all this time spent in vain-- wasted years, wasted gains
The way District 7 works is the whole thing's a stretch of forests and mills and 3/4 of the land belongs to the Capitol. All the work that's done is on their part of the land, the benefits only go to the Capitol. The remaining 1/4 is for the citizens of District 7 to use. It might seem like a lot, but we have to live and work on that plot of land too. The old people said we all used to live in tree houses until the smoke from the mills pushed us out. Now we just get a crowded clearing with tiny homes, even smaller families.
Our family was one of the bigger ones. My parents had their three kids- my oldest brother Levi and after him, Bachur and then me. Got smaller when our mother died. My father put his hands on our shoulders and told us to stand tall. The poison that killed my mom was from a new beetle and it was destroying the trees. If my brothers and I had wanted revenge, the Capitol wouldn't even let us have that victory. They burned down half our forests to get rid of it.
Levi was seven years older than me, five from Bachur and perfect. There's just no other way to put it. I think it’s because when he was twelve he was chosen for reaping, but our only cousin Ilan took his place. His parents had both died of the same disease that killed our mom. He died in the bloodbath and I guess from then on Levi wanted to be worth saving or something. So he was perfect, that was how everyone knew him. Everything he did he was best at. If my dad had been sad to lose our mom it was completely gone for how proud he was of Levi, the way he fell a tree or swung an axe and carved anything. He built me and Bachur a tree house, taught us all the plant names and how to throw an axe. Levi was strong like I wanted to be and smart like Bachur wanted to be.
The only thing he ever did wrong was get killed when I was 13. After the logs crushed him, the other men hauled his body back to die at the house. He didn't have a face, the whole thing had been ripped off, but he was still alive, at least for a little while. Bachur said it was his own fault he died, but I didn't think so. Levi was too perfect to just get killed for no reason, to make a mistake. I think in some way I started imagining Levi was part of the revolution long before the rest of us, but Plutarch said they didn't know anything about him. After everything my perfect brother died faceless for no reason.
Bachur and I were too different to fill that void. He liked the plant lessons more than the axe throwing, more about books than about actually getting in the woods. I probably looked for Levi in him, but I never got it. I don't know what Bachur wanted from me, but neither of us was happy being forced together without our brother around. We started fighting. The tree house burnt down when the second, stronger wave of oak beetles were dealt with.
After the second swarm summer, my father lost his arms. Those two years before my Games, our dad let the wood get away from him at the buzz saw and drove the plank through both his arms. No coming back to the mill from that. No going anywhere with that, not even to drown your bitterness at the bar. He stayed in bed mostly and I was the one who had to look after him. I know most people wouldn't picture me as a nursemaid and it wasn't exactly like that. But he was my responsibility when Bachur went to work at the mills. It was just us in this tiny house that smelt of pus and woodchips and I really couldn't forgive Bachur for leaving me alone there. We fought more; dad stopped breaking it up, stopped talking. I think he was ashamed of us, but nobody was ever going to be as perfect as dead Levi.
Eventually Bachur and I argued enough he just stopped coming home. He got really close to a girl a little older than me, Eilora Dorner. Her family had been dead for years (I didn't really care why) and she had a little sister who got her throat split open in the Games at some point, so she was all alone. I bet she and Bachur got on great because she was lonely and he was pathetic and needy. She was so bookish and helpless they didn't let her into the mills with the rest of the girls and old men, or out into the forests where I should have been. She lived entirely on tesserae. As if Bachur abandoning us wasn't bad enough, now he wanted to split his salary with some stranger too.
They got married after his nineteenth birthday but she still had one last reaping. So even if she made my brother leave us, even if I'd be happier if she'd go away and die on national television where I could gloat over her fat face in its last moments, I told her I'd volunteer if she was drawn. Her and Bachur spent the rest of the evening gushing about all the things I had to live for, how they wouldn't want me to throw my life away for their sakes. That kind of guilt would be too much to live with, Eliora said. I shrugged. Better than being dead.
