It's the story of her life, Katniss thinks, crouched on the dingy tiles of her apartment complex's communal laundry room floor – maybe she just isn't meant to have good things.
Above her, a fly repeatedly bumps into the humming fluorescent light on the ceiling, like it's desperately trying to escape, but can't figure its way out. Katniss can relate.
She looks back down at the pile of her still-damp clothes that someone had tossed from the dryer onto a puddle of bleach on the floor. It's mostly stuff Katniss wears around the apartment. Ratty t-shirts. Underwear that no one sees these days but her. The real kicker is what happened after, when she tried to gather it all up, not yet knowing what they were sitting in. Yeah, she'd smelled the bleach, but the whole room always reeks of bleach. She didn't think anything of it until it dripped onto the front of her pants, which, up until a few minutes ago, were probably the nicest thing she's ever owned in her life. And now they're ruined.
Last weekend, she and Prim had spent an entire Saturday in the city. They browsed the bookstore all morning and then shared a small frozen hot chocolate in the cafe. Lunchtime was spent wandering around the gourmet grocery store and grazing on cheese curds, organic granola served in tiny plastic cups, a sip of mango nectar, and tart clementine slices from the tables of free samples before scouring the nearby second-hand clothing shop for diamonds in the rough. According to Prim's friend Rue, this is where rich people donated their clothes, and you could find designer pieces for a fraction of the original cost if you only searched long enough.
In a rare stroke of luck, it only took a little over an hour when Prim squealed with delight as she held up a pair of black dress pants in one triumphant fist. In Katniss's size, no less. Rich, dark wool with a gleaming silver button adorning the front. At forty-two dollars, they were more than Katniss would have normally spent on herself, but at a ninety-percent markdown, Prim wouldn't let her pass them up. "Think of it as an investment," she'd said.
Paired with a pearl-gray cardigan that Katniss got on clearance at Target and a smart white blouse she borrowed from her sister that's actually part of Prim's show choir uniform, she managed to look professional. Chic, even.
Until now. Dime-sized white splotches have already begun to form.
The door creaks open, and Katniss wills whoever it is to just go away, go away, go away.
"Katniss? You all right?"
Oh no. She recognizes that voice right away. It belongs to her next-door neighbor Peeta Mellark.
Since he moved in last year, they've exchanged hellos when passing each other in the hall, and he smiles at her in a way that makes her feel feverish and fluttery. Especially when he's still in the clothes he wears to work, dark slacks and button-down dress shirts with long sleeves that he usually rolls up past his forearms. She'll see him help carry in their neighbor Mags' groceries, hefting gigantic tubs of kitty litter – usually two at a time – like they weigh nothing. Or he'll be delivering fresh, homemade bread to Chaff, the disabled Vietnam vet who lives downstairs. And countless times Peeta has come to the door to bring back Prim's mangy cat Buttercup, who has a nasty habit of leaping from their balcony onto his, one time even knocking over his potted plants.
"You'd think I'm growing catnip instead," he said with a grin the last time it happened, about a week ago.
"Maybe you are," Katniss answered dryly. "Maybe it's all part of some plan to lure cats away from your neighbors."
It was the longest sentence she'd ever spoken to him, and his smile widened. "Right. All part of my master plan, actually. But it's just the cats belonging to my pretty neighbors. Or...just the one. Then I finally have an excuse to talk to her." He said it with such a sweet, almost shy, smile that it made Katniss want to press her cold hands to her rapidly flushing cheeks.
She smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of her t-shirt instead. "That, or you're just a serial killer in training."
He laughed – a rich, masculine, musical sound. "Stealing cats, not killing them." Buttercup hissed in response.
It was a nice encounter, but it left her feeling strangely vulnerable. It's why she doesn't want him seeing her like this right now. "I'm fine," she tells him in a voice as emotionless as an android.
He sits beside her. "Anything I can do to help?" he asks.
She motions to the fallen clothing, to the bleach stains. "Find and kill whoever did this?"
The weight of a comforting hand rests on her shoulder. Then, as if he thinks better of it, Peeta moves the hand to his own knee instead. "As much as I'd love to, uh, avenge you, I have a better idea." He gingerly lifts her laundry from the pungent liquid. "There's some fabric dye back at my apartment. I can check to see if I have anything that matches." He stands, shifting her clothes so they rest in the crook of his bare arm, then reaches to help Katniss up with his free hand. As she stands, she takes him in more fully. Instead of his usual work attire, he has on paint-stained khakis and an old t-shirt sporting the mottled remains of an iron-on that looks like it might have been a bakery's logo. She can just make out the letters K-E-R-Y, and beneath it, a golden loaf of bread.
