Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It kind of sucks to have good parents in bad situations. Don’t get me wrong–bad parents are horrible. But my moms, they try so hard to make life better for me and my siblings, but it just doesn’t quite work. They’re sweet, they laugh and sing and dance and they love each other and they love us, but no amount of love for their kids stops the looming threat of Reaping Day.

And it kills me because I know they blame themselves for it.

We’re not rich. That’s clear, looking at our two-room little house alone, it hardly fits the six (yes, six) of us. Also, our family’s tesserae history…well, we aren’t unfamiliar to tesserae.

Take Bess. The oldest of my siblings. Last year, there were thirty-five paper slips with Bess Lowthorn on them in the running for the Hunger Games. When I turned twelve, four years ago, I convinced Bess to let me start entering my name instead (though that argument was not a pretty one), but mine only amount to fourteen.

But last year, Bess was eighteen. Eighteen with thirty-five entries. But now she’s nineteen. 

And nineteen-year-olds aren’t eligible for the Hunger Games.

So Bess is finally safe .

So that’s what my moms are trying to help us focus on. And, yes, I’m so, so happy Bess is never going to have to participate in the Games. But it’s still Reaping Day, and I’m still sixteen, and my sibling is still fifteen, and my brother is still thirteen.

My moms know that, and they know we know that. None of us are stupid–well, Bess, it’s debatable, but not the point–and we’re all just trying to enjoy our “day off”.

Oh. Something I should point out is, my Mum, Rochelle. She cheats. Wait, no, let me clarify that–she doesn’t cheat on Mama . What I mean is, she breaks the law, cheats the law, by keeping some of the products from our livestock. Eggs, milk, even the occasional chicken. It worries Mama to death, though. The repercussions would be…not good.

“I can’t just let them starve,” Mum always tells her. “Sometimes, we just have to do something.”

Mum still has half a lick of sense in her, so she doesn’t ‘steal’ often. When we’re especially desperate, she takes eggs and milk and stuff. And when that’s not an option, and only then, does she let me or Bess enter our names for tesserae.

Oh except for right now because now we have a whole fucking chicken, just ’cause why not, y’know? A WHOLE fucking chicken, already gutted and plucked and cleaned. Mama will cook it when we all get back from the Reaping ceremony.

Assuming we all get back from the Reaping ceremony.

I drum my fingers loudly against our wooden table, a steady, rhythmic tap, tap-tap, tatatata tap . Henson, sitting next to me, feels the vibrations and places a hand on top of mine. Stop, he then signs plainly. You’re pissing me off.

Well, what he signed was ‘I’m annoyed’, but the general assumption when it comes to Henson is that there’s at least one implied swear-word in every one of his sentences.

Henson is my brother, the thirteen-year-old one. Well, technically my half-brother, because Mum isn’t my bio-mom, and he’s the biological son of both our moms, but that’s not important right noooow. Anyways, Henson. His hair is way curlier than mine–like Mum’s natural hair–and cut short. He’s about one foot tall with a snub nose and a gap in his front teeth, so he looks a lot younger than he is. He picks about eight fights a day with me, but I still love him.

Like any good brother, I respect his request and stop the tapping–

Haha, nope. I out-bitch him any day of the week. Fucking try me, I think, continuing on with the tap, tap-tap, tatatata tap . Any good brother would actively choose to annoy him further, that’s what we’d do.

I will break your fucking kneecaps, Henson signs.

You won’t, I challenged.

He stood up and brought a fist back, but I just held him at arm’s length by standing up too and placing my palm on his forehead.

Go eat shit, he says. That’s his favorite insult, by the way.

I grin and I’m about to respond when someone pulls me into a headlock from behind. “ACK, fuck you, Bess!” I protest as Bess messes up my hair. But I’m built like a toothpick, and she’s the one who hauls the heavy bags of grain for the animal feed. It’s an even more unfair fight than me versus Henson.

“FOOOOOOX,” I plead. “HELLLLP.” Fox the Fucking Bystander is sitting cross-legged in a nearby chair, giggling at my misfortune.

“You did this to yourself!” Fox says all sing-songy and signs at the same time. With my family, we usually always sign when we’re talking, at least around Henson–at least when we can , and also when you’re not being ATTACKED by your fucking SISTER .

“Did not!”

