Fleur Laveau- District Eleven female (18)

Not every girl can say that her mother is a witch. That sounds like it would either mean a lot of things going right in your life or else a lot of teasing. In my case it didn't really end up as either. I did get a lot of teasing, but so did everyone in my family, and not because my mother was a witch. It was because my brother Henri and I had a lot lighter skin than everyone else on the plantation. We also had green eyes. The headmaster of the plantation had light skin. And green eyes.

Voodoo didn't really work the way people assumed. Even if it did, my mother was super discreet. People in Eleven had a lot of reason to hate their overseers and want something bad to happen to them. If anyone from the Capitol found out my mother practiced an art that was pretty much entirely thought to be curses and hexes she'd be quickly executed. Only the other workers knew about my mom's predilections and they were afraid to get on our bad side so a lot of them left us alone. As anyone who's been bullied can attest, bullies don't have to actively harass you to make it known you're an outsider. Cold exclusion can be just as harmful.

Since Henri and I were rejected by the other workers we spent a lot of time with just each other and our mother. That led to more bullying, which led to more seclusion. Eventually we turned into a close-knit family that would do anything for each other since we knew we would get nothing from anyone else.

I flipped through the worn library book as I sat on my bed, a threadbare blanket thrown around my shoulders. Recent history was a minefield in Panem but if it happened 300 years ago it was considered less controversial. Slavery, therefore, could sometimes slip through, especially since I was looking at the early end with the triangle trade across the oceans. People like me were taken from Africa and some were left on islands far out in the ocean. Entirely new cultures popped up mixing the religion and mythology of the homeland with the influence of the slavemasters from the new world. That was where my mom's beliefs came from. It was my origin and it fascinated me.

It was the origin of my troubles as well. The implications weren't lost on me when I read about how by law if a child's mother was a slave she was a slave as well. My very skin was a mark of the horrors people like my mother had gone through for centuries. We weren't slaves anymore in Panem but the reverberations of those attitudes still came out in my ostracization for someone I had nothing to do with. Maybe that was it in the end. Whether or not they knew it, maybe the others didn't actually hate me. They hated that someone like me was still a possibility.

Vaslay Nikulin- District Eleven male (14)

"This one is galena. They're kind of rare so I was pretty excited when I found it." I held up the gray rock with its squared-off crystals jutting out every which way. Alex was listening very attentively, trying to support his little brother in his rock habit. I'd found six new rocks since he last asked and I was showing them off one by one.

There was an urgent knock at the front door to the house. I heard voices and then footsteps coming toward my room. I got up from where I'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor and opened the door to see my mom. She wasn't exactly scared but I knew she was about to say something important.

"It's Mrs. Freeman," she said. Alex was jumping up even as she finished. "The baby's here."

I stayed behind. That was not my calling in life. Dad and Alex were both great with medicine and surgery and stuff. I didn't like blood so that was out. I could help pick plants or cut bandages or whatever but delivering a baby was best left to people who could look at squishy and bloody things without throwing up. Once they got the baby out and all washed off I'd be more than happy to hold it so Mrs. Freeman could rest.

It was better I just stayed out of the way, so I stayed in my room and fiddled around with my rocks. I wasn't sure what I could do with rocks as a job when I grew up but I'd find something. Probably I'd end up working in the fields and just play with rocks on my own time. My family was well-off enough that I didn't have to work yet but when I had to support myself maybe I could work in the fields a few days of the week and make the rocks into art to plants from the fields was a big no-no but we were actually supposed to clear the rocks out! Most people just dumped them in a nearby stream but I always picked through them and took out the good ones. If you just looked close at the rocks you'd find all sorts of pretty or special things. I even had a few semiprecious stones. They weren't big enough to be made into jewelry but I knew how special they were.

Mrs. Freeman screamed and I winced. It was just part of having a baby but I was sorry it had to be so hard. It didn't sound like a complicated delivery, though, since Alex and Dad weren't yelling. That was probably another reason medicine wasn't for me. I liked the part where people got better but it was hard for me to see people in pain. I heard the sound of a baby crying and knew everything had turned out all right.

Mom opened the door and peeked in, smiling. "Do you want to come see the baby? She's all washed off," she said.

Mrs. Freeman was sitting back on our medical bed, a little sweaty and disheveled but in one piece. Alex was bundling up the soiled linens while Dad washed his hands.

"She's so cute," I said about the tiny baby who was already looking up at me with a searching expression in her brown eyes. "What are you going to name her?"

Mrs. Freeman was already smiling. "We're naming her after her grandmother Rue."

Vaslav: 4'8" tall, Russian descent. A mix of unruly brown and black hair and is small. Vas is often mistaken for being younger than he is

Marie: Biracial, green eyes