71.
Johanna is 16 when she is reaped, 17 by the time she is in the arena, but she looks younger. She is short, and slight, and she looks so afraid all the time, always crying or about to cry, with sheets of long red brown hair covering most of her face. No one pays any attention to her, not the other tributes, not the commentators, the Gamesmakers, the viewers, not even her own mentor. It doesn't change in the arena. She grabs a pack and a pair of axes and gets out of the Cornucopia area without anyone else sparing her a second glance.
When she is alone in the windswept, craggy wilderness, she carefully hacks off all her hair with the razor sharp edge of one of her axes, and the face that she reveals to Panem is now dry eyed, sharply intelligent, older. There are only 5 tributes left by the time anyone pays attention to Johanna, who has been quietly surviving on the edges of the arena, biding her time. The Gamesmakers have been pushing them all closer and closer together, making the area with any vegetation smaller and smaller, until the 5 of them are hunting each other in a tiny oasis among a sea of unforgiving rock.
Now there was no hesitation in the way Johanna held herself, held her axes, and for the first time, Panem saw what Johanna really was, electric hatred sparking from her eyes, taut muscles, and axes that were extensions of her own body. Extensions that she buried with vicious fervor into the bodies of the four remaining tributes, one after the other, seemingly impervious to the pain of the many wounds that were inflicted on her, until she collapsed, panting, into the rocks, blood obscuring one side of her face and dripping down her leg.
The energy drained out of her body, and when the hovercraft picked her up, the winner of the 71st Hunger Games, she was crouched over her axe, trying to rub the blood and viscera off of it in the tiny ribbon of dirt between two boulders, succeeding only in covering it with her own hot blood.
She gets put back together, makes it through the interviews and the victory banquet. Her team dresses her differently now, pairing her new short hair with plunging backs and dramatic jewelry. She has just as many conversations about her hair – they are so concerned about her damned hair – as about her strategic win. Both conversations are laced with a false admiration that fills her with rage, makes her want to scream at these people who hate anything they can't predict and control. The look that President Snow gives her when he places the Victor crown on her head scares her, freezes her inside even as she looks boldly back at him.
She goes back to District 7, moves with her father and brother into a big house in Victor's Village and tries to remember what it was like to be her.
Johanna never had too many friends, but she finds that she can't deal with anyone any more, and everyone drifts away to become someone she knew once. She doesn't know is she pushes them away or if they push her away, but the things that interest them, that used to interest her, don't anymore. And she finds that there is no reason now to fake it, to pretend, to just be nice.
She loves her family, fiercely, but they were never much for talking, and she finds she has trouble dealing even with them. They are the same but different. Her father still goes to work in the forest every day even though he doesn't have to meet the quotas any more, but he is even quieter than he was before, looks older, as if something is destroying him slowly from the inside.
She spends more and more time alone in the forest, hacking her rage into the trees, working her body to exhaustion, and hoping that she will be able to sleep.
She fills her house with things, beautiful things, a couple of which she makes herself, working with her brother to smooth and coax the fine wood from the saw mill into elegant, graceful chairs. It is as whole as she felt since the games, working silently with her brother in the shop on something they never would have been able to make before, not with both of them working full time, not out of solid walnut. One day she flings herself into his arms, surrounded by the familiar smell of sawdust and hot metal, clinging to him with the desperation of a drowning person, and he hugs her back, just as hard, blinking back tears.
On the last stop of her Victory tour, Snow tells her what she already knew, that the Capitol hates an upset, hates the underdog, and that a lot of people, important people, lost a lot of money on her games. But he tells her something new too, that there are ways to pay some of them back, favors to bestow.
"And if I refuse?" she spits back at him, the same electricity from the arena sparking in her eyes.
The president seems to warm himself on her rage, and just calmly readjusts the rose in his lapel as he replies.
"Did you ever wonder why Haymitch has no family?"
He looks at her significantly as the truth registers on her face.
She spins and walks out of the room, murderous rage filling her body. She laughs maniacally at the fact that she thought her life would be different after winning, that she would be out from under control of the Capitol. She can see the scared confusion on the faces of the guards and Avoxes that she passes on her way out of the presidential mansion, but it only makes her laugh more. They have no idea.
She promises herself that someday, somehow, she is going to kill Snow herself as she heads back to District 7 and the tattered remains of her life.