Our obnoxiousness summons our moms. Mum immediately starts cracking up–damn, I can’t trust anyone , can I?

“Mama! They’re teaming up on me again!” I try.

“Stop bullying your brother,” Mama says. She always looks tired, with dark eyes and darker eyebags–I kind of look like that, too.  But at least she’s smiling right now.

He started it, Henson butts in.

“I d id not!” My voice cracks with indignance. I can tell Bess is also snickering. “Okay, Bess, let me go or I’m gonnaAHH–”

She lets go of me too suddenly and I fall to the ground with an audible thunk , almost faceplanting. Bess swears under her breath and helps me back up.

“My bad.” She says.

I glared at her and muttered, “hmph,” as I tried to fix my hair. Bess, she wouldn’t’ve stood a chance in the Hunger Games. Sure, she’s strong as an ox–but then again, twice as stupid. Her build is a dead giveaway of the womanpower she’s capable of, which could  make others want to team up with her–but, more likely, make her a target immediately, someone to get rid of quick . She’s capable of killing, but often too sympathetic to be willing–she trusts too easily, and any friends she made could’ve stabbed her in the back at any given time.

Trust would be the death of her.

Oh, yeah. Right. Speaking of the Hunger Games. That’s today.

Heh. Fuck.

I look back up, out of my thoughts, and see Fox staring at me. They always seem to know exactly what I’m thinking–they can read anyone like a book. And even if they weren’t a mind-reader, it didn’t take much deductive reasoning to come to the conclusion that the Hunger Games is on my mind on the day of the Reaping.

And I realize a couple seconds into the silence that it isn’t just me. It was the same feeling as when a cloud passes over the sun outside, and the light from the window dims while the candle stays burning .

Mum clears her throat. “S’pose we should start heading that way,” she notes. That way, meaning the Abattoir.

A few of the others murmur vague noises of agreement. It was an hour-thirty-minute ride from our place to the Abattoir, and we all know we’re going to end up wasting time somewhere. We always do. Usually at the old ruins along the way–we stop there every other year.

I call shotgun! Henson announces before sprinting out the door.

“Wha–! Hey! No fair!” Bess protests before chasing after him.

Fox and I lock eyes and a faint grin crosses my face. “Race you,” I say. 

I run out of the door, using the frame to correct my course. The sun shines bright in the sky and the air, like always, is warm and dry. Aside from the plain block houses, this part of the District was empty expanse, full of nothing but miles of shrubs and dried grass, mostly space for cattle to graze. It’s all a big plantation, one where my family and several other families work for pennies to every thousand dollars we earn the landlord .

The middle of the summer, July 4th, in District 10 is often miserably hot, but today it feels closer to right to me. How unfair–or perhaps just ironic–that it’s today that the sky is showing us mercy. Blah blah, something merciless sun shows more mercy than ‘humane’ humans, blah blah, metaphors and shit. Is that a metaphor? I don’t really know, nor do I care. 

If only it wasn’t so damn dry here. My family’s actually pretty fortunate compared to some–we live near a better-off town (it’s actually the one with the Abattoir, where the Reaping takes place), and we can generally get water from there with gallon containers and whatnot and bring it back home. So, usually, our water supply is reliable enough, though it tastes like illness and metal. Sure, we’ve had countless scares during droughts, but…you know what, no . I’m not even going to pretend. There’s no ‘but’ I could add that makes that statement better.

I glance behind me to see Fox–and my moms are on their way, too–and the clouds of dust I’ve kicked up just by being on the bone-dry ground. You’d think all the dust and shit would be maddening, and to some of us it is. But I’ve grown used to it. Used to the unceasing heat. Used to the feeling of dust on even drier skin, dust that can’t be rinsed off your skin no matter how hard you try, dust that I constantly have to brush out of my hair with my fingers, dust. Used to dust, and dust, and dust; it’s a lot of dust. But once you get over the dust, well, life is still fucking miserable, but at least you’re okay with the dust now.

I round the corner and skid to a stop at Lucifer’s stall door. “Hey, buddy,” I say, unlatching the door and letting her step out of the stall as I saddle her. By the next stall, Bess is huffing from the exertion of running, arguing with Henson at the same time, while Henson is sitting all self-satisfied and smug on Maximus, his and Bess’s horse. Well, not technically their horse; all three of ‘my family’s’ horses actually belong to the landlord –fuck it, most everything we have belongs to the damn landlord–but it’s an unspoken agreement in our neighborhood, whose horses are whose family’s.

