Chapter Text
Reaping Day is always the worst day of my year, but for more than the reasons people think.
Those things are enough on their own, of course. The sleepless, airless night before in my shared attic bedroom over the bakery. Lying awake between my brothers, imagining my name on five slips of paper in that giant glass reaping ball. The vicious finger prick at check-in that aches for days because we can’t afford the good creams that would close the cut. Standing in roped pens like livestock under the scorching sun, waiting for Effie Trinket to emerge in another crazy, frilly outfit looking like some pastry I’d decorate for the shop window. Watching the condemned mount the stairs. Bearing witness to their deaths on live television. Nightmares the rest of the year featuring them.
In District Twelve, everyone carries these hurts. They're somewhere between unbearable to unspeakable, each and every one, but we do shoulder those burdens together.
No one helps me get through the reality of my mother. Crashing up the stairs, boxing my ears for showing weakness, yelling terrible, unforgivable things at me until I've no more tears to cry.
Mother’s spent her whole life regretting Reaping Day.
My family carries that regret alone.
She slices a raisin loaf for breakfast the way you’d slice a throat. My brothers and I stay clear of her, buttoning our starched shirts to the collar and threading worn leather belts through the loops in our nicest slacks. Tack, my oldest brother, straightens Rhy’s collar. My middle brother has parted his hair straight down the middle and slicked it to a shine, just as stiff as the set of his shoulders. He’s eighteen this year, his name in the reaping ball seven times, and lucky for it to be so few. Mother trusts him with the daily sourdough boules now, the ones that merchants line up outside our door to buy first thing on Monday mornings. If he makes it through today’s Reaping, he’ll be free of the lottery for good and will step into inheriting the shop, since Tack’s apprenticed with the clerk’s office now. Rhy’s so close to the rest of his life that all of us can taste it. Premature hope a cottony dryness in all our mouths, like a persimmon bitten before it’s ripe.
Mother’s almost frayed to bits from the tension. She’s attacking the bread with such force that the perfect crispy crust falls to crumbs all over the counter. She prepares torn and ragged slices for our lunches, heaped carelessly with blackberry jam that looks more like additional gore than a real attempt at hiding the damage. She hands Tack all three plates and her eyes skate over Rhy like she can barely stand for her gaze to settle on him. She doesn’t look at me at all.
I’m just sixteen. I have to survive today three more times. Father says the only way she can bear it is not to think of me at all. He frames it as a kindness, as something she does out of love, because my father is kind. I think only someone as kind as he is could love a person like Mother. He must know his excuses are far from the truth.
Love and guilt aren’t the same.
Father lumbers down the stairs just before it’s time to go, tucking Mother under his arm in a bear hug she resists even though she looks twig-brittle enough to snap if she’s not careful. He ruffles Rhy’s shiny hair—which does not succumb—and claps me on the shoulder, giving me a nod, looking me in the eye.
“Chin up,” he says quietly, which is the only thing anyone’s said to me all day. No "you’ll be all right", because he doesn’t make promises he can’t keep, and anyway, Father’s got a bleeding heart like mine. Neither of us wants to hear that I’ll be all right when some other boy from District Twelve won’t be. Probably a soot-blackened, malnourished kid from the Seam. Someone like Limn, maybe, who sits next to me at school and already has the trademark miner’s lung cough. He works afternoons breaking up slag outside the mine shaft for coal leavings to sell at the Hob half price, because even with tesserae, his six siblings will starve to death without the income—his mother can’t work. Limn has his name in forty times.
That’s what I’m guilty about as my brothers and I go to the square. Limn and his neighbors and problems that belong to other people. Problems that are worse than mine, all things in balance. Problems I'm scared I only think about because they sting less for me; they are not as personal.
Mother finally looks at me just before Rhy and I join the sign-in queue, her face all screwed up in its usual critical squint.
“You couldn’t even bother to comb your hair?” She reaches out, rakes her fingers through my blond tousle, nails catching and yanking at the roots. I wince. “Stand still. Christ.” Then she pushes me forward, to the line where Rhy already stands, tall and kept and obedient. I join him quietly, rubbing a hand over my aching head. It’s not the worst damage she’s ever dealt me. Father would say that’s her way of worrying over me, but it’s not. She can barely stand to worry over Rhy; she’d rather I had just died in the womb and saved her the trouble of needing to be cared for.
