Age 14
"So, tell me again why you can't make Gale Hawthorne fall in love with me?" Delly Cartwright skipped backwards over the paving stones, her yellow curls bouncing as she faced Peeta on the path to school. Like always, the girl crackled with energy, bright, bubbly energy that Peeta could almost see if he squinted.
It was a side effect of her non-humanness.
Short and plump with jewel-bright eyes and a face-splitting smile, Delly didn't look human—not that anyone ever noticed. Peeta could never decide whether it was an illusion like with his ears or just the power of her personality. Or maybe it was because everyone was used to seeing the bizarre getups of Capitol people on television. Compared to their surgically added scales or spikes or neon green eyes, Delly was positively normal.
She was some kind of hobgoblin or maybe an imp…Peeta couldn't be any more certain of what she was than he could of his own heritage. They were both centuries removed from their ancestry, all knowledge lost to the mist of years, years that left them piecing together scraps of old legends.
Delly's smile widened, showing delicately curved canines. "Are you ever going to answer me, Peeta?"
Peeta looked around the path. The paved path was still deserted, still shaded in the light of the rising winter sun—school wouldn't start for another couple of hours, but he always got there early. He had to.
Peeta knew that Katniss and Gale Hawthorne sometimes stopped by after a morning's hunt to sale his father squirrel and rabbit at the back door. Of course, his father bought Katniss' game—the money helped his match and Peeta's. It was good. Peeta wanted his family to help hers. But, Peeta couldn't stomach seeing it, having her so close when he couldn't talk to her was bruising, chaffing his insides raw.
Seeing her with Gale Hawthorne was worse.
"You know chance doesn't work that way," he told Delly. Although he wished it did. He'd have marry Gale off to Delly that day…if he could've lived with doing something so underhanded. His father's lessons had been ground into him forever. He had to be moral, be responsible, stay hidden.
"Now, Peeta you're telling me that you can make little gingerbread boys and girls get up and dance, but you can't make Gale ask me to the harvest festival?"
"The gingerbread thing was years ago, Delly," Peeta said. "Besides, flour is my medium, not human boys."
"Rock or stone, blood or bone—why does it matter what he's made of? I can build from anything."
"Well, I'm not you." That was their power, the Cartwrights, building anything, repairing anything. They mostly stuck to leather and shoes, but Peeta had seen Delly take apart, repair, and rebuild the bakery's oven in less than an hour.
"And…" she said, waggling her finger in the air, skipping forwards then backwards in a little gig. "I've seen you use chance on people. Like when that prank backfired on Markus Caulfield."
"Mrs. Latimer's an old woman. She'd have had a heart attack if she found all those frogs in her desk."
Delly stopped in the middle of the path and pointed at him. "So you admit to using chance on people."
"Yes, but I still couldn't with Gale."
"Why?"
"Well… because chance only works by manipulating chance…the odds. I can only make something more or less likely to happen. I can't do the impossible."
Delly narrowed her over-bright eyes. "Peeta Mellark, are you implying that it would be impossible for Gale Hawthorne to fall in love with me and beg me to accompany him to the harvest festival?"
"Considering that Gale Hawthorne hates people from town, has never spoken to you, and has never gone to the harvest festival…" Peeta let the words hang in the cold morning air. He kept walking, leaving her to glare at the back of his head.
"Fine," Delly said, skipping fast to catch up with him. "I only wanted Gale for your sake, to keep him away from Katniss."
"Delly..." Over the years, Delly had worn him down, wheedling the story out of him bit by bit. Whatever the Cartwrights were, they didn't have matches, but it was better talking to her than to his silent father, still caught up in his own match's lingering grief or to brothers who hadn't found their matches and only saw its teasing power.
"What I really want to know is how you know she's your one and only. How do you know there's not some other girl out there you'd like just as much and you're just wasting your time…"
Peeta stopped her mid-sentence with a kiss, pulling her in by the waist, quick, but it stopped her words. Delly blinked up at him.