Fox smacks me lightly on the back of my head. “Jackass.”

“Sore loser,” I respond. I hook my foot on the stirrup and swing my leg over to the other side of the saddle . I’m the better rider anyway, between me and Fox–and all the little subconscious things you have to do that I don’t really notice anymore stress Fox out.

“Plus,” I always tease Fox, “Lucifer likes me more.” Which, of course, isn’t true, and they know that. Lucifer doesn’t care if it was me or Fox or Mum or Henson or a war criminal or a five-year-old who she had to deal with; Lucifer had no qualms with people. I bet she’d even like Capitol people, despite their horrible…everything. But especially their voices–their fuCKING VOICES , I hhhhhated their voices. They sounded like the human embodiments of nails on a chalkboard. Hearing the Hunger Games escort, the one who announces the tributes for District 10, say anything at all made me want to tear my ears off. I’m sorry, call me a bitch, but I can’t fucking stand any of them.

And I promise you, I have bigger problems with the Capitol than just their stupid accents.

I help Fox up onto the saddle as well, and then our moms finally get here, too–actually walking at a reasonable pace, like the definitely very responsible mature adults they were. They carry the empty plastic gallon containers–for water, like I said earlier–along with some filled waterskins and distribute them evenly among us. They attach the containers to the saddles of the horses and just hand us the waterskins. Thank goodness they actually remembered, because otherwise we’d be screwed, in the middle of a desert.

Soon Bess accepts her fate in not getting the reins of Maximus, and Mum and Mama both mount their own steed, Daisy. Daisy takes the lead and Maximus follows close behind, and Lucifer brings u p the rear.

I take one last lo ok at the stable and the houses and take a deep breath. In a couple hours, the two tributes will be selected, and then it’ll be over with for another year. I pray to a god–a god that I know has abandoned us long ago–that all my siblings will see this place again.

- + - + = + - + -

The oldworld ruins bring us twenty minutes out of the way from if we’d went straight to the town. They sit shaded under nearby rock formations; my guess is that nobody's ever cared enough to thoroughly look for ruins to tear down in this part of D10, and the less smooth terrain helped mask it. Whatever the reason is, it’s still here (unlike most ruins, removed/relocated looooong ago by whoever does that), partially rotting and primarily unlooted.

And this place is fucking awesome.

It’s a single, two-story, wooden house in the middle of nowhere. I wonder what was going through the owner’s head when they built/bought the thing–it seemed so inconvenient. But, then again, people could be a horrible pain to deal with. Or maybe it had something to do with taxes?

Fox and I dismount Lucifer and I tie her reins to the porch railing. Mama does the same for Daisy and Bess does the same for Maximus. I wait for the others to get up on the porch, too.

You do the honors, Henson, Mum decides.

He grins then turns the doorknob. For a second the door doesn’t budge, and then he gets impatient, pulls too hard, and nearly flies backwards as the door opens. Bess catches him before he  hits the floor. I cover my nose and hold my breath at the cloud of dust that erupts from inside the house; it sends Mama into a coughing fit. Once the dust dissipates, I carefully step inside.

The place smells of mildew and the room is dark. The only sources of natural light are the open door and a couple broken windows. I slowly move a bit further into the room, and as my eyes adjust I recognize the silhouettes of the threadbare, sometimes hardly-there furniture. But I swear, every time we visit this place, we find something new.

It probably isn’t safe for us to be here–we’d get sick, maybe? I dunno–with everything that’s taken the place over. But, then again, the walls of our house are probably laced with lead or some type of poison. I don’t know.

Henson, Fox, and Mum all head upstairs, and I wince at every creak of the stairs, hoping that the floorboards don’t give out under them. Once they’re up there, looking through what I guess are old bedrooms and an attic, I (and Mama and Bess) begin searching the first level. I walk the far corner of the room, hand hovering over or brushing what I could only assume were old kitchen counters and stuff.

I cross a refrigerator– so this place must’ve had electricity at some point, I realize, which is a surprise, considering its isolation. Maybe, when it had been in use all that time ago, it wasn’t all alone. The door had been left open (and the insides were all plants and mold and…life), like whoever lived here had left in a hurry. The thought gives me a distant kind of sadness laced with a vague sense of horror. I know that something bad happened a while ago, that it wiped out most of the planet, that Pamen was the only surviving human civilization. My guess was that these people, the ones who lived here, weren’t the lucky ones who survived.

