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He hates me. Or at least distrusts me. Even though it was years ago, I think he still remembers how I tried to drown him in a bucket when Prim brought him home.
HELP
My father knew and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. There was nothing even to bury. I was eleven then. Five years later, I still wake up screaming for him to run.
“District Twelve. Where you can starve to death in safety,”
I finally had to kill the lynx because he scared off game. I almost regretted it because he wasn’t bad company. But I got a decent price for his pelt.
Rip lynx
Besides, the Capitol accent is so affected, almost anything sounds funny in it.
Its giving british accentz
I try to remember that when all I can see is the woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones. I try to forgive her for my father’s sake. But to be honest, I’m not the forgiving type.
They’re not our kids, of course. But they might as well be. Gale’s two little brothers and a sister. Prim. And you may as well throw in our mothers, too, because how would they live without us? Who would fill those mouths that are always asking for more?
I’ve listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust one another.
“It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves,” he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine. If it wasn’t reaping day. If a girl with a gold pin and no tesserae had not made what I’m sure she thought was a harmless comment.
She’s about as safe as you can get, since she’s only entered once. I wouldn’t let her take out any tesserae. But she’s worried about me. That the unthinkable might happen.
“Tuck your tail in, little duck,” I say, smoothing the blouse back in place. Prim giggles and gives me a small “Quack.” “Quack yourself,” I say with a light laugh. The kind only Prim can draw out of me.
days, especially if there’s good weather, it has a holiday feel to it. But today, despite the bright banners hanging on the buildings, there’s an air of grimness. The camera crews, perched like buzzards on rooftops, only add to the effect.
I could be shot on a daily basis for hunting, but the appetites of those in charge protect me. Not everyone can claim the same.
Anyway, Gale and I agree that if we have to choose between dying of hunger and a bullet in the head, the bullet would be much quicker.
He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America.
The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.
Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch — this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen.”
To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others. The last tribute alive receives a life of ease back home, and their district will be showered with prizes, largely consisting of food.
And it’s not me. It’s Primrose Everdeen.
Oop
He doesn’t know me really, but there’s a faint recognition there. I am the girl who brings the strawberries. The girl his daughter might have spoken of on occasion. The girl who five years ago stood huddled with her mother and sister, as he presented her, the oldest child, with a medal of valor. A medal for her father, vaporized in the mines. Does he remember that? “What does it matter?” he repeats gruffly. “Let her come forward.”
Family devotion only goes so far for most people on reaping day. What I did was the radical thing.
Sweet, tiny Prim who cried when I cried before she even knew the reason, who brushed and plaited my mother’s hair before we left for school, who still polished my father’s shaving mirror each night because he’d hated the layer of coal dust that settled on everything in the Seam. The community home would crush her like a bug. So I kept our predicament a secret.
Oh, well, I think. There will be twenty-four of us. Odds are someone else will kill him before I do.
Thats one way to thank him ig
People deal with me, but they are genuinely fond of Prim. Maybe there will be enough fondness to keep her alive.
“It’s not just hunting. They’re armed. They think,” I say. “So do you. And you’ve had more practice. Real practice,” he says. “You know how to kill.” “Not people,” I say. “How different can it be, really?” says Gale grimly. The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all.
But I hate Effie Trinket’s comment so much I make a point of eating the rest of my meal with my fingers. Then I wipe my hands on the tablecloth. This makes her purse her lips tightly together.
Icon
And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that, she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor. Only when she mounts the stage and they ask for volunteers, all you can hear is the wind whistling through the decrepit buildings around her. There’s no one willing to take her place.
RUE MY SHAYLAA
He hasn’t accepted his death. He is already fighting hard to stay alive. Which also means that kind Peeta Mellark, the boy who gave me the bread, is fighting hard to kill me.
Waitttt hear him out firzt man
It’s hard to hate my prep team. They’re such total idiots. And yet, in an odd way, I know they’re sincerely trying to help me.