"Feel anything?" he asked.
Delly opened her mouth then closed it. "Actually, no, not really," she said.
"Didn't think so." Peeta had kissed three girls in the last the year and felt absolutely nothing, worse than nothing, a kind of quiet revulsion that rattled and just felt wrong. "There isn't anyone else." He said this even though he knew it was hopeless.
He was walking down the same path his father had tread years before—having a match who didn't want or need him, who had found someone else. Katniss spent her time with Gale Hawthorne now. Tall and handsome, the object of a thousand crushes—even Delly, no matter what she said—Gale Hawthorne would be any girl's pick.
And he didn't need the gossip, he had the confirmation of her own heart, the joy, the longing he felt through her in the mornings, knowing that she's out hunting with Gale in the forest that surrounded the district. Hunting was dangerous and illegal and getting caught meant instant death, but she was happy out there, happy with Gale.
Peeta did his best not to think about it too much. So he kissed other girls, reminded himself that his father had found someone. It was harder to forget what a disaster his parent's marriage was or that he knew that his father still felt his match's emotions. He shoved those thoughts away, too.
"Look, Delly I've got to go. See you in class later?" The girl nodded, heading for the school, still looking slightly puzzled. She got there early to help the teachers—grading papers, straightening desks, fix pencil sharpeners whatever they needed.
Peeta had another errand.
He rounded the schoolyard and slipped into the half-collapsed building at the edge of the property. It had been the original school, but now it was a bombed-out shell, a relic of the rebellion almost seventy-five years ago that no one had ever bothered to knock down.
Peeta worked his way through the building, dodging broken liquor bottles, crumbling masonry, and the charred remains of clothes that littered the floor. Mockingjays, nested in dark corners, rustled their wings, ready to protect their territory, mean, but not dangerous because this wasn't breeding season.
He followed the fresh footprints already stamped into the dust until he reached a small alcove in the old cafeteria, the place only half as filthy as everywhere else and partitioned off by a tattered blanket suspended from the ceiling. Five mismatched chairs circled a battered folding table, its legs lopsided, its surface scratched and scarred with a generation of boys' initials.
In the chairs sat four boys, slumped low and lounging, trying to look bored in the dim light given off by the gas lantern on the table.
The crew got shuffled around once in a while, as kids left or graduated—four years ago Seth Johnson got sent to the Games—but today it was Ash, Junior Ernest, Tory and Ethen. He ate lunch with most of these guys every afternoon, but on Thursday mornings they played cards.
"Ready to lose, Mellark?"
"Shouldn't you still be home in bed, Junior?" Peeta asked. Junior was six months older than Peeta, but he looked younger than all of them with a round baby face and milk-pale blond hair.
And it didn't help that his name was Junior.
"Nah, the early bird and all that," Junior answered, tilting back in his chair until the first two legs were off the ground. "Today's my day." He picked up the worn deck from the table and flexed them until they flew, clacking into his other hand.
The cards were ancient, dog-eared and worn, stolen a dozen years ago from Peacekeepers at the Hob by some daredevil kid, a kid so awesome another boy volunteered for him when his name was called for the Games—that was the story, anyhow. Peeta didn't believe it. Nobody volunteered for the Hunger Games, not unless they want to die.
"Are we playing or are we talking?" Ash said. He kicked Junior's chair until the boy wobbled for a second, then lost his balance, sending the cards, the chair, and the boy crashing backwards to the dusty floor.
"You're mean, you know that?" Junior said scowling, picking himself up from the ground.
"Just practical," Ask said, grinning. Ash was the only dark-haired one. There was Seam blood somewhere in his line, but no one made fun of him for it because his dad was the principal and could sentence juvenile delinquents to hard labor in the coal mines.
Peeta helped Junior gather up the scattered cards. "Not so practical making him spill the only cards we've got."