“You think they’d catch us if we tried to move here?” Bess asks out of nowhere.

“Prob’bly so,” Mama offers.

“If the rats didn’t eat us first, you mean,” I add.

Bess scoffs. “Rats don’t eat people.”

“Well, not living people.” Mama says under her breath. “…Usually.” Which quickly earns silence from me and Bess.

The light from the window catches on something in the corner of my eye. I turn to the remnants of a couch, then I see a broken side-table. Two of its legs had snapped, leaving its contents sprawled and damaged on the nearby floor, coated in dust like everything else. I crouch down and try to make sense of it. Something that looks like a lamp, but in large shards–the cloth of the lampshade was gone, leaving the metal framework in a couple of pieces.

I think it was a piece of glass from the broken lamp that caught my eye, but now what interests me is a plastic (I think) box. I pick it up and brush off some of the dust and sit down cross-legged. Rectangular and fairly small, it can’t weigh much more than a pound. It’s opaque and gray, with some iridescent swirly patterns all over it, and some grooves and buttons and lines. I turn it over a couple times, trying to make sense of it. It seems vaguely familiar–I think I’ve seen something like it before–but I can’t put my finger on what that something is, exactly.

I press one of the buttons, not expecting it to still work. I mean, it ought to be dead by now, if not mangled by rodents or taken by time. Except it does work.

The box makes a horrible SCREEEEEEEEEECH noise in response. I yelp and nearly throw the thing across the room. THE FUCK? I think. WHAT THE FUCK??

But then my muscles relax again and I realize it’s playing something. Something that isn’t mechanical screaming, I mean.

I try to make sense of it, and then I figure it out.

Music.

I clasp a hand over my mouth and tears blur my vision. Music. Damn it, music. It’s sung by a gravelly voice, one of an older person. Music was something so deeply sacred and pure to me, and it was rare, too. Again, I think about the people who abandoned this house in a panic, the ones who’d probably died gruesome deaths. Those people–they were people, too. Just like me. Just like my family. And I’m not making sense here, but–just– music. It’s too human. Too human for this world.

Too human. Too human. Too human. And now I’m a mess. I don’t know why I’m like this. But this song must be centuries old by now. All hopeful and cheery.

Too human for this world. For the world with the Reaping and the Hunger Games and starving people and humanity-destroying disasters and wars.

What went wrong?

Anyways, that’s my deep soapboxing emotional philosophy shit for today. To unlock the next level of depressing-shit-that-everyone-already-fucking-knows-and-I-don’t-really-need-to-say-out-loud-because-shit-kinda-speaks-for-itself-at-this-point, pay $5.99 or watch eight three-minute ads.

I wipe the tears from my eyes and take a deep breath. I push a couple more buttons–one pauses/unpauses the song, and the other restarts it. I close my eyes and listen to the whole song. Then I repeat it. Again and again, until I’m sure that every word, every note, is ingrained in my memory. I hum the rhythm softly.

After a couple minutes, I press the first button again, turning the box off. Who knew how much time the thing had left until it ran out of batteries. I wonder if they still even make the kind of battery that it needs anymore.

I look up and realize both Mama and Bess are watching me. Because of course they are; I made the ancient magic box do the sound thing. Bess leans on the couch, near me. But it's too frail, so the back snaps off, and she goes down with it with a loud crash.

The crash causes Fox, Mum, and Henson to come back downstairs, to make sure everything’s okay. Mum calls Bess’s name before she even sees what happened, knowing damn well who caused the problem. Fox walks over to Bess with light footsteps, making sure she’s okay (she is), but Henson just barks a laugh, earning a swat from Mum. But she’s suppressing a laugh, too. Mum has never been too good at that whole Responsible thing.

“We heard the music, too,” Fox says as they help Bess back up. Fox frowns at the now-even-more-broken sofa, as if they were hoping it was salvageable. “I thought my brain was making stuff up. Where was that coming from, by the way?”

I stood up and gestured to the music-playing box still in my hand.

“How the hell is that thing still working?” Mum asks. “It’s gotta be at least a bajillion years old.”