They make smalltalk, initiated by Peeta, as they climb the two flights of stairs to their shared floor. Peeta's apartment has a layout identical to the one Katniss shares with Prim, yet it couldn't be more different. His is tidier. With freshly painted walls. His furniture matches. Her couch at home is stained and threadbare, something she fished out of the dumpster last Spring.
"Can I get you anything?" Peeta asks, a shy smile spreading across his handsome face. There seems to be more color in his cheeks than there was before. "Something to drink? I have, uh..."
She shakes her head. He's already doing her a favor. She doesn't need to take anything else from him. "No, I'm good."
"Oh...well, if you're not thirsty, I can get you something to eat. I just did some baking earlier. They say I make a mean cheese bun."
Katniss must visibly perk up at the mention of cheese, because Peeta's off to the kitchen in a flash before she can even accept. He's back in record time with a cheese-covered bun on a small plate.
"Sure, Peeta, why don't you go get me one," she deadpans.
"Sorry," he says sheepishly. He rubs the back of his neck. "I guess I'm a little over eager."
Even so, she takes the proffered plate. It looks too good to pass up, and she's too weak to refuse it now. "Thanks," she says. The first bite is soft and flaky and buttery, the cheese adding the perfect savory touch. She finishes it immediately, before they even have the chance to sit down.
"And, uh" Peeta says, "...at the risk of making things more awkward, I'm going to need you to take off your pants."
An hour and about three more cheese buns later, Katniss and Peeta are seated side by side on his couch, her wearing a too-big, but incredibly comfortable pair of Peeta's sweatpants. Her own pants are on a drying rack out on the balcony. Peeta had somehow managed to match the color with his fabric dye. When Katniss first saw the end result, they looked so perfect she could have kissed Peeta right then, but her good sense stopped her before she could do something so stupid.
She presses her finger to the last few crumbs on her plate. "How are these so good? Are you a pastry chef or something?"
"No. Not anymore, at least. My parents owned a bakery when I was a kid, and I used to help out. It went out of business a few years ago."
She thinks about those nice clothes he works in. Dress slacks. Those rolled up sleeves. "So you have some sort of office job now?" she asks.
"No." He laughs. "I teach first grade at Panem Elementary. How about you? What do you do?"
She knows he's just being polite. She asked him first. But the question makes her uncomfortable. She doesn't want to talk about her work. What is she supposed to tell him? That she works two unfulfilling jobs that she hates for a combined seventy hours a week and she's still drowning in debt? Tell him about playing FreeCell on the computer at her boring receptionist job? Or that time at Save Mart that this drunk guy threatened her with a knife because she wouldn't sell him two bottles of Jägermeister at four a.m?
Peeta flashes her a kind smile, oblivious to her inner turmoil. "Let me guess – based on how nice you look, I'd say you're some sort of high-powered executive."
She snorts. "Hardly. I had an interview this morning. But I already know I didn't get it. They basically told me I'm not qualified. It was a long shot, anyway." She tries to change the subject, anything to avoid some display of sympathy from Peeta. That's the last thing she needs. "So are your parents retired now?" she blurts out.
"Mostly," he says. "My dad sells pies out of a food truck in the summer and fall. And my mom does the book-keeping at our cousins' shoe store a couple times a week. They both like to keep busy. Especially now that my brothers and I all moved out of state."
"Oh, that's too bad."
"It's really not," he says with a laugh. "I still see them on holidays. There's always Facebook and the occasional text. How about you? Is your family scattered too?"
She should have expected that he'd ask about her family. Once again, he's just being polite. After all, she's the one who clumsily brought it up. But it's the last thing she wants to talk about. Where does she even begin?
Her childhood had started off idyllic enough. Their lack of money was more than made up for by the abundance of love. Until her father was blown to bits in a mining accident, and her mother mentally checked out for a few months. Katniss had been eleven, and Prim only seven. Katniss became the de-facto head of the household. It was Katniss who did all the grocery shopping, walking to and from the store dragging Prim's old red wagon behind her. She prepared the meals. Washed the dishes. Did the laundry. Forged her mother's signature on permission slips. She did it all with a stoicism that easily fooled Prim. And even after her mother came back to them later that year, Katniss wore her self-reliance like armor.
Katniss's mother, who'd been a med student before dropping out to raise her children, eventually got a job at a nearby hospital. It took awhile, but Katniss's relationship with her mother started to mend. The trust wasn't fully back, but Katniss worked hard to stop shrugging off her mother's attempts to – well, be a mother. It wasn't perfect, but it was good, the two of them working hard to ensure that Prim would get as normal a high school and college experience as possible.