"I'm sure you could steal us another pack," Tory said.
"Yeah," Ethen added to his twin brother's words. "You're one of the lucky Mellarks. You'd just slip into the Hob and slip out."
Peeta groaned and rolled his eyes. "You see how often I lose. If you want to see luck, you'll have to ask my brother."
The gambling had been their father's idea, a way to practice chance, but, once their eldest brother Rieska graduated, Hagan, like usual, started showing off, winning hand after hand until the other kids started calling him Lucky Mellark.
"You're lucky enough," Junior drawled, leaning back in his chair again. "Never lose more than you win. Should call you Even Stevens."
Peeta pulled the coins of his ante out of his pocket and stacked them on the table in front of him. He took his time, trying not to look too startled that Junior had noticed that.
It wasn't like anybody could guess his secret, but he didn't like standing out, not when he had his family to protect, not in District 12 where being different could get you killed. "I just know when to quit. That's called moderation, Junior. You should try it."
Grumbling, Junior shuffled the cards. The game was an invention of mish-mashed rules created to compensate for the cards that have gone missing over the years or gotten so damaged that they had to be thrown away. The rules as they stood now had been around for three years, since the king of diamonds had gone missing.
All the combinations of numbers and suits flowed through Peeta's mind as Tory cut the deck for Junior and Peeta waited for the pull.
The pull told him how things would happen if he didn't do anything. Call it fate or luck or just the odds, the pull didn't like to be changed. It worked like a magnet, clinging to a certain set of events, repelling the alternatives. If Peeta weren't careful and he tried to force chance, stretch it too far in either direction, try to stop a sure thing or make the impossible happen, the pull would snap back into place, reshape itself like a rubber band.
As Junior started dealing out the cards, the pull settled on Ethen, a vibration Peeta sensed more than he saw. He would have the winning hand. Peeta looked around the room, gauging the strength of the pull and how much it would let him change.
It wasn't too strong yet. He could make himself win, but he didn't need to be lucky, not with the seed Junior just planted. Neither did Ethen or Tory. Their mother worked with the mayor, they didn't need the money. Junior, then. His family lived on the edge of town. He hadn't won in a while and maybe he'd stop complaining, at least for a while.
Peeta reached out with chance, letting it unfurl inside of him, shifting through the odds. A hard tug and the pull came away from Ethen and hovered over the five boys until Peeta fixed it to Junior.
Junior's hand hesitated on dealing the next card. "Did I skip somebody?"
"Yourself," Peeta said. He pointed to the four cards in front Junior. Everyone else already had five cards.
"Oh…I could have sworn," Junior muttered, dealing himself a last card.
Because he was sitting next to him, Peeta heard Junior's excited intake of breath when he flipped over his cards. He never could bluff, one of the reasons he usually lost.
Peeta turned over his own hand and grinned down at the sorry, but expected jumble of cards—a throwaway hand. But it wouldn't matter how many cards he pulled, the results would be the same.
It was a quick game. They were done with time enough to horse around on the way back to the main schoolhouse, shoulder punches and fake jabs, jokes, Junior beaming with a pocket full of jingling coins, the others swearing revenge next time they played, but no one really mad. It wasn't the kind of money people got angry over losing, just money that would've gone for a bag of candy at the sweets shop or a cookie after school, nothing for them or their families to miss, not like in some families…
It was almost as if thinking about her brought her into view. Katniss, with quick steps, smooth like the pace of a cat on the prowl, was walking into the building, her long black braid swinging behind her in rhythm with her steps.
Every time he saw her, it was like seeing her for the first time, sharp and throbbing, an old wound that still stung in bad weather. Having a match felt a little like the pull of odds, as though some power wanted them together, drew him towards her while his father's binding was dragging him in the opposite direction.
And it was like being ripped apart.
For a heartbeat, her glaze met his across the schoolyard and he held it, for just that moment, before the binding drove him to break that tiny contact and she was gone.