( It’s just when they got married- my dad smiled for the first time in months. If it came down to me or her, he already had a preference. After everything I did, he’d rather Bachur was happy than I was alive. )
It's stupid, but when the reaping called my name, for a second I thought Eilora would've volunteered for me. Of course she didn't 'cause that defeats the whole point of why I would've volunteered for her, so raising myself onto the platform I didn't feel too betrayed. I guess it was the way the two of them looked me right in the eye- as if they had nothing to be ashamed of, as if they didn't owe me anything, as if they were relieved the axe fell on my neck. I knew how Bachur thought. If I had volunteered, they'd have felt guilty. Not lonely or sad, just obliged to the favor I'd given them. Like it was some kind of expensive wedding gift instead of offering to throw my life away. And that when the train took me away they must've thought they were so lucky not only because they weren't in my debt, but that they wouldn't have to put up with my intrusion in their perfect honeymoon bliss. That was the part I kept going over in the lowest of caverns, pretending to shiver. These people who were thankful to be rid of me, I'd live long enough to haunt them.
( Before I left, my dad came to say goodbye. He couldn't lift his hands to my shoulders, but he still reminded me to stand tall. I don't think he minded that I tried a different tactic. )
There'd never been a female victor from District 7 before me. I think it's because most of our girls worked in the mills and lots of times they end up claustrophobic and half deaf from the machines. Can't run very far with lungs that wrecked either. Since I had to look after my dad, I didn’t have any mill experience, just lessons throwing axes and chopping trees with Levi since I was small. We had a handful of guy champions, but the only one still alive was Blight. He won the year after the second swarm. When he came home from killing a District 9 girl by crushing her chest, he left his family and moved to the Victor's Village alone. Totally sequestered, so I think that's why he didn't really know either of us, me and Simon Creeler.
Simon was only fifteen but offered to protect me. "She takes care of her dad, Rubus Mason," he explained to Blight. I guess I hadn't thought about it, but apparently that was how the rest of the District saw me. I was crippled Rubus’s dutiful daughter, who looked after her limbless father while the living brother ran off. Blight didn't look at me through the entire explanation, so I guess they both missed my humiliation. Once Simon was through with his pity party for Johanna Mason, Blight waved me aside. Guessed I was even more useless than a mill girl.
When Simon found me at the back of the train, he promised to look after me. Blight didn't like it, he admitted, but it would look bad if he let a nice girl die on TV. I watched the last speck of trees disappear and wondered if- for a place called home- anybody there even knew me.
In our only training session, Blight just asked, "Is your do-nothing brother going to take care of your dad after you die?" By that point of being misread, being assumed to be stupid or weak, I was so mad I just made this noise like I might start crying out of pure fury. He grinned. "Not a bad plan." I don't know if I can give him credit for that tactic then, but maybe it means we both came up with it.
I never thought of myself as a good actress, but somehow I wound up using tears a lot. My stylist complained when I turned that crisp brown eyeliner into a puddle on my face, but by the big pre-Games interview she'd worked it into my style. Caesar jumped on the drape of a silver green dress, the long runs of makeup down my cheeks, the shaking of my shoulders.
"Are you supposed to be a weeping willow?" he cooed and the audience laughed at my sniffles.
Simon went into the Games with a 9. I got a 3. The last person who got a score that low was a slow boy from District 6, so it should've been suspicious. The night before the Games Blight pointed out someone might see through it, so pretended to forget to grab a weapon at the Cornucopia. Simon was nice enough to give me his knife, "just in case". I saw this moment replayed so much after the Games I started to actually like it. Not for some pre-teen boy being nice to me, but for the way it bit him in the ass later.