“Beats me,” I say. “But I want to keep it. Maybe we can figure it out.”

Mum makes a skeptical “mmh” sound in response. She isn’t a fan of things that aren’t practical. Which is fair, looking at our life. It isn’t that she hates music, but she’s definitely looking at the magic box and thinking nothing but, Waste of energy .

But she also has a hard time playing the bad cop. She looks at Mama. “What do you say, Tammy?” She asks her, making the expression that silently pleads for Mama to say no to it, so Mum didn’t have to.

But I don’t ask for much. None of us do. And it was Reaping Day, which was definitely stressing everyone out. Especially Fox, come to think of it–and they definitely love songs. And it couldn’t be that expensive to keep, and even if it was, we’d just sell it to a neighbor (assuming we didn’t get caught) or throw it away.

And Mama is naturally a good cop anyway.

Mama sighs. “Alright. Give it to me.” She holds out a hand, and I give her the music player. She puts it in her bag.

Henson stomps the ground lightly to get Mama’s attention. He’s holding something, I think a large piece of cloth, and stuffs it under his arm for a second to sign, I found this, too. I want to keep it. And then he takes it again and holds it out, both hands on one of the corners so the pattern is spread out. It was a blanket, I think, a really long time ago, about as wide as I am tall. Mostly a very faded yellow, with a reddish flower/sun design in the center.

“Yes,” Mum says in a heartbeat, and there’s no argument at all. Nights could be freezing, after all.

Mama takes it and turns it over a couple times, probably checking for any harmful growth. “It’s…almost completely intact,” she observes. “Like the music player.”

“For this crap to last this long, the kinds of materials that they, that everyone , must’ve had back then…,” Mum says. She shakes her head. “I wonder what happened. Why we don’t got none of that anymore, not here.”

Oh, you know damn well why District 10–plus the other districts–don’t have those kinds of resources anymore. Same reason they send our kids to fight to the death.

Because the Capitol fucking hates us.

Mama folds the blanket into a neat square and tucks it in her bag, too. “Anyone else find something they like?”

“Some shiny rocks,” Fox offers, taking a fistful of said rocks from their pocket and showing the rocks to everyone on an open palm. It earns a couple of sharp breaths from the rest of us as we realize what they are. Fox grins.

By shiny rocks, Fox means jewels.

“Let me see those,” I say, taking a couple from Fox without warning. My eyes grow wider. They're dirty from decades, maybe centuries, of neglect, and also tiny, but they’re still beautiful–breathtaking, really. And probably really valuable, come to think of it. Even if they were fake, I bet I could convince some rich asshole to buy them–those guys can’t tell oranges from apples from bullfrogs, after all. It could feed us for months, if we’re careful with our money. “God-fucking- daaaamn .”

And Mama’s too excited by the jewels herself that she doesn’t even tell me to mind my language. Fox and I give her the jewels–there’s about six of the tiny things–and she tucks it in a separate pocket in her bag; it is on the inside of the bag, on the side closer to her hip. There’s a spark in her eyes now, and I can tell how grateful she is for what could be a massive safety net.

“Should we keep looking? In case there’s anything else?” Bess asks.

Fuck no, Henson argues. Did you not see where the sun is?

The sky, Bess responds.

We all stare at her for a couple of seconds. “OH,” she realizes.

“We should get going,” Mama says.

And so we leave, with a blanket, a music box, and some jewels, all of which we would put to use after the Reaping, when we get back. And for some reason, it now seems more like ‘when’ instead of ‘if’ to me.

- + - + = + - + -

The town–I always forget the name (this is why I’m failing Geography)–is much denser than the plantation-neighborhood I live in, but still the buildings are short, and one-story for the most part, save for the very center.

We stop on the outskirts of the Abattoir and dismount our horses. The giddiness from finding the jewels has worn off by now, and we’re all hit by a new wave of dread. We all take turns hugging one another and saying goodbyes and goodlucks.

When it’s my turn to give Henson a hug, fear seizes my heart. Fear for him. I can’t lose him. I can’t watch my brother burnt alive, mauled, slaughtered, poisoned, starved…I can’t watch him die in the Hunger Games. He’s thirteen. It doesn’t matter that Henson Lowthorn is only on two paper slips, two of a couple thousand.

