She stumbles, and falls off of the ledge, her mouth in a perfect O-shape. She finally realizes that her "friend" had been a traitor all along—but much too late. She falls through the air with a large, red stain on the front of her shirt, staring up at the sky one last time. She will inevitably die. And it's Arboren.
I jump out of the tree, blindly sprinting through the woods. I bump into trees and scratch my face on branches because I can't see where I'm going, I'm crying so much. I trip over roots and fall many times, but I don't care. Nothing I'm suffering now is as bad as what happened to Arboren, and I just want to get home.
When I make it home, I immediately rush into my parents' arms, and the story of what's happened in the past couple weeks just gushes out of me. Starting with my talk with Arboren after the reaping, I tell them about how I was curious about the Hunger Games, so I decided to watch, I tell them about meeting Ash and learning to hunt, that I had lied and it was me who had brought us the food, I tell them about learning that the Games was a game of death, about how horrible I think it is, and finally I tell them about Arboren.
"She's d—" I can't say it. "Dea—" I just can't. Death and Arboren don't seem to go together. I start sobbing uncontrollably, unable to speak anymore. Father just picks me up and lays me down in my bed.
I stop crying about half an hour later, but just because I don't have any water left in my body to make tears. In fact, I am really thirsty. I drag myself out of bed and go to the well to get a drink. When I get outside, my parents are waiting for me. I get ready for them to yell at me or something for disobeying them, lying, and hunting illegally, but they don't speak.
"You're not mad?" I tentatively ask.
They shake their heads. "No," says Mother, "it's all our fault. We were just to scared to relive it—"
"Relive what?" I ask.
"We'll get to that," Father tells me.
"Anyway," continues Mother, "We didn't want the Hunger Games to be a part of our life anymore, so we just tried to block them out by never watching. I guess that proved impossible when Arboren volunteered, because you two are inseparable friends. We should have let you make your own decision about whether to watch or not."
"Ellery," asks my Father, "do you want to know why we have never let you watch the Hunger Games?"
"Yes," I answer, definitively. I'm ready for anything they have to say.
My parents look at each other, deciding who should tell me whatever secret they have been keeping for years. It's Mother who draws a shaky breath and begins to speak. "Years ago, ten to be exact, your older brother died in the Hunger Games."
What? I have a brother? This doesn't make sense—how did I never know that? I stare at Mother with a blank expression on my face.
"You see," Father continues, "when he was only thirteen, and you must have been four, he was reaped and went to the Games. We thought that there was no chance for him, but somehow he made it to the final two, when he lost to the boy from District Four."
"So why didn't you ever watch or let me watch?"
"We didn't want to bring back the memories. The easiest thing to do was to forget and pretend that nothing ever happened. But it was definitely unfair of us not to let you watch, as you were too young to remember anything anyway."
Suddenly, I am really curious about something. "What was his name?"
"Haslett," Mother answers. "His name was Haslett Beecher."
"We might still have some pictures," says Father.
Five minutes later, we are seated around the dining table looking through a small box of photos that Father had unearthed from the depths of a closet. There is a picture of a baby crawling across the grass, a picture of a two-year-old with wavy, blonde hair like mine holding a large stick, one of a seven-year-old sitting far up in a tree, and many others chronicling Haslett's life. Finally, there is one of thirteen-year-old Haslett holding up the arms of a grinning four-year-old me. This is the last picture—it must have been taken a few days before the reaping.
And my parents are wrong. I do remember. Out from the depths of my brain, come fuzzy memories of playing outside, swimming, or walking to town with my older brother.
Everything makes sense now. The way my mother reacted when I had first asked her if I could watch this year's Games, why my father had said 'not again, not again' when I was reaped, why Cassia had seemed to know my parents already—it all fits together finally.