The first few days in the arena were boring. It was a sweltering jungle full of vines and giant spiders that looked like vines. We dropped to ten by the end of the second day and Simon and I hadn't even seen anyone since the Cornucopia. We ate spider (it was as tuff as bark, but there was a decent crunch). When we ran into a girl from District 11 who was more scared than we were, Simon strangled her to keep quiet. I curled under some rocks and listened to the last bit of life choke out of her, watched her hands pound against Simon's trunks of arms. When Simon wasted forty-five minutes trying to coax me out, tempting me with food the girl had been carrying, I knew I could've snapped her neck like a twig if anyone had given me the chance. When I crawled free, Simon was sharpening the girl's ill fitted weapon- an axe. Isn't it lucky? he laughed, waving the thing over Blight's latest gift (water and sunscreen). It was hard to eat with the light of its blade reflecting in my eyes.
That night we talked about making the final eight. We saw a District 12 boy hallucinating from dehydration that morning, and pegged him for dead by noon tomorrow, so we were as good as in. The final eight was when the Capitol interviews the families, so Simon curled up next to me and talked about his own. No father, just his mom and a sister. He was halfway through a story about his little Acacia when I slid the knife in his neck. I didn't even wait for the canon before I took the axe, the weapon that should've been mine if people hadn't made stupid assumptions of me. Can't someone take care of their family and be capable of taking care of themselves too? Levi would've managed it. Maybe not as well as me.
( Apparently at this stage they interviewed my brother. I didn't see the video until after he was dead, but they asked him if he was surprised at how brutal his baby sister was in the arena, turning on her own ally. He had looked right into the camera and said "I think Johanna has wanted to kill somebody for a long time, so the Games have just given her that opportunity." I offered to save his wife's life and he called me a budding murderer. If things hadn't gone the way they did, I'd have killed Bachur myself after seeing that clip. )
When the District 2 duo came running, I pretended to struggle climbing a tree. Before they fell into the pit I’d dug, I dropped nooses over their throats. I mocked tripping on some tree roots, so when the boy from District 1 tried to jump me, I turned around and he fell right on the blade of my axe. By the time I pushed his body off me his chest was in two half's. When I was taking a bath in a muddy excuse for a pond, I drowned the dying District 12 boy (he finally found a source of water). The whole thing was so easy I was practically bored when I launched the axe into the District 4 boy’s face. Walking away I thought of the difference between his rank 10 and my 3 and, done with crying, I laughed all the way to Victor status. People must have thought I was unhinged, chopping up spiders while the girl from District 5 tailed me, her fear so thick I could practically smell it. Eventually I tried cutting down the tree she was hiding in. She stabbed me in the shoulder and I knocked her teeth loose with the blunt end of an axe. She started choking on one and I waited it out, sitting on her chest. It was an uneventful end, but I was happy it had finally closed- Blight had stopped sending sunscreen. Nobody was sending me gifts, I found out later they were sending things to the other kids, trying to warn them about me. Guess the other brats never got the message.
In the post-games interview I told Caesar pretending to be weak was harder than the actual killing. I didn’t expect people to laugh, but looking back on it, it was pretty funny.
On the train home Blight kept looking like he wanted to say something to me, but never got the words out. He just looked like he was twisted up in those vines, and settled on moving in across the street in the Victor’s Village without a word. I don’t know what he could’ve told me to make anything about coming back home easier, it wasn’t like we had much in common besides murder. I was too excited about being free from the threat of being eaten by giant spiders or disemboweled on live television that I probably wouldn’t have listened.
Nobody’s ever happy to have a tribute back, no matter what they tell you about the food, the prizes. Simon was apparently well liked and his little sister was only six, so I was a real villain to most people in District 7. I didn’t care, the new house was taller than most trees and we got my father a nurse. He wasn’t smiling, but I felt free. I worked in the woods like Levi did, only I kept my face. Nobody could look at it, but it was mine. I thought for once this place was like home- the people all knew me, even if they didn’t like me. But when I reached to feel the baby growing in Eliora's belly, she flinched, and I realized there was no home for people like me.