He must’ve felt the way my breath caught, because he doesn’t pull away for a while. And when he does, he doesn't tease me. He says, It’s going to be okay. And that’s about as gentle and comforting as Henson gets, and I’ll take it.

Then Mama wraps her arms around me, holds me so hard I almost can’t breathe. But seconds later she pulls away, arms on my shoulders. After a moment, she takes off her necklace and sets it around my own neck. My mouth opens, about to say something, although I’m not sure what that something was, and so I don’t manage any words at all. The necklace was my grandfather’s, and his mother before that, and her parent before that, so on, for generations. It was a sacred thing to Mama.

“For luck,” she explains. I can hear the strain, the worry in her words–it’s always there, gnawing at her wellbeing. But still her voice is soft and warm and comforting and, well, motherly. “Bring it back to me, okay? Promise me.”

I have to bite down hard on the side of my cheek to keep from bursting out sobbing. I don’t trust myself to speak, so I nod and sign, I promise , before hugging her again.

She kisses me on the forehead. “I love you, Avis.”

“I–” I have to take several breaths to avoid having my voice break in the I’m-going-to-cry way. “I love you, too.”

And that’s when I can’t stand it anymore. (Un)fortunately, that’s when Fox, Henson, and I have to report to the Abattoir.

I grab Henson’s hand in my left hand and Fox’s in my right as we brush through the crowd, in order to get to our designated section of the Abattoir. Despite being a massive district in terms of land, District 10 has one of the smallest populations. All the twelve-through-eighteen-year-olds could fit in the town’s square, typically used for announcements and concerts and shit. Their families formed a huge crowd around the square. Some will watch on screens in the streets a little further out, since their view would be too obscured otherwise.

The Abattoir is shaped like a semicircle, with a stage in the center. There, the mayor and the District 10 escort , Moneta–she’s a Capitol person, with the accent that made me want to rip my ears off . The Abattoir divides the Reaping kids up by age and gender; “boys” go to the left sections and “girls” go the right sections. Then they sort us by age, least to greatest, putting year eighteens at the front, nearest to the stage, and year twelves in the back, farthest from the stage. The squares of each category are neatly defined; it’s easy to tell which crowd is under the sign for GIRL14 versus the crowd under GIRL13 or BOY14 . The boy and girl sides are divided by a larger space/path than the ages.

Henson slips away from me, to the BOY13 section, without saying goodbye. It stabs at my nerves a little bit, because what if that was the last time I ever saw him? I lose sight of him behind a tall, red-haired boy.

Fox holds on tighter to my hand now, and I can feel they’re on the verge of a panic attack. Usually, I would pull them aside to a safe place so they could calm down, but the Reaping is starting in a few minutes, and if we’re caught outside of the Abattoir, we’d be killed on the spot.

I crane my neck, searching the GIRL15 section for any familiar faces. And I’m not disappointed. There’s Warren, and I wave her over when she sees me. She pushes past a couple of girls to get to us, all of them way taller than her. See, her height makes me feel a little better about mine, although I’m decently tall anyway for someone raised in an environment riddled with malnourishment.

Warren understands immediately that I want her to be with Fox. They and Warren were also pretty good friends–we grew up together, after all–and it’s way better than Fox being surrounded by strangers.

Once, and only once, I tried joking that Fox was safe from the Reaping. You know, since they’re not a boy or a girl.  but I’ve never been great at being funny, and the joke fell flat, and it just depressed everyone because, of course, that's not how it’ll work. If their name gets picked, they’ll go as the “girl” tribute, and they’ll die just like all the District 10 tributes before them.

“It’s going to be okay, Fox,” I say, but my words have nothing behind them, and they sound half-assed and meaningless. They nod in response, but it’s clear that it didn’t help one bit.

Warren takes Fox’s hand, then gives me a smile/grimance. Without any of her usual quips or smart-ass comments, she disappears back into the GIRL15 crowd with my sibling.

I take another deep breath, and tell myself it’ll be alright. Fox has only four paper slips in the running, the absolute minimum for a fifteen-year-old. They’re going to be okay.

Please, let them be okay.

I force myself to keep walking, take my place in the BOY16 section. Beside me is a boy that must be six feet tall–suddenly I don’t feel as good about my height–and I can tell he’s one of those rich kids. He’s even dressed nice for the Reaping, something my family couldn’t afford.

