Age 11_January
Peeta kicked his backpack into the corner along with his self-control. He was shaking from the strain of holding everything back, of keeping pity and confusion balled up tight in his gut along with slimy doubt.
He stalked through his family's living room, passed racks of fresh baked bread with crackling lacquered crusts and on into the heart of the bakery where the wood-burning ovens pulsed and breathed.
The boy stopped at the doorway and watched his father for a moment, studied the pain etched in the man's stance as he stood there, head bowed, arms spread wide with fingers clenched along the edge of the countertop. Peeta couldn't see his face, but he could almost smell his father's pain mingling with the scent of baking bread.
"Did you do it?" These were whispered words, spoken low, but Peeta stayed in the doorway. He didn't trust himself to be in the room with his father if the answer were yes.
His father turned his head just enough to see Peeta over his shoulder. "Do what?"
His fist pounded against the doorjamb. "Did you use chance to kill my match's father because he was married to yours!"
This was the first time Peeta had ever said aloud what he'd guessed.
The idea had niggled, bad tooth-like at the back of his mind ever since that first day when he saw his father watching Katniss' mother. The longing, the sadness. Everything about that first day of school was branded into Peeta's mind and that stuck out.
And something had always been off between his parents, a lack of shared smiles and warmth between them. As far as Peeta could see, they just
existing in the same place at the same time.
His father's head snapped up, already tense muscles stiffened into stone. The man grabbed a handful of flour from the plastic bin on the floor and tossed it in the air. It hung, suspended for a moment, before floating down, snow-like, in a perfect five-foot circle around him. "If you're asking questions like that, we do it in here."
An elfish circle, cast in flour, forged at the absolute edge of chance. A circle that forced the people inside to speak truth. No sound carried beyond it and no word could be repeated outside of it.
He fixed his eyes on his father. Peeta didn't want the answer to be yes, but why else would the man call a circle? He swallowed the guilt and the fear and the grief that wasn't even his and edged onto the flour disc.
"So you think I'm a murderer, now?" he yelled as soon as Peeta was inside. "And a coward too, if I used chance to cause that mine collapse."
"I think Katniss' mother is your match. I think you'd do what it takes to have her." Peeta knew he'd do anything for Katniss. He spent most of his waking hours thinking of ways to get around the binding.
"She is my match." The words were so quiet, Peeta wasn't sure he heard them. "But we choose different paths years ago."
"That doesn't answer my question." You couldn't lie in a circle, but you could dance around the truth and not really answer.
"No, I did not kill him!" The man paced the edge of the circle, leaving footprints in the flour that disappeared moments later. "You know why I never went after him?" his father asked, turning back to Peeta abruptly, glaring with a bitterness that didn't hide his relief at saying these old pent-up words. "Because I could feel how happy he made her—happier than I ever could. And that's what you do for your match, you put her first. Now all I can feel is my match grieving for another man."
Peeta closed his eyes against his father's words, shied away from imagining that kind of pain. "Then let me put my match first. Take the binding off so I can help Katniss."
"And what would you say to her, today of all days? What would make a difference?"
Peeta didn't answer him, couldn't answer him. It was so strange—how was it that he felt so much and Katniss felt nothing at all? How could they be a match if everything he felt was one-sided?
He was used to picking up bits of Katniss' emotions, used to feeling the odd shifts of joy or anger or sadness that didn't belong to him. He didn't begrudge sharing his heart with her, being a depository for her spare emotions. But now, Katniss' grief cut through him like a wind battering a mountainside, chipping off edges, carving grooves.
Something cracked inside Peeta and he sank to the flour-covered floor and watched the streaked lines his feet made through the circle. The flour swirled, absorbing the marks, making the circle whole again.
Yesterday during lunch, they'd sounded the mining accident sirens. Most of the people—students and teachers alike—had raced to the mines, some just wanted to witness the burning chaos, but almost everyone knew at least one person who spent their days mining the coal seams. Peeta had come home from school early draped in Katniss' distress.
Her grief had woken him at dawn and he had known then that her father was dead. He'd only managed to fall asleep after a dose of sleep syrup his mother had forced on him when he wouldn't eat dinner, yelling that she couldn't let him get sick because he had chores to finish.
He'd lain there breathing in and out against the rib shattering weight of her sadness, wanting to hurt somebody. And his father had seemed like a good target.
His father sat down on the flour-covered floor next to him. "You have to remember; this…isn't our grief. We haven't loss someone we…someone we love."
Peeta traced circles in the flour, causing the powder to gather into tiny tornadoes at his touch. He and his brothers had made all kinds of flour models when they were younger. He blew lightly and the flour spread back over the floor. He stared down at it. "Why do we feel this way if it doesn't matter?"
The man shrugged. "It's just the way we are."
Age 11_April
His father was gone and Peeta was terrified.
Not really gone, but not really there, either. He went about his work, did all the things he was supposed to, said all the things he was supposed to, but he was gone. Every day he drudged through work then disappeared upstairs to take syrup and sleep.
And his mother drank the clear liquor they sold at the Hob, the District's black market and got meaner every day. His mother was human so Peeta didn't know how much she understood about chance or matches, but she knew enough to be bitter and she took it out on her sons. And for some reason—Peeta figured it was because she was their mother—she was immune to chance.
