A SIDEWAYS KISS

A Seam girl skimmed her fingers along the spines of books, the coal dust and grime wedged under her fingernails resembling dark crescents. At every bump, the titles boasted their prices, and she marveled at how no one in that house would mind if she damaged something so expensive.

* * * SHEEPISH MUSINGS FROM A POOR GIRL * * *

Not that she would.

It was just a peculiar thought.

She was just about to slide one out and flip through the immaculate pages with her filthy hands, breaking my promise that no one would ever read in that study, when Haymitch spoke up, jolting her.

"There's nothing interesting," he drawled, slouched back in his chair with white sock feet up on the desk, unimpressed with his warm house and nice furniture, "just Capitol stuff."

"They couldn't provide you with bedtime stories?" She pretended to pout. "How else are we going to get you to fall asleep?"

He answered her with a humorless smile, exhaustion sagging his eyes. He hadn't slept peacefully in a long time.

The night before his fifth and last reaping, he was restless and crawled into his mother's bed, the mattress creaking in the quiet an hour before dawn. After being reaped the next afternoon, he had been too worried to sleep since he was thinking about the arena, how he would be dead if he did not fight hard enough.

He blacked out rather than slept in the arena yet awoke to real terrors, instead.

After undergoing numerous surgeries that repaired his injuries and erased all visible scars, his mentor denied him morphling beyond his recuperation so Haymitch still could not rest painlessly, even after winning the Hunger Games.

In his new house – he didn't call it home – in the Victors' Village, he gave up on the hope of dreamless slumber. Half the night his dreams terrified him, and the other half was spent being calmed down by whichever woken relative reached his bedroom first. He preferred his brother's company since Cory was usually the main object of torture in his dreams, being torn apart by bloodthirsty squirrels in a serene forest. Sometimes he and Cory tried to save Maysilee Donner before she chucked a rock over a cliff and flung herself after it. Unlike the fateful ax that had delivered the final kill to the District One tribute in the Fiftieth Hunger Games, she never came back up but burst on the craggy bottom. Most nights he relived the pink birds spearing her pale throat - her actual death. Every night he screamed his throat raw.

The family understood from experience, and in the form of a young, curly-haired boy, the Seam girl had been informed.

The girl was Mollie Hannigan. I did not know her as Mollie Hannigan until her interviews with the Capitol reporters during Haymitch's Games. She played along as the girlfriend of a tribute, answering their questions honestly and smiling when she was supposed to. I listened alongside Panem as I lurked through the deceivingly beautiful arena, accumulating its plethora of tributes as soon as their canons fired. The audience and I needed to know when they were dead.

I saw her often enough to know her face, though. Like Haymitch, I was often near her. At her birth, her mother died. During a rough winter, her frozen sister shambled into my arms from the far side of the bed. On New Year's Eve, her cousin was robbed on the way to the bakery, his pockets heavy with saved money to buy something celebratory. It was an accidental death but there are no exceptions in my line of work.

At sixteen years of age, she was slight and pretty and had an underdeveloped, lopsided chest. Like the Abernathys, she owned the Seam look: dark hair, gray eyes, and olive-toned skin. Her forehead was dotted with pimples during her conversation with Haymitch, and unlike him, she never had scabs from scratching at them.

Mollie Hannigan had frowned a little at her boyfriend's face upon reuniting, the lost acne scars upsetting her. She thought it was makeup that made him look so flawless in his victory interview. No one had said anything because there wasn't much to say.

It paled in comparison to his reruns on the television in the next room. The couple overheard Rayan Abernathy's recorded interview, then suddenly the commentary while Haymitch clutched a dying Maysilee Donner's bloodied hand bled through the walls. Following a frantic 'Shit', they heard Cory rush to shut it off.

Haymitch sighed. "I don't want to go tonight, Mollie."

* * * TONIGHT * * *

The feast that he, his mentor Stephan Hendricks,

the Head Peacekeeper, the mayor, and other

high-ranking officials in Twelve would

attend to congratulate Haymitch on his victory

using really good food.

"Too bad," Mollie said, lifting a scrawny thigh onto the arm of the chair Haymitch slovenly occupied. "I mean, I could take your place. Tuck my hair into a cap and square my shoulders, glare, eat like a savage. I think I could pull it off."

Haymitch raised a dark brow at her. "Why do you want to go?"

"Well, I figure I should use you while I've still got you." She patted her sunken stomach deep into her shirt and explained, "You have the rest of your life to eat whereas I'm back to starving with my father once you find yourself a pretty, curvy Capitol woman. He's barely earning enough to scrape us by, and serving soup for Sae only pays so much…"

"Oh, shut up," he told her, admirably ignoring her knee that dug into his side. "I've shared my school lunches with you for years and you know I've never had a problem with that. How's this any different?"

"Because I was your girlfriend, and now you can do better," countered Mollie, shrugging, glad his eyes were bright again even if it was with annoyance. "If you were to cast me away like dirty bathwater, I'd get nothing."

"You're not bathwater."

"That's your answer?"

Haymitch realized that she was trying to distract him, and was grateful for it, and for her, but that did not make him any less agitated. "You won't starve, and I won't be the one that leaves. That choice is yours and only yours, sweetheart."

"I doubt it, Mister Quarter Quell. Just think – you'll be twice as popular than the other victors!"

"Mollie."

"Too dark? I'm sorry," she said, running a hand through his unruly curls after yanking his shoulder back so he was leaning against the seat.

"You're fine. Just stop trying to comfort me at your expense," he mumbled in reply, his head falling against her. After a moment of comfortable silence, he smirked. "It wouldn't be a Capitol woman, anyway. Working with Maysilee, I might convert to preferring Town girls."

Mollie snickered, trusting there was no truth in his words. "I can see why: blonde hair, blue eyes, boobs, rich. Well, richer than us - no, wait, not you, anymore. They're richer than me."

"More like you're poorer than them, but okay."

She backhanded his temple without much force but he still flinched.

* * * ANOTHER APOLOGY FROM MOLLIE HANNIGAN * * *

A long, sideways kiss.

It had been three days since the morning he returned from the Capitol. I visited Haymitch for weeks after his Hunger Games. So much happened, so much death.

The prostrated young man hugging his intestines while cameras and dead tributes surrounded him from all angles was just at the beginning. But that was the climactic finale of the Second Quarter Quell, with twice as many tributes and twice the carnage. Me times two.

There were more losses ten days after that sideways kiss.