Winter melted and the ground softened. Animals came out of hibernation and birds that had migrated south came back, tweeting merrily as if they had never left. Peeta continued with watching Katniss walk home from school everyday, working at the bakery and trying to muster the courage to talk to her but always failing.
I'll tell her tomorrow. He told himself as he watched her small figure disappear into the distance before turning to walk home himself.
Soon spring came and with the softening ground came sports day.
That day at school the desks lay abandoned, the halls deserted with just a single paper airplane left forgotten as it swooped to the ground from a breeze of a window purposely left open. The classrooms were empty and a chair sat at an angle forlorn as if someone had clattered to their feet hastily and left it in a hurry.
Everyone was standing outside, in front of the track, the school groundskeeper had laid it with freshly white chalk measuring the lanes. Peeta and his classmates wore different coloured headbands as they stretched and jumped up and down to warm up.
"So what's the schedule?" Luso asked. The most curious thing about him, Peeta marveled was that when he first met Luso he had the lightest, buttery blonde hair, but over the years it had darkened shade by shade and now it was a dark brown, almost black.
Sports Day in Panem was basically a festival that promoted sports and physical health. Peeta looked over the schedule, this morning's events included the sack race, wrestling, a three legged race, tug of war, and a relay race before lunch. All the students in the upper school competed against everyone, there were no differentiation between the grades and sexes. After all, in the Hunger Games everyone played the same game between age groups and male and female.
"Hey Peeta," one of the boys in his class waved him over. "Your brother's head of the sports day planning committee, any idea what's going on in the final relay?"
Peeta shook his head. Klein had been incredibly close-lipped about the events in the main event which took place later in the afternoon, an obstacle course including a number of different challenges. Participation was optional, however there was a bit of prize money for the winning team so there was always interest. For the past week Rye had been relentlessly calling their brother 'Seneca Klein' for his role as a kind of pseudo-Gamemaker in drafting this year's main event.
The morning started as usual with Delly, clumsy and uncoordinated making a mess of herself tripping over her own feet at the sack race. Peeta, to his surprise managed to come in second in wrestling in the school competition, only after Rye. Maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise, he thought as he stretched his sore muscles, the younger Mellark boys knew how to take a beating. When drawing names for partners for the three-legged race he desperately hoped to draw Katniss but no luck, he got Rosalind Walsh who did little more than giggle and flip her hair back causing them to come in last. The tug of war was nothing short of a fiasco, with both sides shouting taunts at each other as the red handkerchief tied to the centre of the rope jerked back and forth. Eventually Lowell Mathers was so sick of the boredom he pulled out a switchblade from his pocket and slashed the rope, causing both sides to tumble down and scatter, resulting in a loss on his side.
During the relay race Peeta kept his eyes on Katniss, enraptured by the way her jersey fluttered in the wind and how her shorts bunched up when she ran. She was fast, one of the fastest girls but unfortunately her short legs couldn't keep up with the longer strides of the taller girls. He was so busy gawking at her he didn't notice the baton in his hand until his team was screaming at him to run, and so he did, his face flaming at the embarrassment at zoning out, because by now his team was in dead last. He slammed the baton onto the next person's hand as if it was a hot potato.
Later at lunch he was guzzling cold water. He and his friends, sweaty, aching and sore from the morning's events were commiserating with each other and swapping tales when the teachers came around with boxes of numbers to draw teams for people who wanted to compete in the final relay. Peeta had his eye on Katniss who had refused, then ducked off with Gale. Probably to use up the time to hunt in the woods together, he thought.
"So Peeta, are you sure you don't know what's going on in the afternoon's exciting relay?" Samus asked for the uptenth time. Peeta shook his head and reached into the box. Number 5. The box reached Delly but she held up a hand to push it away, she was done with sports as far as she was concerned.
Click
There was the sound of a camera and a bright flash of lights, Peeta and his friends turned to see a Capitol photographer snapping pictures of the students for the District News section.
"Hey, Messala!" Nan waved to a slim young man with several piercings.
To their surprise he grinned at them and jogged over. "Nan, surprised to see you here."
"Why would you be? I told you I was still in school," she laughed. "Anyway these are my friends, can you show us some of the pictures you took?"