Caring for people has only ever hurt my mother. She doesn’t do it anymore, if she can help it.
I feel the absence of her attention as I hold out my hand to the white-suited Capitol attendant for the prick, then join the sixteen-year-old boys near the front of the square. My parents always stand toward the back of the square, where the crowd obscures their view. Mother leans against the sun-warmed brick wall of the grain exchange and closes her eyes. I’ve seen her like that before, when I was younger and still looked for her in the crowd. She looks like a cat sunning herself, face relaxed and careless, as if she’d had some of those medicinal herbs sold in the Hob. As if she wasn’t in her body at all.
And maybe she isn’t. She doesn’t even come here to buy the poppy and sesame seeds we sprinkle on the loaves. It sends her back to her own Reaping days. To the day her sister was chosen.
My aunt died before I was ever thought of. She was sixteen and blond as I am. They say she was reedy thin like my mother, neither of them much of a beauty. Mother was eighteen. Her last year in the Reaping, and her only sibling was chosen; their whole family safe from the pageant after that, but at the highest cost a family can pay. My grandparents did book work for the Peacekeepers’ office back then, nothing very important, but it left them close enough to the Capitol for people to resent them. Close enough that maybe some part of her thought they were safer than the rest.
Father says very few people came to call in the two weeks after. My aunt was killed over a backpack at the Cornucopia on the first day of the games, and there was a sense of relief over it; everyone was sad for a day and then they moved on. He says people felt if it had to be someone, it might as well be the girl fed from the Head Peacekeeper’s table. He says my mother used to have a sharp and cunning smile, but never wore it after that. He says my grandparents faded like the winter sun, no will to go on with no one left to hold them up. He says that the first real thing my mother ever said to him was that she should have volunteered, that she justified it because no one expected a volunteer, District Twelve doesn't do volunteers. Anyway, Mae was old enough and Mae was smart enough and Mae probably had a better chance of getting through the arena than she did.
But she should have volunteered anyway, she said. According to Father, it was the only time, before or since, that he’s seen her cry.
When I think of my mother the way my father sees her, gnarled by grief, bent over under the weight of the sort of choice you can never take back—I can almost forgive her.
I can almost see how it’s better if she doesn’t let herself love me.
The crowd shuffles and waits as Effie Trinket takes the stage, chirping her way nervously through the opening speeches. The mayor stalls until District Twelve’s only surviving victor, Haymitch Abernathy, wobbles onto the stage and takes his seat. He’s almost too drunk to breathe, which is pretty normal for Haymitch on Reaping Day. I guess it’s the only way he can forget his own. He's not unlike my mother sunning herself against that building, eyes shut, imagining that she’s anywhere else.
I don’t like to look at him listing in his chair; instead, as Effie goes to the girls’ reaping ball for the first name drawing, I drop my gaze to my hands and pick at some dried flour that’s caught under my nails. I helped Rhy mix up the dough for tomorrow’s loaves before breakfast. He can do it by himself, measuring the slack dough into perfectly portioned lumps, spread out on a flour-dusted counter and covered with a piece of cloth. Normally he does; I prefer to work with the finished desserts. I like to mix herbs and powdered dyes into the icing and lose myself piping patterns, flowers, swirls onto clean white sugar canvases. But on Reaping Day, I need something simpler to occupy my mind. My hands shake too much for decorating. Tomorrow, I’ll be steady again. Tomorrow, I can—
“Primrose Everdeen!” Effie Trinket calls out.
My heart thuds once, hard, like dough slapped onto the countertop.
And my eyes find her like I’ve been keeping track of her the whole time. Tiny Primrose with blond hair like mine in two braids, and a too-small white blouse that’s come untucked in the back. She’s frozen in the very back row with the other twelve year olds, as the whole crowd shifts and mutters and turns, restless with discontent as they always are when it’s one of the little kids picked.
I see her eyes go white at the edges with terror, and I look away from her, across the square, to the girl I do always track in a crowd, though I try to forget I’m doing it. Katniss Everdeen. Primrose’s older sister.