When I heard about the arrangement, I thought it was a useless threat since no guy had wanted me before. Maybe Simon, I wondered, but he probably wasn’t thinking any attractive thoughts about me when I cut out his trachea. But as it turns out, horny assholes in the Capitol like a girl who can put on a show. Of course I turned it down, because I didn’t work so hard to look like a brainless weakling and kill half a dozen kids just to suck a Chancellor’s dick. When Snow said I was making things dangerous for the people around me, I told him I didn't give a damn what they did. If they wanted to hurt people close to me, I offered to draw up the list myself. But sitting across the long table with that thin ratty smile, I knew the President still saw me as a piece in the Games. I was the girl who faked struggling with the weight of her weapon before she severed a Career bitch's spine. I had a reputation as a liar, so they called my bluff and killed our father. A "stroke", his nurse said. I knocked her teeth out too, but she didn’t choke on them.
Eliora struggled to the Victor’s village to see me, then worked around a massive stomach to play nursemaid in my guilt. I couldn’t tell her was my fault and she couldn’t have guessed. In the end I think she was just hoping I’d become like the sister she watched die, that was why she was nice to me when everyone was afraid. Or maybe it was the baby and the hormones messing with her brain. All I know is it wasn’t for caring about me, or at Bachur’s request.
I told Snow’s representatives that killing my father, you did our family a favor, one less mouth to feed. So when they killed Eliora, I had to amend my rebuttal- three less mouths to feed. But I didn't say anything. I had one more chance to take back all that bluffing, the posturing, and let every eager admirer drill into me over the Victory tour. There was no real freedom after the Games, killing a bunch of kids didn’t earn me anything. I felt like I turned into Blight, voice all wrapped up in the vines like the first of the dying tributes. I wanted to wake up back in the jungles rather than live in this. When had the arena become more like home?
Bachur was so pathetic in the room where the baby would sleep, in a place where he'd start a family with or without me, so I told him why she died. I’m not great at keeping my feelings to myself. Even though the Games were only six months ago, I wasn't expecting to get punched. For as apparently good as I was at killing, for how much Bachur thought I was a murderer before I’d even gone away to the Capitol, I wasn’t really a master at fisticuffs. I protected my broken arm with my whole body, trying to inch under the baby’s crib to get out of reach. On the one hand it was nice to see Bachur grow a spine, but nobody enjoys getting the shit kicked out of them by their only living family member.
He accused me of being selfish, as if he’d spent years cooped in our house while I went off with a stranger and he changed the bandages on the stubs of our father’s arms. If I wasn’t the one getting beat about the head I’d have accused him of the head trauma. He told me to do whatever the Capitol says from that point on, like he had any idea what that meant. I spit between his knuckles and blithely informed him (and maybe myself too, remembering her hands over my shoulders. “Stand tall, Johanna,” she told me at our father’s funeral.) that my sleeping around wouldn’t bring Eliora back. Yeah, but it would keep him alive, Bachur reminded me. That still should mean something, even after the monster I’ve become.
When I came too, the stylists had finished sewing my eyelid back together. Blight was standing in a corner, I figured in case I needed briefing on the upcoming tours. How are we going to explain the sling, I asked them and when I tried to smile my mouth filled up with blood again. The cover story was I broke my arm in a fit of rage when my family died. It fits your image, Marae cuckolded, globbing on a second coat of concealer for the bruises, the burst blood vessels around my eyes.
When it was over Blight asked, Did he convince you of anything? nodding to my body- primed and perfect by purple and puffy beneath the Capitol’s styling’s. I shrugged. When I tried to imagine Bachur’s face I kept seeing the huge spiders hurriedly trying to eat before the canon sounded and took the bodies away. I wanted to imagine our time in the tree house, but I thought of the half a liver poking out of the District 1 boy’s chest cavity. When I wanted to imagine him reading his favorite book on Fourdrinier machine construction, I saw Simon’s sister’s eyes when I stepped off the train.
If my once sweet and gentle brother could rage blackout and knock me unconscious to save his own life, I should probably take it seriously. Nobody knew who I was, but I didn’t want to be the girl who let her entire family die to protect her pride. I smiled again, no blood that time, and Blight finally got the twisted words out. After he beat the hell out of you, Bachur hung himself on a tree outside. You’re already that girl. We got on the train and I figured being alone, not having a home or a loved ones, that must be what being free is.