a quiet little
cool-headed, warm-hearted
whisper of a thing

Emerson Thierry (12)

District Eleven

The morning of the reaping was surprisingly chilly. Emerson never wore jackets to reapings before, because it was usually sunshiney and warm this time of the year. She hadn't wanted to wear one this year. It was her first year in the ropes—what they called those of reaping age in Eleven—and she didn't want to be in a jacket. She didn't know why. Maybe she was just being irrational because she was walking to the square for her first reaping.

Mom stood at her side as she always did during the reaping years, this close to snatching her hand up. Emerson wouldn't blame her, and she didn't think she'd pull her hand away, so maybe Mom just thought she was old enough to be embarrassed by it. But she wasn't old enough not to be scared anymore.

She wished it wasn't always so silent on the way to the square. Before, it was a little bit easier, but it was still so solemn. They would walk along in silence for all the people of age who were so scared they couldn't think of conversation. Now, their silence was an indication of their own fear, and Emerson didn't like sitting in it, sticky like glue.

She looked down at the ground and watched her feet hit the concrete for each step that they moved forward. She stepped down harder than normal so she could hear the slaps, wanting to distract herself with something. After a moment of this, her mom threw her a look, and she let out a breath and quieted down. Immediately Mom looked guilty, but Emerson didn't know how to tell her she didn't care.

It seemed like everything for the past couple of days just sent Mom and Dad into hysterics. Every little thing that seemed to upset Emerson was a big deal to them anymore, like they had to keep her happy as they led up to the reaping. It didn't make sense, and it was really stifling, and it only reminded her more of what was coming up. She knew that they were just trying their best, and she wasn't going to ask them to stop, but she couldn't wait to breathe in free air again.

"Sonny," Mom said, and Emerson looked up to see that the square was now in sight. She hadn't realized how close they were to being there. The entire walk there, it was like they were hundreds of miles away, and it would be forever before they finally arrived. But now they were close, and Mom and Dad were stopping, looking down at her. Mom put her hands on Emerson's shoulders, and she knew exactly what this meant without having to hear it said. Mom loved her, be brave, the prick at registration doesn't hurt that much, be a good girl.

Emerson had to blink and looked up at the cloudy sky for a moment to keep herself from crying. She didn't want to walk up to all the others just this year in the ropes, the ones who were dealing better, or at least quieter, with tears streaming down her face. She was going to be strong, okay, she was going to be strong.

"Love you, honey," Dad said, a sad smile on his face. When Mom stepped away, he moved forward and put a hand on the side of her face. He watched her for a second, and she wished she could smile back, but she couldn't. "Okay, go on."

She nodded slowly and turned around, walking over to the lines. There was a much-older boy in front of her, towering over her in height, and for some reason she was even more overwhelmed by him. She started wringing her hands together in front of her and looking around, hoping to find someone she knew among all the other kids—hopefully Odessa, and she and her best friend could be terrified to death together.

She turned to her other side to look around at the kids in the other line, and saw Odessa hurrying over to her as she did. No one minded when she cut in front of the people who had already gotten behind Emerson. There were a lot of people ignoring the rules of line-waiting in favor of being able to stand next to their friends, especially the younger ones like them.

"Emerson," she said, stress evident in her movements and voice, and Emerson swallowed. Odessa was the calm one between the two of them—not that she expected her best friend to keep her cool at the reaping, but it still didn't spell well for how Emerson was going to handle all of this. She just wanted to go home so badly it ached in her bones, like she could feel the exact way she could be laying in bed on a day off with no school and no need to work the fields with her mom. A lazy day sat in her vision in some alternate universe, and she was definitely jealous of whatever alternate Emerson was laying there, blissfully unaware of what this one was going through.

Odessa ended up taking Emerson's hand, and the two of them felt each other shake as they slowly moved forward in line. The process went quickly, so it was almost a continuous step forward, but there were also so many kids that they had to push through. Emerson had never noticed before how massive the square was, and how packed the square was. Outside of the ropes, her parents always held her hand so tightly she felt like her bones were going to be crushed to powder, making sure that she didn't get lost in the almost shoulder-to-shoulder packed crowd, trying to squeeze every single member of District Eleven into one large area. It was a feat that would almost be impressive for the planning it would take if it didn't go along with this particular event.