And then in the early hours of New Year's Day two years ago, while on her way home from the night shift, a drunk driver entered the off-ramp on the freeway, slamming right into her mother's car. Neither driver survived.
Then came the news that her mother had let her life insurance lapse. Without the insurance money, paying for the funeral and living without her mother's income nearly broke them. Katniss maxed out her credit cards, got a second part-time job. Cut down her schooling to only half time until she dropped out altogether.
She doesn't want to drop this much personal information onto Peeta at once, so she just gives him the cliff notes version: her parents are dead and she's Prim's guardian. To his enormous credit, Peeta doesn't press her for details.
In the ensuing silence, Katniss fidgets and Peeta rubs the back of his head nervously until he springs out of his seat on the couch. "Would you like another cheese bun?"
She's tempted. She can barely remember when she's had food this good, and so much of it. She doesn't have a shift at Save Mart tonight, and it's not like she has to hurry home to Prim. When Katniss texted her saying she was next-door, Prim replied, Don't hurry back, followed by a winking emoji. "I should probably get going," she says nevertheless.
On the way to retrieve her pants, Katniss spots a table in another room filled with things like packages of number two pencils and eight-packs of crayons, stacks of composition notebooks, boxes of tissues piled high in a precarious tower, and economy-sized bottles of hand sanitizer. "Most people just steal pens from work," she jokes. "This is impressive."
Peeta laughs. "And next week, my plan is to disassemble everything from the playground and bring it here to decorate my apartment."
"Just what this place is missing, too. Monkey bars in the living room."
Peeta laughs and then sheepishly explains that this is for his classroom. A lot of his students can't even afford lunch, let alone school supplies. So anything that the school can't cover, he pays for out of his own pocket. Usually, though, the supplies he buys at the beginning of the year tend to run out before Christmas break. It's mesmerizing watching Peeta talk so passionately about teaching, and the welfare of his students.
They find themselves sitting down again, freshly-dyed pants forgotten, and Katniss asks what happens the rest of the year. Do they just go without? Or does Peeta fill his table with stuff then too? In the middle of the school year, when everything he purchased has run out, and he's out of extra money, he relies on crowdfunding. He brings the page up on his phone and shows Katniss the projects he has going. The first is for the basics: more pencils, crayons, notebooks, tissues, and sanitizer. The last two being especially important during cold season.
When it comes to the next project, Peeta explains how the roof at his school had leaked over the summer. Ruined the carpet in his classroom. The school patched up the roof, but didn't have the funds to replace the carpet. Peeta shows her a couple pictures, and it's honestly pretty gross. It looks like something died on it, and then someone rolled up the carcass in it, threw the whole thing in the river, and then it somehow found its way back onto the classroom floor. He shows Katniss a page with a couple large, brightly colored rugs to cover up the water damage. It's expensive and kind of a longshot that it'll get funded, but it would go a long way toward making his classroom more inviting.
Later, when Katniss is back home, she logs onto her ancient dust-collecting computer and finds Peeta's fundraisers online. She donates five dollars. It's a drop in the bucket compared to what he needs to meet his goals, but it's about all she can spare. The rent is due soon, and she still needs to fill up the gas tank and get groceries.
It's become a ritual for Katniss and Prim to stop at the gas station once a week on the way home from picking Prim up from show choir practice and, after filling up, treating themselves to cherry Icees. Today, there's only enough cash in her purse for one, so Katniss lies and tells Prim she's too full from a late lunch.
As they wait in line, Katniss tries not to let her impatience show. She hates standing around, and despite what she told Prim, she's actually famished. Prim must sense this somehow, as she extends her drink in Katniss's direction. "You want some?" she asks. "I'm kind of full, too. We had a pizza party in 5th hour." Katniss sips some of the icy beverage from the plastic straw, and it pacifies her a bit. But it's still hard not to get annoyed when they're in line behind Sae the Lottery Lady.
It looks like Sae's redeeming her winning tickets, the cashier doling out crisp twenty dollar bills only to get those same bills back when Sae decides at the last minute to purchase a stack of tickets so thick they're starting to resemble one of Prim's textbooks. Katniss glances at the time on her cell phone.
"Can we get a lottery ticket too?" Prim stage whispers to Katniss.
Ugh. She tries not to roll her eyes, lest it seem like she's passing judgment. "No," she replies simply.
"It'd be so great to win, though."
