A/N: Today, the second of hopefully three Thanksgiving break chapters, we have District Eleven! This pair was a nice pair to write and I'm excited for you guys to read them. Enjoy! :D
Trigger Warnings: Very little profanity
There was a time
I used to look into my father's eyes.
In a happy home
I was a king, I had a golden throne.
Those days are gone,
Now the memory's on the wall.
I hear the songs
From the places where I was born.
My father said,
"Don't you worry, don't you worry, child.
See heaven's got a plan for you.
Don't you worry, don't you worry now."
Yeah!
Soya Chaffer, 17
Resident of District 11
Laborer and Homeschooled Student
The sunlight slants through the reaching arms of the apple trees, splattering across the muddy green grass of the ground. The sunlight makes the glossy apples shine a bit, and the heat feels nice and exuberant, wrapping me in its toasty arms and tanning my paler, freckled skin. I adjust my overalls before scaling the apple tree in front of me. I yank on a branch and pull of several apples in several quick motions; crack pop pop snap crack. I drop them into the large wooden barrel waiting at the base of the tree, and they land with solid plunks on top of the other apples piled within the barrel. I move like lightning to the next branch, and repeat the process, climbing ever higher into the tree and working faster than everyone else.
My younger sister Kaya walks by, rolling a full barrel of apples, along with one of the three workers who board in our home for the fee of working the fields, Albert. Albert keeps his head down, which is shielded by a wide straw sun hat. Kaya, however, tries to taunt me.
"How's our little Spider Monkey?! Having fun working too hard?" she giggles playfully before tossing a clot of dirt at me. My hands shoots out and swats it out of the air. I may be a normal girl on the ground, but in the trees I'm another entity. I love working in my family's orchard.
Kaya and Albert waddle away soon enough, rolling the barrel full of ripe apples between them. I softly toss apple after apple after apple into the barrel until it's so full that a few of the glossy red and green apples overflow and fall with soft thunks onto the ground. By that time, Albert and Kaya are back from dropping off their barrel by the front doors of the ranch house, where the trucks will come in the morning to pick it up. The other two boarders, Alessandra and Roote, are planting new Granny Smith and Fuji saplings at the end of the orchard, and I can see them working when I climb to the top of the tree to grab the last of the apples. Kaya and Albert are working together to roll away the barrel I just filled up. Using my shirt as a makeshift basket, I carry the last dozen or so apples down from the upper branches of the tree. I hop to the ground and walk over to an empty barrel sitting by a tree several hundred yards away. I plop them in, and then I drag the barrel over to the next tree over, and I re start the process. Crack pop pop snap crack. Plunk plunk plunk plunk. Thunk thunk thunk.
Even when a soft breeze starts to blow through the orchard, ruffling the leaves and my dark brown hair, and the sun starts to set in a fuzzy blaze of orange, pink, and maroon, I keep working, plucking apples and lofting them into barrels. Alessandra, Roote, and Dad are just done planting, and Kaya and Albert have been done for two hours. Six overfilled barrels, needing to be rolled away, sit in my wake as I work.
I love the feel of the rough bark underneath my fingers as I hook my arms around the branches, pulling myself up higher. Apples fly through my fingertips, arcing gracefully down into the barrel like a constant stream of glossy red pockmarked by green. My eyes only see the boughs and the leaves and the apples and my own calloused hands, and my fingertips scrabble across rough bark, rough stems, and slippery smooth apples. The slight night chill pervades around me, and goosebumps spring to life on my arms, but I ignore them. Finally, I hear my mother's soft voice behind me.
"Soya, come on. We let you stay out late, but let's go inside. Kaya's waiting, it's time for arithmetic. I let you skip yesterday."
I sigh, and let the last apple I've picked fall from my hands into the barrel. Albert and Roote are rolling the other barrels up to the front of the house. I take my mother's soft, warm hand and let her lead me to the back entrance. We walk through the kitchen, where Alessandra is preparing dinner. Kaya is waiting at the worn dining room table when we walk into the room, her arithmetic book cracked open. She looks bored as she gnaws on the eraser on the end of her pencil. She's working on Pre-Algebra this year, being 13; I'm learning how to do Calculus right now. It's hard and I don't totally get it, but thankfully Mom has all the time in the world to slowly explain each step of new concepts.
