Adair Oakson- District Seven male
I jittered as I waited in the crowd with all the other boys. Every part of me was moving, from my legs as I shifted my movement back and forth, to my feet bouncing on my heels, to my fingers restlessly tapping each other behind my back in a nervous habit I'd picked up long ago. Not that I had any reason to be nervous. It was just the day we picked a boy to die. And a girl, but that didn't affect me, so to be honest it didn't seem like quite so big a deal.
The Reaping was complicated. It was the scariest day of the year, but also undeniably the most exciting. It was the only time every kid in the District was packed together in a writhing mass of nervous, twitchy adolescence. Every time I wondered if maybe this would be the year one of the kids we sent actually won. There would be parades and parties and most importantly, packages of food and goodies raining from the sky like someone shot Santa Claus right out of the air. Ninety percent of me was always about ready to faint, and the other ten percent was caught up in the sheer spectacle of it all, from wild dreams of winning to the strange outsider Capitolites who came to pretend it was all an actual game and stand around having no idea how crazy they looked in their clothes and makeup.
It was funny how scared I was of Minerva when she stepped onstage. She was a thin lady who looked like a porcelain statue. She looked like she would crack if she fell over, at least if she wasn't wearing half a dozen red ruffles all up her like a tube, but she still scared the daylights out of me. It was her lily-white hands that picked a name out of a bowl and her rose-red lips that said it out loud. I probably would have thought she was pretty if I didn't think she was a worse thing to see than Medusa's split ends.
Just do it.
This is so exciting.
I can't bear it.
Just get it over with.
I should volunteer.
I had thoughts like that sometimes. Stupid, brainless thoughts that I sometimes acted on before I remembered I could be really dumb. Even I wasn't that dumb, though. Despite the wild vision I had of bravely winning the Games, getting crowned Victor, bringing fortune and presents to Seven and living forever as a hero, I knew it wouldn't be like that. So, even though the words formed themselves in my mouth when the thought popped into my head, I shoved them back down my throat where they wouldn't get me killed.
Ha, not getting me that way, me, I thought. Gotta get up pretty early in the morning to put one over me, even if the one doing the putting over is also me.
"Adair Oakson!"
Son of a gun.
Adair didn't have a personality since his form was a temporary short one so I could write. Now I just need a Three male (which is set up and I expect it will just take a few days to put together) and I can rush forward like a popped dyke.