At this, Sae turns around. "You can't win if you don't play," she says with a wink. Sae should know. A couple years back she won a million dollars from a scratch-off ticket she purchased at this very gas station. It's where she buys all her lottery tickets now. It's silly, Katniss thinks. As if lightning is going to strike twice in the same place. If anything, Sae should be buying her tickets anywhere but this gas station, but the woman's nothing if not loyal.
Prim repeats her question, pressing her hands together in a pleading motion. It would actually be kind of adorable if what Prim wanted weren't so stupid.
"Fine," Katniss grumbles anyway. She roots around her purse for some loose change. She needs the last dollar in her wallet for Prim's drink. "Maybe one of the one dollar tickets," she says, though she already regrets it. A dollar could buy four bananas at the grocery store. Or a can of beans. Or a box of store brand spaghetti. All of which would be more useful than thirty seconds of hope.
Just when Katniss thought the transaction in front of her was done, Sae points out one of the twenty dollar tickets on the top row of the display, a ten-inch long rectangle of glittery gold card stock.
Katniss fishes a dime and two lint-covered nickels from the bottom of her purse. She just needs twelve more cents and she'll have a dollar. Twenty dollars, though, she thinks bitterly. On a lottery ticket. That's half a tank of gas. Or two family packs of chicken thighs when they go on sale at the market. Takeout pizza on her birthday. Twenty cans of beans. Her train of thought is interrupted by the cashier handing her something. "What?" Katniss blurts out stupidly. Her eyes cut over to Sae, whose ticket is being shoved in her direction.
"That's for you, dear," Sae says. "I've been blessed, and I hope this does the trick for you too."
Prim sits beside her in the passenger seat meticulously scratching the ticket's surface with a nickel from Katniss's purse, an intense expression on her face, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth ever-so-slightly.
Katniss almost hadn't accepted the ticket from Sae. It was too much, and they barely knew each other. Not that that mattered much to Prim. She almost knocked the old lady to the ground giving her a big bear hug. Katniss reluctantly muttered her own thank-you and dragged an excited Prim back to the car after her turn at the counter. They had more important matters to deal with. Like dinner.
There's almost no food in the apartment, but Katniss has officially crossed over from famished to hangry. They'll just have to go grocery shopping another day. In the meantime, there's always cereal at home, maybe eggs and toast or something.
"Katniss! Katniss! Pull over!"
Irritation prickles at her, but she tries to tamp it down. "I'm not taking anything to the animal hospital. And you need to stop yelling when I'm driving." That's how accidents happen, she wants to say. But she doesn't need to burden Prim with her fears. Driving has been a struggle for Katniss since their mother died. Even short trips to the high school or the gas station are stressful.
"No, Katniss! Look!" She waves the ticket wildly. "We won!"
"You have to match one of the numbers on this top line to one of the numbers down here," Prim explains to Katniss. They pulled into the first parking lot they came to, and now they're huddled around the ticket like it's a flame on a frigid night. "If you get a match, you win whatever prize is listed below it. See? There's a two up here and a two down here, and it says – "
"Five hundred thousand dollars," Katniss finishes for her, dazed.
This kind of money will change their lives. Sure, she'll lose about half of it to taxes, but she'll still have enough to finally pay off her credit card debt and her student loans. Make a savings account. Quit her horrible third shift grocery store job. Prim won't have to worry about taking out loans when she goes off to college next Fall. As impossible as it used to seem, Katniss can even go back to school and get her degree, too. She'll actually have the luxury of figuring out what she wants to do with her life and then be able to make it happen. It's like a million doors that she thought were locked forever have just opened up to her. It's a way she hasn't felt since she was eleven years old.
That night she and Prim look at college course schedules online. They point out classes the other should take, read course descriptions aloud.
"You should major in something practical, like business," Prim suggests, "but then minor in music."
Katniss laughs it off, but secretly imagines herself singing again, maybe joining one of the school's ensembles.
None of this would be possible if not for Sae's act of kindness. Katniss has never been a believer in karma or everything happening for a reason. Even still, she should do the same thing Sae did.
Peeta.
He needs to be the first person she helps. Few people deserve it more than he does.
She's so excited that after Prim goes to bed, she gets on her computer to look at Peeta's fundraising page again. There are exactly two donors so far, including hers. How excited would Peeta be if he woke up tomorrow and his projects were fully funded? She debates for a moment whether to put her name or make it anonymous. He did her a favor, so this would make them even. On the other hand, this is a much bigger favor, one that he couldn't afford to reciprocate. Better make it anonymous then. Under the comments section she simply puts: "Pay it forward."