Our little orchard farm is similar to many thousands of institutions around Eleven. While we have one biggish capital city, Lima, with around twenty thousand people, and a dozen or so smaller cities of several thousand people that work in the packaging and canning factories, the other half million of us live on ranches and farms and orchards scattered like seeds in the wind across the District. Tiny villages of one to ten families work on a plot of land like our orchard. We aren't rich by any means; Albert, Alessandra, and Roote are not servants, they just live with us. Having only one family on a farm is hard, especially when it's one over worked single mother and two younger daughters. You need help, and while our three boarders search for families and properties of their own they stay here. Property is cheap as dirt, plants and equipment a little more expensive, but still, with just a handful of cash you can have an orchard just like my family's. Anyone that doesn't live in 11 would think we're rich; living in a nice, bigger wooden ranch painted a nice cream color, with five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, a living room, and a garage, along with a shed out back. We also own several dozen acres of land. But our house has been lived in by other families since before the inception of Panem; it's drafty and rotting and infested with insects and mice. Our land is rough, some of it infertile. Rich people have giant farmhouses with three dozen bedrooms, many children, and dozens of boarders who fight to stay at their giant, richly decorated homes and to work in their expansive, well plotted fields and orchards.
"We're doing logarithmic differentiation today," my mother says, slamming her own Calculus book down onto the table. Kaya's working on y-intercept graphing equations and I can't help but feel jealous of the easier math she has to do. Then again, when I was learning Pre-Algebra, I found it extremely difficult. At least Kaya seems to find arithmetic easier to understand than I do.
My pencil scratches across the paper Mom gives me to write on, and the night trickles by slowly as I slog through a lesson on logarithmic differentiation from Mom. She tries to make it interesting but it's like trying to pick up a whole barrel of apples after you've spilled them down the hillside; it's just not going to happen. After an hour of struggling through the lesson Mom finally relents, and lets me put away my arithmetic book. The tantalizing scent of beef stew drifts from the kitchen, where Alessandra has been working diligently to make dinner. Albert and Roote come in as we're cleaning up our math supplies, their hands muddy from the barrels. They wash them in the giant stainless steel kitchen sink, one of the few things my parents added to the house when they moved her, poor newlyweds, only 17 the both of them. The thought of my father makes me inhale slowly. He died a while ago, when I was 10, from tuberculosis. There's cures for it I'm sure, but farms are far apart, and the only real doctors are in Lima and the other bigger cities. We're hundreds of miles from a big city out here. The county doctor came, but the only thing he's good for is treating colds, the flu, strep throat, and taking care of open wounds. His skill set doesn't cover tuberculosis; after all, he's not a Capitol certified doctor, just a country man who learned from his father the arbitrary country ways to care for the sick.
It's alright that my father died. If he hadn't, I know something worse would've happened. A tree would've crushed Kaya and Mom, or Albert and Roote would be murdered, or maybe we'd lose the entire farm to the Capitol because we couldn't pay taxes. Something worse could always happen, but my father prevented anything else terrible from happening to us when he died. After that, that was the one terrible event that happens in everyone's lives. I miss him, but I'm thankful that that was the worst thing that will happen to me. I won't be struck by lightning, my husband won't die in a house fire, and I won't have a miscarriage. I'll never be arrested, robbed, raped, or assaulted. I'll never be Reaped, because Snow almighty knows that being Reaped is the worst fate there is in Panem, even worse than house foreclosure and assault and lightning and the loss of family to the cold claws of death. Nothing is as bad as the Hunger Games, but even they happen for a reason. Everything happens for a reason. At least the families that lose tributes never have to face darkness ever again.
Everyone sits down at the table, and Alessandra walks around and pours beef stew into the white porcelain bowls Mom has set out. I use my tarnished silver spoon to shovel the soup, gulp by gulp, into my mouth. I'm hungry and tired, and beef stew is always delicious, the beef a couple of days old from the slaughterhouses of Ten next door, the vegetables and broth right here from our farm. I smile at the people congregated at the table, and my eyes skip over to the empty chair at one head of the table, where my father used to sit. My mother sits at the other head of the table. His loss is still there, always there.
Everything happens for a reason. That's just the way it is.
I won't just survive
Oh, you will see me thrive
Can't write my story
I'm beyond the archetype
I won't just conform
No matter how you shake my core
'Cause my roots, they run deep, oh
Oh, ye of so little faith
Don't doubt it, don't doubt it
Victory is in my veins
I know it, I know it
And I will not negotiate
I'll fight it, I'll fight it
I will transform
Omri Plower, 18
District 11 Resident
Laborer and Student at Alahee Village School
I keep my head low as my eyes flash to the paper laying on the desk in front of me. I pick up my pencil and then begin scanning the instructions carefully before jotting down the answer to the first question:
When were the Hunger Games instituted?
It's the Preliminary Reapings today in Alahee, our small little farming village in the middle of nowhere in Eleven, at six tonight, so of course the teachers are flooding us with trivia and facts all about the Hunger Games. The Prelim Reapings are sort of a holiday in Eleven; there's zero chance either of our prospective tributes will be selected in the full Reaping after they get sent to Lima, where thousands of kids from across the District end up. People party and eat, and our female and male tributes are the king and queen of the school dance, which is held tonight. I don't have a date, unlike the kids in the front row.