To calm down, I trace the hem of my pant leg, counting each time my thumb runs over the bumps of the stitching, and I do that until an earsplitting feedback sound rings out. Then, the mayor steps up to the center of the stage. Like every year, every fucking year, since as long as I can remember, he reads from the same script. Something, something, North America, bad stuff happened and we all fought, but then everything was fixed when we established the great Panem, but then the districts got pissed off and they didn’t want to all fucking starve to death, so they rebelled, but the Capitol naturally won and they destroyed one of the districts, and so that’s why we murder your fucking children every year: to remind you of how MORAL we as Capitolians are. He then goes on to remind of us the rules of the Hunger Games: you get twenty-four kids from the districts, then they all have to fight to the fucking death, while Gamemakers throw even more traumatizing shit at them, and the last one alive gets to go home and they’re rich now. So everything’s alright in the end! And look how great the Capitol is!

I’m nearly asleep by the time Moneta, the Capitol escort, takes over. Even more unpleasant a sound than the microphone feedback, Moneta starts talking. I cover my ears, but it can’t block out the wretched screech of the woman’s voice.

“Hel looo , ladies and gentlemen! Happy 17th Hunger Games!” She trills , all high-pitched and sing-songy.

“Merry manslaughter to all, and to all a bloody fight!” I finish under my breath. The rich boy beside me apparently hears this, and he suppresses a cackle. I can’t decide if this makes me like him more or less, but then I decide that I like him more for it. It’s a shared moment of distaste for the Capitol, and a reminder that he’s not the problem here–he’s just a little less of a victim, but he still is one. And yada, yada. Humanity and community and combine together over common enemies and stuff, I guess.

“ What an honor it is to be here today in District 10!” She continues. “My name is Moneta, and I will be the main assistant, as well as the escort, for the tributes selected here today. Now! Let’s get on with it, shall we? Ladies first, as always!”

She makes it over to the large glass ball tinted pink, full of thousands of paper slips for all the eligible girl tributes this year. Moneta has to step up on a stool behind it in order to reach into the bowl. She sticks a hand in, rummaging around for an unnecessarily long time–it's her job to build suspense for Capitol viewers, after all. I’m shaking as I hold my breath and wait for the name.

Please, not Fox. Not Fox. Not Fox. Not Fox. Not Fox, please. Not Fox.

I’m about ready to go up on that stage myself and strangle her, when Moneta finally pulls out a paper slip. She reads it, then, with a toothy smile, she announces: 

“Butch Silverwell!”

I feel guilty for the sigh of relief that escapes me. My muscles relax a bit. Butch Silverwell. I’ve never heard of her before. Fox Lowthorn is safe.

The crowd goes dead-silent. I turn to look for the girl tribute like most everyone else. From the GIRL14 section comes a girl in a threadbare plaid dress. The color must’ve been purple long ago, but now it is a faded brownish-grayish-lavender. Her hands are clenched into fists as she walks toward the stage in stiff, forced movements. When she passes by my section, I can see her expression. She looks shocked, mostly angry–but only a little afraid. She walks with her chin up, defiant, as she steps up onto the stage, beside Moneta.

“Now, do we have any volunteers willing to take her place?” Moneta asks. But District 10 has only ever seen one volunteer, when I was thirteen–a girl sacrificing herself so her girlfriend didn’t go into the Games. I remember the original tribute screaming, No, no, don’t do this, Rea, as Peacekeepers took her offstage and as Rea took her place. The volunteer, Rea, had frozen to death the first night in the Games. But the girlfriend’s pleas for her not to volunteer on the Reaping day…it haunts me still.

“Rea! Rea, no!”

But Rea was the only person brave and stupid enough in our district to ever sacrifice herself like that. The Games mean death to us in District 10. No-one has ever survived it.

Butch is a goner.

“Alright, then!” Moneta chirps. She skips over to the second glass ball, tinted blue, for the boy tribute. She pulls the same bitch move, where she draws it out an unnecessary amount–she lifts one halfway out of the bowl before dropping it back in (without reading the name), before picking another one. She finally takes one for real, clears her throat as she unfolds it. The first couple of attempts, she mispronounces the name so horrendously that I couldn’t tell what she was saying. Then, the mayor steps up, reads the thing, then corrects her under his breath. “Ah,” she said.

This time, correctly, she declared the boy tribute:

Avis Lowthorn.