Four
The vision of our mentor trying to rise out of the slippery vile stuff from his stomach is rather comical, but it's mostly pathetic and kind of sad. The reek of vomit and raw spirits almost brings my dinner up. Rory and I exchange a glance. My healer instincts speak louder, so I take one of Haymitch's arms. Rory, to my relief, takes the other one and we both help him to his feet.
"I tripped?" Haymitch asks. "Smells bad." He wipes his hand on his nose, smearing his face with vomit.
"Let's go back to your room, shall we?" I ask him. "There you can clean up a bit. How about that?"
Haymitch doesn't answer. Rory and I make an effort to carry him back to his compartment. Poor Rory does it all by himself, because I'm not as strong as he is. We haul him into the bathtub and turn the shower on him. He hardly notices.
"I take it from here." I tell Rory. I'm not strange to naked bodies. After all, when you work as a healer, you see pretty nasty things. Stripping down Haymitch, washing the vomit out of his chest hair, and tucking him into bed aren't much of a challenge to me. Plus, I don't want to leave him with the Capitol people.
But Rory shakes his head. "No, no, I do it. It won't be a pretty sight."
Rory can be very headstrong when he likes, so I don't try to change his mind. I know I won't be able to. "Together, then," I suggest. He doesn't say otherwise.
He and I clean Haymitch up. The sour smell of vomit is gone and we put Haymitch on his bed. He's immediately snoring.
The train stops. Rory and I say goodbye vaguely and enter our compartments. I'm curious to see why the train stopped, so take a look through the window. We're pausing at a platform to refuel. By the track, I see a patch of dandelions.
This reminds me of years ago. When I was seven, Katniss came home and grabbed my hand and a bucket and headed to the Meadow. It was dotted with the golden-headed weeds. Dandelions. After we'd harvested those, we scrounged along inside the fence for probably a mile until we'd filled the bucket with the dandelion greens, stems, and flowers. That night, we gorged ourselves on dandelion salad and the rest of the bakery bread.
"What else?" I'd asked Katniss. "What other food can we find?"
"All kinds of things," she promised me. "I just have to remember them."
My mother had a book she'd brought with her from the apothecary shop. The pages were made of old parchment and covered in ink drawings of plants. Neat handwritten blocks told their names, where to gather them, when they came in bloom, their medical uses. But my father added other entries to the book. Plants for eating, not healing. Dandelions, pokeweed, wild onions, pines. Katniss and I spent the rest of the night poring over those pages.
The next day, Katniss was off to hunt. It was the first time she did that without my dad. But she came back home with a dead rabbit. We hadn't had meat in months. The sight of the rabbit seemed to stir something in my mother. She roused herself, skinned the carcass, and made a stew with the meat and some more greens I had gathered. Then she acted confused and went back to bed, but when the stew was done, we made her eat a bowl.
The woods became our savior. Katniss was determined to feed us. She stole eggs from nests, caught fish in nets, sometimes managed to shoot a squirrel or rabbit for stew, and gathered the various plants that sprung up beneath her feet. She kept us alive.
On May 8th, when Katniss turned twelve, she signed up for tesserae. She began to trade things at the Hob.
Slowly, my mother returned to us. She began to clean and cook and preserve some of the food Katniss brought in for winter. People traded us or paid money for her medical remedies. One day, I heard her singing.
I was thrilled to have her back, but Katniss never trusted her again. I'm sure that a part of her even hated our mother. I forgave Mom, but Katniss had taken a step back from her and nothing was ever the same between them again.
I can only hope that those two will set things right. It's my biggest wish.
The train begins to move again, so I have to close the window. I imagine my home. What are my mother and Katniss doing now? Are they sitting together at our living room, watching the recap of the day's events on the battered old TV that sits on the table against the wall? Or are they at opposite places of the house, only to face each other when it's completely necessary?
Imagining my home makes me ache with loneliness. This day has been endless. Today's morning seems to have happened a lifetime ago.
I don't even bother in changing my clothes. I climb into bed, still wearing the yellow dress. The sheets are made of soft, silky fabric. I don't even have time to feel sad; I'm already sleeping.
Gray light is leaking through the curtains when I wake up. My heart is racing, but I don't know why. Maybe I had a nightmare. I hear Effie Trinket's voice, calling me to rise. "Up, up, up! It's going to be a big, big, big day!"
I don't want to put another outfit on, so I remain with the yellow dress. I hold onto my primrose pendant and it gives me strength.
I slept in the two braids my mother did for the reaping and I just leave it up. We can't be far from the Capitol now. I don't know what to think about this.
As I enter the dining car, I see a very odd scene. Effie is muttering obscenities under her breath while Haymitch, with his face puffy and red from the previous day's indulgences, is chuckling. Rory just sits there, staring at his breakfast.
"Sit down! Sit down!" says Haymitch, waving me over. The moment I slide into my chair I'm served an enormous platter of food. Eggs, ham, piles of fried potatoes. A tureen of fruit sits in ice to keep it chilled. The basket of rolls they set before me would keep my family going for a week. There's an elegant glass of orange juice.
I eat as quickly and politely as I can, and I finish off my meal while everyone is still eating, so I analyze their eating habits. Not to judge them, but to have something to do. Effie eats like a dame, with her legs crossed and impeccable manners. Rory eats like he'll never see food again, which is relevant because our families hardly ever have something to eat, unless Gale and Katniss bring food home. I'm not bothered by Rory's manners at all. On the contrary; it makes me like him even more. As for Haymitch, well… he's already drinking. Maybe he's entirely hopeless, because Rory and I don't stand a chance. I can't blame him.
"So, mentor," I say, "do you have some advice to give us?"
Haymitch puts down his glass, filled with an alcoholic drink. "Look, we all know that twelve-year-olds never win Games. So accept your fate and I accept mine."
I sigh, but I don't complain. I was waiting for this kind of attitude when I saw him at the reaping. The only thing I can think of is what he may have seen in the Games he participated (and won) that made him use alcohol as a painkiller.
"So you won't even try to help us because we're already dead?" Rory asks angrily.
Haymitch looks at him, studying his face. Maybe he thinks that Rory has a slim chance to survive at least the bloodbath at the Cornucopia, because he says, "All right, all right, I owe you a try. Be it, then." He sighs. "In a few minutes, we'll be pulling into the station. You'll be put in the hands of your stylists. You're not going to like what they do to you. But no matter what it is, don't resist."
"But–" Rory begins.
"No buts. Don't resist," says Haymitch. And he leaves the car. Just like that. As the door swings shut behind him, the car goes dark. There are still a few lights inside, but outside it's as if night has fallen again. I realize we must be in the tunnel that runs up through the mountains into the Capitol. The mountains form a natural barrier between the Capitol and the eastern districts. It is almost impossible to enter from the east except through the tunnels. This geographical advantage was a major factor in the districts losing the war that led to my being a tribute today. Since the rebels had to scale the mountains, they were easy targets for the Capitol's air forces.
The train finally begins to slow and suddenly bright light floods the compartment. Both Rory and I run to the window to see what we've only seen on television, the Capitol, the ruling city of Panem. We watch the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces with artificial colors.
We stop at the station. And I realize that more than one of these artificial people may be part of my prep team. With this grim thought, I follow Rory out of the train and step into the grounds of the Capitol.