I turn my attention back to the post test. Mr. Schapelle, the teacher for all of us Seniors, has been lecturing about the Hunger Games all day. I listened sometimes and didn't listen other times, but I already know everything he talked about today. You don't really learn much in Alahee after ninth or tenth grade. There's no point in teaching most of us Calculus or Pre Dark Days Capitolian Literature. A gaggle of young farmers aren't going to have any use for that stuff in their heads. The really smart ones that want to learn everything get taught by the pretty Ms. Luetis. She's a good woman.
As I work, my gaze keeps flicking up to the front row. Mr. Schapelle lets us select our seats in the Senior year, saying we're mature enough to choose our own seats. And, anyway, it's easy enough to quiet down sixteen Seniors in one room when you have the loud, booming voice of Mr. Schapelle.
We've naturally organized ourselves into groups. In the front row are the popular kids. Killian Sprouse, the grandson of Alahee's Mayor. The Carlyle twins, Widdon and Gwenyth, whose parents have a huge inheritance from Pre-Dark Days. And then there's also Sloane Gallus, the local bad girl and daughter of one of Alahee's four Peacekeepers, who are all laid back drunkards who don't care what we do.
The second row are their close followers. Miri, Tanya, Houston, Gabe. Miri's mother is the 4th grade teacher, Tanya and Houston's parents are field supervisors, and Gabe is a normal kid with normal parents who happens to be a good kissup and a good looker. I sit in the third row along with another follower, Giana Hallen, who sits on my left. On my right is another nice pushover type of kid, a girl named Lidia Wynthrop. She's pretty but quiet, and lets everyone walk all over her, sort of like how people do with me. Next to Lidia is a super smart kid a year younger than us named Samgee Unius. He's super smart and pretty nice and would be front row material in the Junior year, but he was too late entering our class, in our Sophomore year, to reach the front row. In the back row are Sarah, Wheaton, Clarynce, and Imelia, the deadbeats. Sarah's mother is the town whore, Wheaton is an ugly orphan who likes to steal, Clarynce's family is so poor that he looks like he's already dead from starvation, and Imelia is quiet and spunky, always drawing in one of her notebooks and singing strange songs in a high voice. The fourth row is the row for social dropouts. If I was ever in the fourth row, I would really hate myself. I feel pity for those behind me in that row, although none of them seem to mind being back there. Sarah is always fixing her overdone makeup, Wheaton is always playing with some trinket, Clarynce stares off into space with a small smile, and Imelia draws and hums her songs and glares at the front row. I wish I was like Imelia, able to hate the front row and not feel reverence towards them. I wish I was like Killian, strong and handsome and rich and well known and popular, the ruler of the 22nd Senior Class of Alahee Village School, Home of the Huskies. We don't have any sports or any extracurriculars; we only have twelve teachers, two janitors, and a principal that rules over all sixteen schools in Tuskgee County, one of Eleven's seventy six counties and is never here. Our school is a speck on the space time continuum, Alahee just a smidge larger, but this school, this little village, is my entire world, and I want to be well known here. I don't want to be another pushover sitting in the third row, the millionth pushover to sit at this desk through generations of people entering this room and sitting down. There are front rowers, second rowers, third rowers, fourth rowers. Everyone else yearns to sit in the front; I wonder what the front rowers want. Do they crave to sit in my seat, looking at the back of the heads of the front rowers longingly? Why would they ever yearn for that, though? Who wouldn't want to be special and popular? I want to be like that.
The end of the day comes soon enough, and we turn in our post tests. It's almost the end of the year; school quits in awkward spots for the planting and the harvest and such, so we run school through June. It's the last week of June, at the end of this week school will be over, and I will be free of the classroom and its rows, and I will never have to talk to anyone from school ever again. But I need to make a statement to them. I need them to remember me as more than Omri Plower, the third row boy pushover who sat quietly for twelve years in the too hot school with a too polite smile, giving them answers to homework and helping them carry things. I need them to remember me for the person I want to be. It's not who I am deep down inside, it's who I want to be, who I yearn to be. I need them to see the person I crave to be. I need them to see what shall be the purest form of Omri Plower.
I walk home alone, my beat up baby blue book bag barely held together, one of the straps frayed and about to snap. Good thing I won't need it soon. When I get home, I set down my bag gingerly next to the entrance. My mother and I's small house has one room; we separate our beds and the toilet and shower from the kitchen/living room with thick canvas curtains my mother found a long time ago, before I was born.
It's just my mother and I. She's already working at the rusty stove, boiling a pot of water she must have already fetched from the well at the center of town. I grab the box of noodles and the marinara sauce we bought at the singular grocery store in Alahee three days ago just for this special night. I pour the dry, rubbery pasta, made in Nine, into the pot. My mother watches the pasta boil and soften as I part the curtains around my bed. I open my dresser, and pull out my dress clothes, a new pair of khakis after my old ones got dirty from the last Prelim Reaping, and a cornflower blue dress shirt that was my father's before he passed.
