Veda Keate- District Nine female (16)

Naked. I might as well be naked.

I didn't understand how they could do it. When I first arrived in the Capitol I was blown away by the lights and the colors and the garishly dressed people. I found myself often averting my eyes when men walked by with plunging necklines or appliques on their pants meant to draw the eye to carnal locations. I felt like I was surrounded by people wearing things only married people were supposed to wear and people my age weren't even supposed to know about. Then I met my stylists and they peeled my dress off of me as I sat shaking and trying to cover myself.

"I want to put it back on as soon as the parade is over, please," I'd said.

"Oh, honey, you can't wear this anymore," Baste said, her face sympathetic as she saw mine crumple. "It's not a good idea to make a belief like that visible." Later I went through my closet and it seemed like everything had a low neckline or stretched tight across my chest or slid over my legs and backside like I was wearing nothing but paint. I chose the longest skirt I could find, which reached only to my calves, and put on a coat over my shirt even though it was warm inside.

I don't understand why they would do this. I wasn't hurting anyone with the way I dressed. Wasn't it enough I was going to die? They didn't have to make me dirty before I did. I'd never known the Capitol looked at children that way. It was the most disgusting thing I could imagine and I hated them for it even more than I hated them for taking me for the Games. On my way to the training center I'd walked past a kindergarten-age girl with bright red painted lips and another in underwear-sized shorts with sequins on her backside. It was filthy what the Capitol made them look like. It made me sick just to think about. And they took my clothes off and treated me the same way.

The first aid station was a tiny shred of what my life was supposed to be. I hung around it like a desert oasis, wrapping bandages around dummies and sorting through plants to find the one that could nurse a patient back to health.

"Hey," came a voice from behind me. I turned around and saw the friendly-looking girl from Seven. "How are you cold? It's so hot in here."

"I'm not cold. It's just where I'm from girls wear long dresses," I said.

"That would be hard in Seven. I would be self-conscious when I was climbing trees," she said, leaning against the table of supplies. "You're Lucille, right?"

"Everyone calls me Veda," I said.

"I'm Petra and people call me Petra," the girl said. "Are you going alone or looking for allies or what?"

"I think I should get an ally, I'm just really shy," I said. "It has to be a girl, too, since I have a fiancee back home and it wouldn't be proper for me to be near a boy."

"You could cheat on him with a girl, too," Petra pointed out.

I could feel the blush on my cheeks. "I mean... I guess. But not, like, me. That's not... what I like," I stammered, drawing my arms into my chest. People from other Districts really just talk about anything out loud.

"Me either. I guess I'm still too young to even know. I was just saying," Petra shrugged. "Anyway since neither of us are romantically available but we're both platonically available, maybe we should ally."

I probably should have thought it over but I was just happy to have anyone. "I'd like that," I said.

Petra Ridley- District Seven female (15)

Veda had a weird life. I'd been biting my tongue since I didn't want to be rude and because trash-talking her upbringing wouldn't do any good now anyway but she mentioned some pretty weird stuff. Her marriage, for one- that came out after we'd allied, since she'd been afraid if she told the whole truth I wouldn't want to ally and had thus gone with "my 'boyfriend'". It was enslavement, actually, though I'd kept quiet on that front too. Honestly I had no idea what to do. In our conversations and discussions of our pasts Veda had matter-of-factly recounted how she was "married" to a grown man when she was thirteen and their baby was taken from her shortly after the birth. Or in other words, she was raped and impregnated as a child- and she expressed how much she worried about her "husband" and hoped she'd be reunited with him. I felt like I was sitting on a giant bomb. I wanted to get rid of it but I was afraid even touching it would set off a disaster. My heart broke for Veda and I wanted to tell her what had really happened but how do you tell someone they were a child sex slave? That had to have done damage but Veda was happy at this moment. If she saw the truth it would mess her up way past what she could recover from before the Games started. So for the moment I was trying to hide my shock and focus on the present.

"I had a pretty normal life," I said. I hadn't known until then how true that was. "I guess everyone thinks their life is normal but, like, I just went to school and had lumberjacks for parents and everyday stuff like that."

"It sounds like you enjoyed it at least," Veda said.

"I have a good life," I shrugged. "It'll be a lot better once I win and I'm fabulously wealthy." It was just a joke, sure, but it was important to be positive. Everyone had a chance.

Veda's gaze went distant. She rested her head on her bent arm on the table. "I don't know if either of us can win," she said.

"Of course we can. Anyone can," I said. "It's more likely for some people than for others but it wasn't likely for any of us to get Reaped in the first place." Statistics were just that- statistics. They were a way to describe reality, not a way to determine it. Statistics had no effect on what was going to happen. They were only a generic average of a million different data points with a million different variables no one could fully account for.

"In Seven we have a lot of open wilderness," I went on. "Every once in a while someone gets lost in all that endless forest out there. Whether or not they survive depends on a lot of things. First of all how cold it is. Then whether they find water. But there's another thing a lot of people don't think about and it's one of the most important parts: positive mental attitude. There have been people who were lost for months and stumbled back into town weighing eighty pounds and with a broken leg. There are other people who wandered around for a day and then just laid down and died. Your attitude, your refusal to give up and your choice to keep believing there's a way, can decide whether you live or die. It's real and it makes a difference."

I hadn't intended to make a rousing little speech. It was just something that really mattered to me. I could feel my blood stirring with my fervent belief that we did have some control and even if sometimes things didn't work out that didn't mean we could give up until the very end.

Veda was smiling just a little bit. Whether or not we got through this, at least she had a little more hope now. I'd given her a positive mental attitude and already I knew our chances were better.