glance at the girl standing on this stage who I know good and well would have starved to death in the District 12 that existed after the last time the Capital turned its attention in our direction. I look back at my daughter who is smiling softly after what she must see as a display of District unity directed at her friend. She doesn't know how deeply District unity (or any kind of unity for that matter) is frowned upon. She has no way to know what it was like because I have never told her. I don't want her to see how much harsher life in this place can be. Please, please don't let her ever see just how difficult our lives can be made.
The boy's name is drawn. Somewhere it registers that it is one of the baker's sons – the youngest, I think he's a classmate of Madge's. I'm focused back on the task at hand. Reading the Treaty is next. I get through it, as I do every year, reading without focusing on the words. My mind is occupied, as it always has been, with thoughts of my little girl. I look at her standing in the crowd, eyes a little watery, fingers tracing the pin on her shoulder. I think about her and what she means to me and know that I will never, ever understand what it was that possessed our predecessors to sign the piece of paper that I am reading. How beaten down and dead inside do you have to be in order to sign away your children's future?