I head out, all dressed up, to see my mother pouring the pasta into two earthenware bowls. She pours the sauce over them, and then sprinkles some cheese she bought from Mrs. Flores, our nearest neighbor, who makes cheese, over the sauced pasta. She hands me my bowl and a fork, and I dig in once she sits down next to me with her own set of cutlery. Soon our delicious, special dinner is all gone, and it's nearing six. We walk hand in hand to the town square. My mother's willowy and gaunt even though we have enough to eat usually; we both work, she just got today off and I got my after school shift off as well due to the holiday of sorts. She's been broken and quiet, wistful, ever since my father died when I was 3, so this is how my mother has always been to me. I squeeze her hand as we reach the square, and she kisses me on the top of my head before I go off to the pens.
My finger is pricked, and then rubbed on a piece of paper next to my name by the Mayor's elderly wife, Mrs. Henrietta Sprouse. I walk over to the eighteen year old boys pen to find the boys from school's Senior class minus Samgee, who stands in the 17 year old pen behind us. Widdon and Killian joke loudly, Houston and Gabe try to insert themselves into their conversation, and Clarynce and Wheaton stand at the back of the too spacious pen, Wheaton fiddling with an ornament of some sort, Clarynce staring blankly at the stage as Mayor Harold Sprouse takes the stage along with our town's "Escort", the prettiest woman in town and the Mayor's daughter, Killian's mother, Mrs. Lorena Sprouse. She makes a short speech about how much she loves Alahee and our village's bravery before going over the the bowls. 102 slips in the boy bowl, 106 in the girl bowl. She starts with girls.
"Lidia Wynthrop!" Lidia wobbles out of the pen, and takes the stage. It's customary to let the tribute selected be the tribute, but I don't plan on that. I need to show them all that I'm more than the little boy cowering in the third row. I need to show them who I am. I won't have much chance of being selected at the actual Reaping, after all, with thousands of kids to pick from. And I'm as strong as an ox from my work in the fields, and ever since I concocted this plan at fifteen years of age, I've been practicing throwing knives that I bought off a traveling merchant. If I do get picked, I'll actually have a legitimate chance. I'm about the equivalent of a District Eleven Career, if you're looking at it like that. If it was the real Reaping, everyone would be waiting with bated breath, but everyone chatters quietly about the party afterwards as Mrs. Lorena Sprouse selects the male.
"Clarynce Hogan!" Clarynce is startled out of his trance, but I spring forward.
"I, Omri Plower, volunteer!" I shout confidently, strutting onto the stage, and I see the shocked faces of everyone. Even if it's only for a second, they see me, they really see me. Even if it's only for a second, they know who I am.
For a second, I sit in the front row with Lidia, and it feels so damn good.
A/N: Today we had Soya and Omri, courtesy of IlluminatingSpirit and DaughterOfTigris! Thanks for this fun pair!
May have gone a little overboard on Omri? I dunno.
Okay, just one thing I want to say. I keep mentioning lengths just because I don't want you guys to think that someone with a longer POV is one I like better. That isn't necessarily true, and those with the longest POVs don't have a better chance of Victory. I'll be honest, I've selected some Bloodbath tributes since I got zip Bloodbath tributes xD I also have my Top 6, and any of them can turn out the Victor although I think I have one selected to be my Victor. But, then again, let's look at Oceanside. While Serephina was my Victor for a long time, Chen, Caitlin, and Catherine for god's sakes were also my Victor for a good chunk of time, and Hailea, Steale, and Holly all died in the first 3 days in the first draft of the Games but ended up making it to Top 8. So yeah. Don't worry. Things change with me I'm so damn indecisive and I get soooo attached to tributes I will probably cry more than you when they die xD
Thanks for supporting me against haters y'all! You are the best!
I'm also about to break down because we're at 199 reviews. With this chapter, we'll surpass 203 reviews for sure, the number of reviews we had on the entirety, the WHOLE GODDAMN ENTIRETY, of Oceanside! That is just insane, and I love you all so much. (Almost as much as I love worldbuiling ;)
Who did you like better, Soya or Omri? Overall thoughts on this pair? Predicted placements? Thoughts on the writing?
P.S. Platrium, I cannot wait to see your favorites and not favorites! xD
P.P.S. Who will claim the lucky 200th review?
P.P.P.S. Should I start doing trivia questions about this Games and Oceanside just for fun?
P.P.P.P.S. I need help! Should I do a sponsor system!?
P.P.P.P.P.S I have too many postscripts xD
Until Next Time,
Tracee