Back inside, Adam put on the tea kettle. He used to use a Keurig to make tea, until he heard rumors about the plastic cups releasing hormones when soaked with hot water. So now he used an old metal tea pot with a curved spout. It made him feel either like a grandmother, or a hipster.
Katniss sat at his small wooden circular kitchen table. She munched on a few carrot sticks despondently. Her hair hung down around her eyes, and she leaned on her forearm. She looked at the wall.
Adam did his best to radiate compassion out of his body, like he was opening some valve and it was filling the room like a gas.
"What happened?" he asked. He wasn't used to being a source of strength. Usually, he was the one looking for validation from his parents, or a bartender, or his barber...
"The words were hard," she said, "but I used that book you gave me to help understand them." He had given her a dictionary as a last thought before leaving for the day.
"That wasn't the real problem," she said. She stood up and walked over to the window. Outside, the darkness was slowly swallowing up her marksmanship.
"I am not a…" she began. She picked up the Oxford Pocket Dictionary and flipped to a page with a big circle on it. "A… scholar," she said. "There's only so long I can read these things before my brain gets tired. I can't read anymore. I'm not used to reading this much!"
She kept her back turned to him.
Adam poured two cups of hot water and dipped in some Celestial Seasoning Red Zinger tea bags.
"Back home," she continued, "reading is for rich people. And even many of them don't do it. I learned a little from Prim, and some more during the Hunger Games tours during the long train rides. But I never imagined what it would be like to stand in front of so many words, and try to take them all in.
"These are just directions to a place, or a list of food. These are… huge ideas. Stories of whole countries. So many different…" she paused, and then mouthed the word out carefully. "Civil...a...say...thuns. I don't even know why I'm back here. They should have sent Beetee."
"Who's that?" Adam asked.
"A very smart man who would be better at this than me," Katniss said. She'd already failed. She was the wrong person for the job. She felt shame and anger in endless waves, pushing her under.
Adam reached across the table and took her hands. She flinched for a sec, and then let him.
"Katniss, you're not the idiot. I am," he said. "I was foolish to think that you were a scholar ready to suck up all this knowledge in a completely new way. You've only been here what - a week? I just assumed… and that makes an ass out of me, and just me."
She didn't get the joke. But he kept going.
"Let me take a crack at this," he said. "OK, the history of the world in sixty minutes or less."