He nodded and turned his camera around and pressed a few buttons. Squares the size of his fingernail popped up and he tapped on the most recent ones.
A student passing a baton to their teammate.
A student sticking out their chest to break the ribbon at the sack race.
Peeta tumbling to the floor when his brother slammed him down.
Peeta's look of furrowed concentration during one of the races.
Peeta and his friends sitting on the grass, their faces flushed and talking animatedly.
"Wow Peeta, you're in here a lot," Delly remarked.
"Well your friend here is very photogenic," said Massala, giving them a glimpse of a metal ball pierced in his tongue. "The camera just seems to gravitate towards him. Oh, got to go, it looks like the final event is starting."
On the whiteboards in front of the field the teachers were furiously scribbling names of students in each team, shouts and roars and high-fives and groans as everybody jostled to see who they were teamed up with.
To his delight, Peeta was teamed up with Nan and Luso, then to his horror, Michaelis.
He groaned inwardly but took his place at the starting line. He could already see the race track set up, standard fare there was a net they would have to crawl under, the most worrying thing was a mud pit which seemed to span a few meters.
Klein and the other sport's team committee members were carrying microphones which they would use to shout instructions at them.
The four members of each team took places at the four points. The gunshot rang out and the first runners of each team ran. "Okay the first obstacle is crawling down under the net!"
Some of their teachers began throwing buckets of something squishy over their students frantically crawling.
"Ewwwww it's slugs," a girl squealed and tried frantically to pull them out of her hair.
"They're harmless, get back in the game Bristol," one of her teammates snapped.
"Ugh Klein, when we get home I'm going to MURDER you," Rye bellowed, sounding almost like their mother as he snarled and crawled furiously.
Luso wiggled his lanky frame down through the tall grass, ignoring the slimy writhing insects landing on his head and shoulders and Peeta cheered as his friend approached. "Next obstacle, the two members of the team must use the saws to cut lengths of wood as indicated and sew two blankets together for the next segment of the race!"
Peeta grabbed a saw and began frantically cutting the wooden pole while Luso grabbed a whalebone needle and tough thread and pricked himself several times as he sewed madly, messy criss-crossing stitches down the centre. While they ran towards Michaelis they noticed the members of the sport's day committee tying their third team member's hands and feet together with rope.
"Okay your third team member is 'injured' and you have to carry them using the stretcher you've assembled!" Peeta groaned inwardly, but quickly knotted the four corners of the blanket on the poles and helped Luso dump Michaelis' body onto their makeshift stretcher.
"Hey be gentle, I'm injured," he snapped.
The third leg of their journey had them slogging through the mud pit, which to Peeta's horror was getting deeper, from his ankles, to knees, to his hips. All the teams began to struggle, some flat-out forfeiting at this stretch.
"What the hell is wrong with your brother Peeta? Is he trying to kill us?" Luso grunted, struggling to lift the stretcher high enough so that Michaelis wouldn't drown.
"Higher peasants," Michaelis' voice rang out snobbishly.
Finally one team, the seniors made it out of the mud pit, and began dashing towards the final stretch, ending right at the school where one window was open in the second story. "Aaaaand the final obstacle, the three members must stand on each other's shoulders while the fourth member climbs them to get through the window where the prize is sitting, right on Mr. Douglas' desk!"
Everyone came to a screeching halt.
Are you serious?
Thom and Bristol and Leevy looked at each other and shrugged. Their fourth member was a small bird-like fourteen year old, light enough for them to support and they began assembling themselves into a teetering column.
"Well, get a move on, they're about to win," Michaelis exclaimed.
Aching, muddy, and ready to collapse, Peeta caught Luso's eye and he nodded grimly. In unison they dumped a squealing Michaelis face-down into the mud and ditched, walking back from where they came from.
"Augghhhhh!" came his muffled scream as he sank, hands and feet bound and unable to struggle out of his bounds, sinking, sinking, until the committee members dashed in to rescued him.
"Well let's call it a day," Luso said flippantly, stretching his aching arm back.
"Yes, let's," said Peeta, who right now looked forward to nothing more than a nice hot shower.