If Primrose is still, Katniss is lightning-struck.
The last time I saw her she look like this, she was eleven years old and starving to death in the spring puddles under our apple tree, cowering as my mother screamed at her for going through our trash.
I see them going home together every day from school. Katniss with an arm around her sister’s shoulders, or carrying her piggyback, or just swinging their hands together as they chatter and wander down the lane toward the Seam together. Katniss, grinning and teasing. She only ever looks that happy with Primrose. I would know; I am always watching to see if she’s happy. Maybe that’s pathetic of me, but I am.
Primrose tucks in her shirt and steps forward from the line of twelve-year-olds. Two Peacekeepers come alongside her and she folds her hands into panicky-tight fists as she walks between them, her shirt tails coming loose again as she goes.
When they pass us, the row of sixteens, that’s when Katniss explodes from the row. She knocks over the rope hanging and finds her feet, darts in front of the Peacekeepers and in front of her sister, her voice breaking over the words I somehow knew she was going to say as soon as Primrose’s name was called, because how could she do anything else?
“I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute.”
The world tilts.
A small, choked sound escapes me before I can stop it.
No one hears me. They’re all too wrapped up in the drama unfolding. An ache’s unfurling in my chest, hot and furious, as I watch Katniss herd her sister back, as the boy she hunts with, Gale, comes up and takes Primrose away screaming high and shrill. Katniss squares her shoulders and takes numb steps to the podium, wooden, like she’s already a corpse.
That’s what a tribute from District Twelve is. A corpse.
I can't imagine these two things in the same sentence together. Katniss Everdeen. A corpse.
For years and years, Katniss has fought so hard to stay alive, no one ever helping her just because she is a person and deserves to breathe just like the rest of us. Even I have not done what I should have for her, to my shame. Away from Mother, I’m outgoing, friendly. I’ve built the friendships and havens outside the bakery that I’ve never found inside it, so it’s even more embarrassing the way all my clever words dry up under Katniss’s flinty, suspicious Seam glare. I’m not willing to risk the ridicule if I were to approach her and she were to rebuff me. Peeta Mellark, not even good enough for a gutter rat.
Except that one time. The pigs, the trash, my mother screaming, Katniss huddled under her fury like a windfall apple, spent and quiet, all the joy and fire she used to pour into the valley song guttered out. And then the nut loaves, so easily tipped from their tray into the coals. It only cost me a couple of bruises to do it. Mother would have found a reason to hit me anyway, by the end of the night, and it felt good for the pain to be worth something for once. It felt good to know that I didn’t have to be able to talk around Katniss to be something good in her life, even if that was only because her life had so few good things.
There’s a ripple of movement in the crowd. Each person touching three fingers to their lips and raising them to Katniss, a goodbye for the respected dead, and I see her jaw clench, see something splinter in her. Her eyes are at the back, on Primrose; she doesn’t see me raising my shaking hand with the rest, making this stupid, useless gesture that will not save her. Just like my burnt loaves, in the end.
Effie Trinket has gone to the boys’ fishbowl quickly, racing against the souring sentiment of the crowd. She yanks a paper from the top, retreats to the microphone, opens her mouth, and deals her second death blow.
She reads my name.
And it’s like when Mother starts yelling, only so much worse. I flee my body. My hands go numb, my hearts stops beating, and there’s nothing in my brain but a buzzing like tracker jackers building at the base of my skull as Effie’s amplified voice ricochets off the stone buildings.
Peeta Mellark
Peeta Mellark.
Peeta Mellark.
Five slips out of thousands, good odds, a life in my favor even with three more years of risk, and suddenly, none of that luck matters. I suck in an airless breath so the spots that flare across my vision don’t spread, and I try to steady myself, but the only thing I can make myself think is—it’s not Rhy, at least it’s not Rhy.
Because that would be the thing that no one else could bear. They’ll be able to survive this, my father and my brothers, and Mother.
Katniss’s eyes shoot to mine for the first time in years, something stricken in them, and I think—she remembers the bread.
But no. It’s just who she is, to be upset for me. She’d like to pretend the only person she’ll ever care for is her sister, but she holds herself apart because Primrose is the only weakness she can afford.