"What do you think it'd be like to live on the moon?" Odessa asked eventually, which was one of their games to feel better when they were both worried about something, like a test at school. Emerson immediately relaxed, looking up at the cloudy sky and thinking. Odessa thought for just a moment, too, before slipping into her ideas. "I think the Capitol would try to make it a spectacle. Well, more than going to the moon already would be."

Emerson smiled, leaning toward Odessa a little bit with excitement as she decided she knew what it would be like. "They'd turn it into Candyland or something. They'd put giant lollipops up in the ground to line the paths, and chocolate bars would float through the sky because of the no-gravity," she told Odessa, like an informed scholar.

"Is that how the gravity works there?" Odessa asked.

Emerson looked over at her and a little smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "I don't know. I just know it's—" She did one big motion, dialing herself down since everyone else around them was gloomy and they had just been moments before, but she got the gist of it across to Odessa well enough.

"Stop it," her friend told her, hand over her face as she suppressed giggles.

The two of them had to look away from each other the entire way up to the front of the line, and every time they accidentally snuck a glance, they'd burst into silent giggles, faces red as they tried to stop them.

Emerson got up to the official, who took her name and blood with a little poke to her finger that felt a little bit like she'd picked up a rose by its thorns, but it didn't stay hurting for long. She pressed a cotton ball to it and walked to her section of the ropes, standing right in the front, where she nearly had to turn her neck to look up and see all the preparations they were making onstage. Odessa joined her soon, both of them soaking up the little bit of blood with a cotton ball over their still vaguely-stinging fingers. She'd seen the square afterward, when nearly everyone had left, and it was just littered with people dropping their cotton balls, and eventually someone came and swept them all up.

"Do you think everyone hates us because we were giggling at the reaping?" Emerson asked once Odessa was standing next to her, watching people bring out the reaping bowls and place them on either side of their escort.

Odessa frowned thoughtfully and shook her head. "No." She turned around, her eyes searching the people settling into place, and nodded toward a couple of people stifling laughter in the boys' section. "See, look. We're just trying to stay positive."

"And not worry ourselves to death," Emerson said. By now, if Odessa weren't with her, she would have withered away from the stress of just this one afternoon.

Emerson shrunk to half her size when the mayor stepped up to speak. She looked over and saw that Odessa had brought her arms in closer to her, and she was twisting her fingers together against her chest. Shrinking in as far down as Emerson was.

They were right up front, but no one really cared what the twelve-year-olds did. Everyone knew how scared they were, so when she shut her eyes and started breathing in slowly, she was sure no one around them cared.

She was in the orchards now, running through with Odessa, and neither of them were supposed to be there. They were looking around to make sure no one would find them, giggling as they went to the best climbing tree. Neither of them worked there, but a lot of kids snuck in to Mr. Graye's orchard for climbing the tallest trees and snagging some of the apples. It was right next to the woods on the edge of the fence, so it wasn't difficult to slip in, although there was a lot of running and sneaking around to do in the expanse between woods and orchard. But Odessa and Emerson were small, and had only ever been caught once. Coincidentally, that was the first time they'd ever done it, and now they were back for a sneaky second go of it.

But this was only a memory, and she could only hear the whispers of what Odessa said to her. Their giggles were background noise to the mayor's voice booming all around her like a too-hot blanket she couldn't get out from underneath. She wanted to embrace the safe past, before she was ever eligible for the Games.

She only opened her eyes again when the mayor was done speaking, getting a brief glimpse of Islie Jon's entrance. She stood up, her heels clacking along the stage and her arms just slightly perched outward, like the wings of a bird seconds away from taking flight.

Emerson wished that their escort seemed a little more approachable. She tried not to judge the Capitolites because of the Games, knowing that none of them could stop them from happening, and they probably didn't know any better. When she was little, before she was ever taught otherwise, she didn't understand the Games either. If she was just taught to embrace them, like Careers or Capitolites, she was sure she would. But people like Islie Jon made that difficult. She sauntered on the stage like she was putting on a show, desperate for the spotlight she had here. And from what Emerson had seen in other Games, Islie Jon was more dramaticized than so many of the other parts of the Games. She flaunted herself, vying for attention to be taken away from the kids who needed sponsorship. She just seemed… mean. Emerson didn't like her.

