Trigger Warnings: Violence, Night Terrors, Abusive Relationship, Alcoholism, Parental Abuse/Neglect (Physical, Emotional), Underage Forced Prostitution, Mental Illness – Depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Nervous Breakdown, Agoraphobia, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Self-Harm, Suicidal Tendencies

Chapter Four: Learn How to Love

Clarissa "Glisten" Navdeep, Year 377, Capitol

November 4th, Games Year 377. Claire was fine then, even almost calm in the hours after her only child was born. A girl, a bit small and pale, with, according to her birth certificate, red hair and gray eyes. Everything was fine—they could go home.

But Claire wasn't happy. Post-partum depression, said the doctors. A few psychotic symptoms, but nothing to worry about.

But a few months later, the breakdown came. Then, agoraphobia, paranoid schizophrenia, like none of the local doctors had ever seen before, although several disorders ran in the family. The parents couldn't really afford to keep going to them, anyway; they were never well off.

Algos, the father, was patient for a while, and then he snapped, too, and started drinking. Taking care of the unstable Claire, himself, raising a newborn baby, working multiple jobs, maintaining the house… it was too much. By the time the baby, Clarissa, was one year old, the patient side was gone, and her survival was most likely a miracle.

. . . . .

Glisten (well, Clarissa, then) always waited for a few minutes outside with her class when the bell rang, when everyone else's parents came to pick them up. She just watched, putting off facing home, much as the teachers tried to shoo her. It wasn't like they wanted her, either. Her grades were perfect but her attendance was awful and no one ever got attached to her.

She didn't want to go home. There was nothing there for her except for the wooden shards of a destroyed crib in her empty, drafty room on the same wooden floor. Never enough food, even if she could have gotten to it.

She watched another girl in her class run over to her father, who had a greeting smile, and squeal, "Daddy!" while the man swung her around once.

Oh, Glisten thought. That looked… like fun. She guessed. She wouldn't really know. But they were both laughing.

The teacher told her to get going, again. She looked at the ground and wrung her hands and mumbled, "Okay," and finally shuffled away from the school. She prayedprayedprayed that the belt tonight wouldn't be the half that had the buckle.

(But the world didn't feel like pretending to be nice to her today.)

The metal bit into her skin, and she shrieked while it ripped at her, but no one dried her tears or protected her or smiled or swung her around once.

She was seven then.

. . . . .

Years later, she was a few days shy of seventeen when she came home to find the house all but destroyed. Her parents had strewn furniture about like children's toys and started up a fire from the stove. There was screaming and more things being thrown so she turned and ran.

She wandered for hours, the evening cold and damp. She found herself at the always-open library, at a table in the back. At first she just sat there, numb, wondering what she was supposed to do if she was going through with this. She'd said that she was going to so many times before, but she'd never gotten far. This time felt different. She couldn't go back.

Hours after everyone else had left, she still sat there, unsure of where else to go, until everything started to hit her and she put her head down and just sobbed, enough that the head of the librarian night crew came over and set a box of tissues next to her and asked if there was anything she could do.

Glisten shook her head and didn't look up.

Dawn came, but she didn't go to school; instead, she set out across the city for the only other living family she knew of: Calandra. An orphaned cousin on her mom side, three years older, shy and kind with dark hair hiding the face so much like her little cousin's.

Glisten wasn't one for begging, but she pleaded her way into having a place to stay, and made all kinds of promises, which she eventually kept: she took on a part-time job to pay her part of the rent, and stayed out of the way, much as she was sometimes tempted to talk.

The girls had their problems. Glisten's "half" of the rent just wasn't enough even though it was all of the minimum wage, and she woke Calandra up at night with her constant night terrors from the past, screams echoing in the apartment's halls.

So she tested out of school a year early that June to get a full-time job at the same company, and left, for somewhere she could stay on her own. College would have to wait for the year.

. . . . .

It was so cold. Glisten was sure that she had never been so cold in her life, not even that time she got locked out of the house for the night and it had snowed. (That was her tenth birthday present, unknowingly.) It was (the definition of) pouring rain, and she could easily wring the equivalent of a bucket of water out of her ponytail and old clothes given five minutes, soaked to the skin. She had barely slept for days, dark circles ringing her eyes, having failed to pay her rent (once again) and being on the streets (once again). It happened from time to time.

But she was okay. (She kept telling herself that.) She refused to go back to Calandra, who she had left just a few months ago.

So now she was curled up on a bench, starving, freezing, soaking wet, exhausted, sick, feeling phantom pain creep up along all of the old scars. She wept, feeling like she was still the scared little girl who had never been called anything but worthless, who had nothing but her daydreams to keep her company, who knew nothing but hurt from others.

Someone approached her. She wasn't sure exactly what happened that night. But for once she had a warm meal and a bed under a roof and dry, clean clothes.

It was a bribe, one that he—a pimp, she found out, working shadily through a Capitol nightclub—would never actually show her again, replaced by heated wire hangers and johns. But of course, she clung to it.

He was usually too high to notice anything else she did. As long as quotas were filled, he was "happy". So she secretly had her job, and over time, college on scholarship, an internship at the Gamemaking Center. (It was there she met Ritter—but she had many secrets from him.) She was just smart enough and just used to exhaustion enough to keep it up.

She tried to avoid recognition when that started. She changed her name. (That was when she became Glisten, a mocking of the better half of the Capitol, an irony—it wasn't like anyone in the stable knew what it was.) She dyed her hair, despite the punishment for it that came out of surprise once it was noticed. (Pink, partly also mocking, although, like the name, it stuck.)

. . . . .

At "some point", she graduated. She got a job as a Gamemaker, and quit her former day job. (And the night job. Suddenly one of the most powerful people in the city, there weren't so many questions as there could've been.)

Everything had changed but she felt like she still had the same old problems—the therapists called it "depression" and "post-traumatic stress disorder". She called it "I hate myself" and "I want to die", and smirked as she said, "To put it eloquently."

END