Chapter Text
They’ll be coming up soon. I can smell it in the air: that hot, stuffy scent that signals the end of the working day in 12. Soon, the men will emerge from the gaping mouth of the ground and stagger back to their houses, which means there are only a couple more minutes.
The peace was nice at first, laying on the grass near the fences and listening to the birds, but the blades have become dry and itchy and poke through my shirt to my back. I sit up and Saoirse stirs behind me, crushing the daisy behind her ear that I placed in her sleep.
I attempt to brush the dry grass from my back, contorting around on myself like a snake eating its own tail, and I hear her chuckle, a soft, repeated exhalation.
“What? What are you laughing at?” I say, with mock indignation. She laughs again.
“You,” she says, sitting up and reaching her hand to my back. “You’re hilarious.”
“Well I don’t try,” I reply, “I’m just naturally really funny.”
“Sure. I’m way funnier than you, though.” She laughs, at a higher pitch this time. A laugh bubbles up in my throat and escapes before I can stop it. That often happens, when I’m around her. “See? I made you laugh!” Saoirse gets to her feet and reaches her hand towards me, to help me up.
“Oh you’re so strong!”
The grass crackles beneath my heels as she pulls me towards her and envelops me in a tight hug. My skin rubs against my ribs as she squeezes me, but I don’t mind. I wrap my arms around her back and attempt to embrace her and wipe the grass off of her back at the same time. It doesn’t work.
She pulls back to face me, kisses me quickly on the nose and, without giving me time to react, grabs my hand and pulls me to the gravel path that leads back to town.
There aren’t many good things that have happened to me, but I can say with certainty that Saoirse is one of the best. I was moved up a year in school, owing to the fact that I was (for lack of a better phrase) an absolute swot. There was a seat vacant next to her, which used to belong to a girl who had been picked for a reaping a couple of weeks prior. I was placed there, and the rest is history.
Kind of. She ignored me for much of a week, possibly because the girl who left was her friend and also probably because I was insufferable, but I didn’t mind. Honestly, I felt almost intimidated — in a class of people I didn’t know, who all knew each other, with the threat of being moved back down, being deemed a failure. I kept my head down and I worked.
The first conversation we had was about our mutual hatred for our Panem History teacher, who said something about how we should be revising for hours a day, prompting a simultaneous eyeroll. It’s funny how our first moment of connection was one of disgust. We laughed, began to whisper, and the rest was History.
I don’t think I will ever get tired of looking around 12 on these walks. Nothing changes, but that is part of its beauty. People have their routines: how Martin sings as he works the meat in the butchers; how the people walking in pairs to the Hob find time to talk about their lives in the week they do not see each other; how the hermit crab shell of the school ebbs with life for hours at a time and then empties its children onto the road, a flood of childlike chatter at the same time every day. Routine comforts me. I’m not one of those people that aches to get out of 12 like Saoirse, who seems to itch to jump the fence every time we go near it. I could quite happily live my life in 12, provided I and those I know are comfortable. I don’t like change, so I have to find the attraction in regularity.
“Are you sure we can’t spend a couple more minutes together? Do you want to come to mine?” Saoirse says, after a while.
“I can’t. I’d love to but I can’t. I’ve got to help Mum out with Drew’s stuff for tomorrow. It’s his first time, you know?”
“Fair. Fair, fair. I hate that we have to do this every year. Even when we were just friends I was so scared that you’d go in and I’d never see you again, but now… well, I want you here even more, you know?”
“What, you don’t think I’d win if I went in?” I say, jokingly. It’s best to joke, because the alternative is to cry, and I don’t want that just yet. “For the record, I think you would absolutely win if you went in. Odds in your favour and all that. The audience would love you!”
“Thanks,” Saoirse says, but she is muted. This also happens every year. Reality sets in the night before, no matter how light you try to make it. You have bad sleep, a worse morning, and then do it all again a year later.
Even though Saoirse is a year older than me, she has less of a chance of actually going in than I do. We both claim Tesserae, except she has her name in 18 times, for her father and herself. Mine is in twenty times: for Drew, for mum, for me. Two might not sound like much of a difference, but it can be the difference between life and death. It has been before.
Saoirse speaks up. “It’s horrible that this year is his first year. I mean, every year is horrible, but a quarter quell? They’re sick. What if it’s some sort of twist like… all participants under 14 years old, or something that affects him and it’s his first time? I’m sorry—”
“It’s okay. Nothing I haven’t already thought about.”
“If I go in,” Saoirse says, now on her doorstep. “If I go in, please take care of everyone I leave here. That’s all I can ask.”
“Of course I will. Same goes for you. Take care of my people, I mean. Especially Drew, you know how he is.”
Saoirse nods, gravely. We both have a bad feeling about tomorrow, but we can do nothing about it. Just watch and wait.
“Goodbye, Saoirse.”
She stands on the step and kisses my cheek.
“Goodbye, Haymitch.”
As I turn from her door and I make my way back to the Seam, I see the men, clouded by dust, walk like shadows to their own homes. The coal dust shimmers in the July air as they move, and it hits me then, as it does every year, that this may be the last time I see these men, this environment, my home. It is going to be a restless night.