What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?
The people of the Capitol are going nuts, showering us with flowers, shouting our names, our first names, which they have bothered to find on the program.
“I’m sure they didn’t notice anything but you. You should wear flames more often,” he says. “They suit you.” And then he gives me a smile that seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through me. A warning bell goes off in my head. Don’t be so stupid. Peeta is planning how to kill you, I remind myself. He is luring you in to make you easy prey. The more likable he is, the more deadly he is. But because two can play at this game, I stand on tiptoe and kiss his cheek. Right on his bruise.
KATNISS OML
I hear Peeta’s voice in my head. She has no idea. The effect she can have. Obviously meant to demean me. Right? But a tiny part of me wonders if this was a compliment. That he meant I was appealing in some way. It’s weird, how much he’s noticed me. Like the attention he’s paid to my hunting. And apparently, I have not been as oblivious to him as I imagined, either. The flour. The wrestling. I have kept track of the boy with the bread.
Guys its so obvious oml
I call him my friend, but in the last year it’s seemed too casual a word for what Gale is to me. A pang of longing shoots through my chest. If only he was with me now! But, of course, I don’t want that. I don’t want him in the arena where he’d be dead in a few days. I just . . . I just miss him. And I hate being so alone. Does he miss me? He must.
But peetaaa
The next hours are agonizing. At once, it’s clear I cannot gush. We try me playing cocky, but I just don’t have the arrogance. Apparently, I’m too “vulnerable” for ferocity. I’m not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious. By the end of the session, I am no one at all.
Okay, maybe I don’t go around loving everybody I meet, maybe my smiles are hard to come by, but I do care for some people.
“I’m very hard to catch,” she says in a tremulous voice. “And if they can’t catch me, they can’t kill me. So don’t count me out.”
RUEEE
“I don’t think it’s going to work out. Winning . . . won’t help in my case,” says Peeta. “Why ever not?” says Caesar, mystified. Peeta blushes beet red and stammers out. “Because . . . because . . . she came here with me.”
AHHH
I want to die as myself. Does that make any sense?” he asks. I shake my head. How could he die as anyone but himself? “I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.”
All of a sudden, I’m overwhelmed by the thought that Peeta may be already lost, bled white, collected, and in the process of being transported back to the Capitol to be cleaned up, redressed, and shipped in a simple wooden box back to District 12.
Ooooo you like himmmm
I’m about to panic when I remember the rabbit I startled earlier today. It has to drink, too. I just have to find out where.
Smart smart
This is what I tell myself to explain the conflicting emotions that arise when I think of Peeta. The gratitude that he gave me an edge by professing his love for me in the interview. The anger at his superiority on the roof. The dread that we may come face-to-face at any moment in this arena.
Maybe he’s sending you a message, it says. A message. Saying what? Then I know. There’s only one good reason Haymitch could be withholding water from me. Because he knows I’ve almost found it.
You better than me bc how is that what you come up with
I wave it teasingly above her head, as if this was the sole purpose of retrieving it, when actually I mean to use it if I ever get the chance. I could kill them, every one of them, if those silver weapons were in my hands.
Sick and disoriented, I’m able to form only one thought: Peeta Mellark just saved my life.
for some reason Gale and Peeta do not coexist well together in my thoughts.
Its becayse ypu like themmmm
Of course, this kind of deal can only be temporary, but neither of us mentions that.
Sigh
“Burn it. Dump it in the lake. Soak it in fuel.” I poke Rue in the belly, just like I would Prim. “Eat it!” She giggles. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something. Destroying things is much easier than making them.”
AHHH THEYRE SO SWET
About Rue being killed, about Rue not being killed and the two of us being left for last, about leaving Rue alone, about leaving Prim alone back home. No, Prim has my mother and Gale and a baker who has promised she won’t go hungry. Rue has only me.
You’d have thought . . . and slowly it begins to dawn on me . . . you’d have thought the very ground was going to explode. “It’s mined,”