I take the stage. Katniss and I shake hands. Her nimble fingers are trembling; I squeeze them on instinct, wanting to be something steady against both our terror. She just reaches my shoulder, which feels incorrect somehow; she has always been so much larger than life. Her eyes flicker to mine and then away without settling, and I'm too bloodless to blush. Maybe this is the benefit of being a walking corpse. Maybe my body has decided to get the dying over with ahead of time, before I can embarrass myself.
I am a jumble as I look out to the crowd, searching for my parents despite myself, though I know whatever I see won’t be a comfort. My mother’s standing in her usual place against the wall, my father’s hand on her arm. His eyes are wet. Her eyes are open. She’s looking at the sky at first, but maybe Father’s hand clenches on her bicep, because she looks at me then, and there’s nothing in them. I thought there’d be something. Some grief. Some relief, even, for my brother. But there’s no expression at all.
They take us into City Hall to separate rooms. Mine is a wood-paneled office, where some bureaucrat’s library has been stowed in dusty abandonment on the mahogany bookshelves. I still can’t feel my hands or the rest of my body, and I think maybe I’ve lost the ability to tell time. The room smells like wood, like the bookshelves. I’m thinking of the wooden boxes tributes return to their districts in once they’ve died. Plain fresh-cut pine with a dead person laid out in white underneath. They air the homecomings sometimes in the latter half of the games, when the live footage is slow. If the damage wasn’t too horrifying, they’ll unload the box with the lid off so everyone can get one last look at the tribute. They look as if they’re laid out in the display cases we use for our pastries at the bakery, only without the glass fronts. I guess the corpse has a lot in common with the cakes that way. Iced in funeral clothes to cover up whatever mess was made of them by the other tributes in their final moments.
My family enters after what feels like just a few seconds, all dressed in their pressed Sunday clothes, and my mind sticks on what’s underneath those funeral suits tributes come home in. The rotten, welling wounds, torn flesh, pain and suffering and death. I’m not sure if I’m about to vomit or scream, but I can’t—not with them here. I can’t bear whatever they would say. I don’t think I can face the extra blows. I force my mind back to the image of the clean, plain, pine-smelling box, not what goes inside. Not how I’ll be inside it.
“Stop crying,” Mother says, businesslike, and I feel the damp on my cheeks. I didn’t even realize tears had welled up.
“My boy,” Father says, coming to me, wrapping me in a big, solid bear hug. He smells of yeast and barley and cane sugar and I bury my face in his coat, inhaling deeply. He hugs me like it’s the only thing he can do for me, which it is. He wants to be a comfort, and he’s never known how. More tears come.
Tack is here, looking sorry. Rhy is in his shadow, something twisting deep in his face in a way I can tell will stick for good. He won’t look me in the eye. I know he’s thinking of Katniss Everdeen and the way her voice choked with love when she volunteered in Prim’s stead. I know he’s thinking of Mother, of Aunt Mae.
“Peeta,” he says. He can’t say any more than that. Maybe he doesn’t know what would have come next.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I say to him, mostly because I can see he wants to hear it. I don’t know what I feel. I don’t think I have feelings, anymore, which has got to be a first. Mother’s always telling me I’m too soft, I care too much. “You’ve the bakery to think of. It’s not as if you’d have any better of a shot than I will.”
He doesn’t come to me, and I don’t go to him, and Tack stays between us like a wall we’ve built. Something has broken between us. Something I hadn't realized we’d even had. There’s not much love lost between my brothers and I. Living with my mother, it’s each to his own, whatever it takes to survive, and they’ve stepped on me where they felt they needed to.
“It's not so bad,” says Mother, having come to sit beside me on the window bench. She pats the plush cushion as if someone might claim the spot between us. “Maybe District Twelve will finally have a winner.”
She’s speaking in a strange, bright voice that she’s never used before, worse than all the anger and moods. It’s some final, awful place she’s slipped into, where no one, not even my father, can follow. He stands in the middle of the room, looking at her like it was her name they pulled out of the fishbowl, his expression cracked and broken. When I meet my mother’s gaze, her smile hangs wrong on her face, and there’s nothing at all in her eyes.
“She’s a survivor, that one.”