CHAPTER ELEVEN

With our training session ending early, I'm home in time for dinner. I unlock the door, reassured as always that Prim remembered to lock it behind her, and call out that I'm home.

Prim doesn't answer, which isn't normal. But I find her quickly; she's curled up in a ball, asleep, on the couch. The old knitted throw we keep thrown over the back is bunched around her knees. Carefully, I readjust it around her, tucking it more securely. Her eyes flutter.

"Katniss?"

"Hi," I say.

Her eyes look glassy; her cheeks are flushed pinker than usual. I press the back of my hand to her forehead to feel for fever. She's warm, but not burning.

"Feeling sick?" I ask.

"A little," she says, and pulls the edge of the throw in close under her chin.

"Soup for dinner?"

"And triangle toast," Prim murmurs, closing her eyes again.

I smile and kiss her forehead, then head for the kitchen. I find a can of Chicken 'n' Stars in the cabinet, and there's a new bag of white bread sitting on the counter. I empty the can into a microwave safe bowl and start that heating while I put two pieces of bread in the toaster.

The toast pops up and the microwave goes off at the same time. I put in more bread and left the soup sit while I butter Prim's pieces of toast and carefully cut each piece in four even triangles; it was the only way Prim would eat it when she was younger. I find a tray and load it up: Prim's soup ladled into a mug and mine left in the bowl; spoons for each of us; her toast on a paper towel. Orange juice and ginger ale for her; just ginger ale for me. When my toast pops up, I grab it with my bare fingers and drop it quickly onto a paper towel of my own. I carry it into the living room.

We eat dinner together on the couch and watch cartoons until Prim starts to fall asleep again. I make sure she gets undressed and into bed; one night without brushing her teeth won't hurt her. Then I turn off the light and shut the door.

Back in the living room I turn off the tv and clean up, before settling at the kitchen table to work on homework. But with Prim asleep and the tv off, I can't avoid thoughts of earlier that afternoon any longer.

The shame of it licks in my belly, and I close my eyes and let Haymitch's words roll over me again. It's your parents' job. Not yours. But someone had to do it. Someone had to make sure that Prim got to school in the morning, that she was fed—that all of us were fed. I couldn't trust my mother to be that person, not after—

I take a deep breath and hold onto the air in my lungs until I feel like I'm going to burst. When I release it, my head is spinning, but I feel more centered, ready to finish the thought, at least in my head.

Not after Dad died.

When I think of my father, I remember him not as the bodily remains my mother could barely identify as I stood, too young, by her side, but as he was before the accident at the mine that killed him. I remember the way he used to carry me on his shoulders so I could see above the crowds at parades. I remember him bent over the kitchen table with me, helping with my spelling. I remember him making my mother smile and Prim giggle. I remember, too, that he looked like me, tall and lanky, dark hair and olive skin, where mom and Prim are pale and fair. I remember that he was strong and kind and full of laughter and now all he is, is dead.

I know it isn't his fault, that he left us. It's no ones fault. That's what the word "accident" means. But that doesn't stop me from being angry. Because he left us, and because, in a lot of ways, he took Mom with him.

I don't know very much about how my parents met and fell in love. I do know that my mother's family didn't approve. I've never met them. If they hated my father so much, I don't want to. I think of my mother's love for my father as her most redeeming quality. She loved him enough to give up her whole life for him. But I also think of it as her biggest weakness. Because when he died, she couldn't cope. Not even for Prim and me.

It didn't happen right away. For the first few weeks after dad died, she was—fine. Strong. She arranged for his burial. Collected the life insurance, which, added to their savings, just barely paid for the burial. Looked at what we had left. And realized we needed help.

It wasn't her own family my mother went to, then. It was Dad's. She moved us to New York, where Dad's sister lived. All three of us shared her guest room. Prim and I started at new schools. And then—then my mother started fading.

At first it was small things. She'd get up later in the mornings. Leave Prim and I to figure out dinner by ourselves. But six weeks after we arrived in New York, she was barely responding when we spoke; when we tried to get out of bed, she just turned her face away.

Dad's sister had not taken us in out of charity; she couldn't afford to. She expected my mother to contribute, once she found a job. But my mother never found one. And things got more and more tense.

I came home one day to them having a screaming fight. Or Dad's sister was having a screaming fight. My mother just lay there, silent, eyes vacant and tears wetting the pillow at her temples.

I remember I was afraid. I sent Prim next door to play with the little girl who lived there and huddled right outside the bedroom door, just waiting for it to be over. I was twelve.

Dad's sister didn't even spare me a look when she passed. But what was worse was the way my mother would not look at me when I curled up next to her on the bed and begged her to please, please get up, to make everything okay. But she didn't. Wouldn't. Couldn't, I guess.

Dad's sister kicked us out three weeks later. We moved into a women's shelter, where we slept together in a room—or rather rooms, because sleeping arrangements were reassigned every two weeks—with other families of women and children, and kept all of our few belongings in a single locker that slid beneath the bed. We were issued toilet paper once a week, and if we needed more, I stole it from the school bathrooms. We ate whatever the shelter, or the school lunch program, gave us, or we didn't eat.

Most of the shelter were people like us, women and their children—a lot who had been abused, some of who'd been sick, or depressed—but there were lots of older women alone too, or women who looked old, most of them not quite . . . right. Some nights it was like living with ghosts. I would lay awake in bed, Prim restless but asleep curled up beside me with her knees pressed into my hip and her fingers clutched in my nightshirt, and listen to the wailing and the sobs and the whispers.

Prim did better than I did, there at the shelter. She'd always been better with people than me, she was pretty and her smile was sweet and quick, and the other women there, workers and full-time residents alike, adored her. In the afternoons after school she'd play checkers with old Wiress, who never spoke but also never lost a game, or trade hand clap games with the other girls.

I spent most of my time in the kitchen with the cook, Sae. She'd send me to do her errands, sometimes, and pay me a few nickels or a quarter in return. They were what paid for the cake for Prim's birthday that year, and for the new white hair bow I pretended was from mom and I both.

Prim was the only thing I cared about, and I tried to act normal for Prim. But I didn't feel normal.

The shelter held classes, once a week. Self-defense classes, paid for by a local church, for women who were at the shelter to escape partners who'd abused them. That's how I met Homes. He was one of the teachers. Most of the time no one showed up. But I always did. At first it was mostly to have another reason to stay away from my mother. But then because, whenever the class was empty, Homes gave me extra lessons.

I was small, still short and painfully skinny, but I was determined to learn how to fight. Homes taught me that, but he also taught me how to handle how angry I was—at the world, and my father, at my mother most of all. He taught me how to keep it from overwhelming me. And when my mother and Prim and I finally left the shelter a little over a year after we first came, Homes and I kept in touch.

My homework is to come up with five things I can talk about without what happened today happening again. But I don't know how I can. Everything I love, everything I hate—everything I think and feel—it all comes back, in some way, to New York. And there is nothing I ever want to talk about, or think about, less.