Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)

by Suzanne Collins

Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.

We would leave early in the morning and hike farther into the woods than usual to a small lake he’d found while hunting.

Victors’ children have been in the ring before. It always causes a lot of excitement and generates talk about how the odds are not in that family’s favor. But it happens too frequently to just be about odds.

Given all the trouble I’ve caused, I’ve probably guaranteed any child of mine a spot in the Games.

I think of Haymitch, unmarried, no family, blotting out the world with drink. He could have had his choice of any woman in t...

Everyone at the table stares at me, even Haymitch, who you’d think would be on my side in this matter since Effie drives him nuts.

“It’s not necessary. My nightmares are usually about losing you,” he says. “I’m okay once I realize you’re here.”

After a couple of hours, I reach an old house near the edge of the lake.

“You don’t even have a phone,” I say. “Effie had that fixed,” he says. “Do you know she asked me if I’d like to give you away? I told her the sooner the better.”

I imagine facing a field of forty-seven instead of twenty-three. Worse odds, less hope, and ultimately more dead kids. That was the year Haymitch won. . . . “I had a friend who went that year,” says my mother quietly. “Maysilee Donner. Her parents owned the sweetshop. They gave me her songbird after. A canary.”

Whoever devised the Quarter Quell system had prepared for centuries of Hunger Games.

"whoever" being two drunk teenagers

As the alcohol overcomes my mind, I hear the glass bottle shatter on the floor. This seems appropriate since I have obviously lost my grip on everything.

I open my mouth, planning to start off with some kind of joke, and burst into tears.

Same

She calls out the name of a girl who’s from the Seam, you can tell by the look of her,

Poor sweetheart

Haymitch’s name is called last of all.

Haymitch has his own troubles over in the woods, where the fluffy golden squirrels turn out to be carnivorous and attack in packs, and the butterfly stings bring agony if not death.

He holds her hand while she dies, and all I can think of is Rue and how I was too late to save her, too.

It’s almost as bad as us and the berries!”

I’ve spent all these weeks getting to know who my competitors are, without even thinking about who my teammates are. Now a new kind of confidence is lighting up inside of me, because I think I finally know who Haymitch is. And I’m beginning to know who I am. And surely, two people who have caused the Capitol so much trouble can think of a way to get Peeta home alive.

“Having an eye for beauty isn’t the same thing as a weakness,” Peeta points out. “Except possibly when it comes to you.”

“Chink,” says Wiress vaguely. “In the armor, as it were,” finishes Beetee.

Good save Beetee

Between her district accent and her garbled speech — possibly she’s had a stroke — I can’t make out more than one in four words.

Great. Now I have to go back and tell Haymitch I want an eighty-year-old and Nuts and Volts for my allies. He’ll love that.

I remember his words . . . “Don’t worry. I always channel my emotions into my work. That way I don’t hurt anyone but myself.” . . . and I’m afraid he has hurt himself beyond repair. The significance of my fiery transformation will not be lost on President Snow.

“I’m not glad,” says Peeta. “I wish we had waited until the whole thing was done officially.” This takes even Caesar aback. “Surely even a brief time is better than no time?” “Maybe I’d think that, too, Caesar,” says Peeta bitterly, “if it weren’t for the baby.”

Even the most Capitol-loving, Games-hungry, bloodthirsty person out there can’t ignore, at least for a moment, how horrific the whole thing is. I am pregnant.

Oh, right. I’m supposed to be pregnant, I think. While I’m trying to think what that means and how I should act — maybe throw up or something — Finnick has positioned himself at the edge of the water.

As I drift off, I try to imagine that world, somewhere in the future, with no Games, no Capitol. A place like the meadow in the song I sang to Rue as she died. Where Peeta’s child could be safe.

Foreshadowing at its finest

“So it’s you and a syringe against the Capitol? See, this is why no one lets you make the plans.”