Peeta didn't know how long it would be before his mother imploded and really hurt one of them. The slaps were normal, he could take the welts from her belt, but she threw a bottle at his brother Hagan the other day that would have smashed into his head if he hadn't moved at the last moment.
Peeta's world shrank to the hours between his mother's rages when both his parents were passed out in different parts of the house.
He spent most of these hours hiding in the space under the stairs with one hand cupped around a flashlight and the other holding a piece of graphite. Peeta drew to escape and because drawing was his. It wasn't some freak power he had inherited and had to keep hidden.
Some days drawing let him disappear far enough into himself that he was alone. The pencil scraped across the backs of receipts and old homework pages, giving life to flowers and trees and flying birds. He drew the endless green woods that surrounded his district, the places his ancestors would have made home before they were trapped along the humans. And, when he wasn't really watching what his hand did, he drew Katniss.
Peeta hadn't seen her much since the mining accident. She was absent from school the whole month afterwards and had only been there sporadically ever since.
He guessed she was helping her mother.
From the way Peeta's father walked around like a living shadow, it didn't look like she was doing well. Katniss' own grief lifted enough for Peeta to function, but it was always nearby, striking him at strange moments.
Like just then.
Out of nowhere his heart started to beat fast.
As clear as any siren, panic boiled through Peeta's body. With no conscious thought, he was up and out of the bakery. He found himself out in the icy spring rain. The rain pounded down on him as he made his way across the mud puddle that was once the backyard. His mother was standing by the row of garbage cans, blonde hair still done up in squishy foam rollers, bellowing down at someone little. Even though he couldn't hear her words yet, he knew she was drunk.
Peeta slipped up behind his mother to find the skeletal face of Katniss Everdeen peering up at him.
She was thin, her luminous gray eyes huge and shadowed in her gaunt face, her patched and soaking clothes clinging to the sharp angles of her body. She clutched the lid from their garbage can in her hand.
She looked like the people starving in the Hunger Games.
Peeta grasped at their connection, yanked it, shook it, tried to see how this was possible. How could she be so bad off and he not know about it? There was nothing there. Nothing, just a tingling numbness.
It was like she was dead.
He was screaming, wasn't he? The sound swelled in his head, but it wasn't coming out of his mouth.
"Don't you think I have enough to deal with? Now I have to police Seam brats pawing through my garbage? Where are the Peacekeepers when you need them? You want bread, you pay for it! Not that your kind care about laws and decency. "
His mother yelled on and on.
Peeta wanted to hit her, even though he'd never defended himself against her beatings. He'd never hated his mother before either, but, at that moment, if he could have used chance against her, he would have opened a gulf in the earth to swallow her whole.
Katniss was starving, maybe even dying and he couldn't do anything about it. Frozen rain dripped down his back and grew to ice shards inside him.
Oh, so carefully, with sad, quiet dignity, Katniss placed the lid back on the garbage can and moved toward the road.
Still cursing, his mother sloshed her way back to the bakery, but Peeta kept watching Katniss. She made it to the apple tree at the edge of their yard before tripping over her own foot. She stumbled and didn't get back up, just lay in the mud and stared out into the rain.
Peeta forced himself to go back into bakery. A dozen loaves of baked raisin walnut bread were stacked on a rack in the center of the room. The other half of the dough was an over-proofed mess gurgling and growing on the counter. His father probably started baking then wandered off, distracted by whatever emotion his match felt.
Peeta threw himself face-forward into the rack of baked bread, crashing it to the ground and knocking most of the loaves into the open fire. He shifted chance, barely, just barely and used the peel to pull two of the loaves out before they were turned to complete blackness.
His mother's eyes cut him from across the room. "You useless rat! Came out of your little hidey-hole just long enough to cost me money!"
She wrapped one hand around Peeta's arm and the other around his father's discarded the rolling pin. The blow caught him square in the face, knocking him to the ground and tasting blood. He barely felt it. "I'll feed it to the pig. It won't go to waste."
He stayed down, head bent, pretending to be cowed and broken. Experience taught him that anything else would make it worse, go from bruising blows to broken bones.
She didn't say anything, but swayed on her feet, frowning down at him. He crawled backward before scrambling up and backing out of the room and into the rain. He hunched over the loaves to keep them dry.
Her reply finally found its way out of her liquor-doused mind. "Feed it to the pig, you stupid creature. Why not? No one decent will buy burned bread!" He ignored it.
This would be the hard part. He had to get the bread to her without communicating with her or letting his mother see.
Peeta threw bits of bread at the pig that sat in its sty, grunting and forlorn in the pelting rain. He looked to make sure his mother wasn't watching.
He took a step towards Katniss.
The binding rings on his wrists throbbed and tightened. Okay, not that.
He threw a little more bread to the pig. Breathing hard, he concentrated on throwing the bread towards her.
The binding locked his arm. Come on! He argued with himself. This isn't communicating.
Something flickered along his link to her, the numbness dissolving into something warmer. He had her attention.
Look, she needs me. She needs the bread. He reasoned with the binding, willed it, put all the chance he had into it until the binding relaxed just enough for him to throw, first one loaf, then the other. He still couldn't turn to her, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the bread land at her feet.
He went back to the bakery and closed the door behind him. He didn't want his mother to look out there and see Katniss walking down the road with two loaves in her hands.
He sagged against the door and let her relief wash over him and blend with his own.