"I've got so much faith in this year," Islie said, shrill voice and bright eyes and Emerson didn't like to listen to her. She never said she had faith in District Eleven. Emerson wasn't sure if she believed that, but she'd heard someone saying so at school. That she only ever said she was excited for the Games, that she thought it would be a good Games. But she never seemed to care about Eleven. Maybe she was so focused on making a show of herself, she forgot then that she had to make a show of the Games, that she had to at least pretend to care about Eleven. Emerson wished she would. She didn't like thinking that there would be tributes going into the Games with a cocky, uncaring escort, even if the mentor had always seemed warm.

Reapings had always been a whirlwind that she hadn't been fascinated in after she realized what they were for. When she was younger, it was so many people, and she knew it was bad—everyone knew from the start that it was a bad thing, a scary thing—but she had also hung onto every word of the escort, the mentor, the mayor. Everyone up on that stage felt a million miles away from her when she was first old enough to be aware, like they were in another universe she couldn't quite breach even if she wanted to. Almost like she was watching television happen in real life—which, she supposed now, she kind of was. This was being broadcast as the escort spoke about the excitement of this year. People around Panem were witnessing this unfold on their screens, and she was here. But that wasn't something that made her interested anymore like it had then. It was something that just made her a little sick to her stomach.

The boy who got reaped was fifteen and looked like he spent long hours in the fields. He was tall and light-skinned, on the skinny side from hunger but with a strength to his step. Emerson always felt like she had whole portraits painted in her mind of the tributes after they were reaped, pressed into the back of her eyelids—especially after she had to watch them die. Already she could tell that this boy, Aisa Powell, was going to be in-between her blinks. Odessa inched a little closer to her, both of the anticipating the girls' reaping.

But instead of slipping into it, there was a volunteer. Emerson jerked her head over to the boys' side with all of the other surprised girls as they watched a boy step out from the section just behind Aisa Powell's—a sixteen-year-old, tall, dark reddish hair, brown skin, stepping out with purpose, even if fearful. But this wasn't frantic, the volunteering of someone who wanted to protect the reaped. She watched as he walked up toward the stage, replacing Aisa, and noticed the mayor's face as he did. Mayor Griffith looked horrified to his core, face twisted painfully and hands gripping the armrests of the chairs as if he was trying to force himself to stay in his spot.

Oh. She guessed it before the boy told his name to Islie. "Icho Griffith," he said, and a murmur ran through the crowd. This was different—not only was the volunteer something new, but it was the mayor's fucking son standing up on that stage. Emerson didn't like this at all. Now if he died, she would see the mayor's hollow face up on the stage every year.

"Why would he do that?" Odessa asked, her voice low and only reaching Emerson. People were starting to quiet down, as Islie moved in to talking about that "excitement!" and bounced over to the girls' bowl. "It didn't look like he knew that boy."

Emerson was glad she hadn't made that up in her head, but she still didn't know the answer. She wanted to tell Odessa to hush; it felt like speaking while everyone was getting quiet would draw attention to them. And she knew that that wasn't how a person was reaped, but… she didn't want attention to be on her. Not from anyone—not the district, not the escort, not whatever god was in the sky. She just wanted to disappear until this reaping was over.

"Doesn't matter," Emerson told her, but she knew it really did. It meant something to both of them. She knew that Odessa tried not to, but she got just as upset when the Games rolled around as everyone else did, and the reasons why people were dying always mattered. At least with the reaping it was random. With twelve-year-olds, the randomness seemed worse, really, but with volunteers… it all seemed bad.

She watched as a name was delicately plucked out of the bowl, read over once, twice for good measure, and—

"Emerson Thi…" Emerson swallowed down her entire soul in one big gulp. The escort was sounding out her name. Her name. "Emerson Thierry, I believe. Emerson Thierry?"

She ran a hand down her shirt on instinct, straightening out any wrinkles before she was up on stage. She couldn't look at Odessa again, shaking hard as she walked. She thought she was going to fall as she had to lift her feet up to walk up the stairs. Why couldn't there be a girl out in the crowd who thought to volunteer for her for no reason at all? She looked up at the boy who was now her district partner, and he was maybe the only thing keeping her from crying.

They were supposed to shake hands, so he stepped toward her and held his hand out before Islie Jon had even congratulated her, or whatever she was about to say. She shook it, feeling how warm his hands were, how certain his grip was. "It's okay," he told her, with a sad smile in his light eyes.

She wasn't stupid. She knew it wasn't really okay, but some part of her was tricked into believing him.

this took forever it's ok we're almost done lads... 4 more left and then hopefully ill update faster bc they'll be more fun chapters. no chapter questions bc i'm sleepy