【饥饿游戏】08

 “Peeta Mellark.”

Peeta Mellark!
Oh, no, I think. Not him. Because I recognize this name, although
I have never spoken directly to its owner. Peeta Mellark.
No, the odds 1 are not in my favor today. I watch him as he
makes his way toward the stage. Medium height, stocky build,
ashy blond hair that falls in waves over his forehead. 
The shock of the moment is registering on his
face, you can see his struggle to remain emotionless, but his
blue eyes show the alarm I’ve seen so often in prey 2. Yet he
climbs steadily 3 onto the stage and takes his place.
Effie Trinket asks for volunteers, but no one steps forward.
He has two older brothers, I know, I’ve seen them in the bakery,
but one is probably too old now to volunteer and the other
won’t. This is standard. Family devotion only goes so far
for most people on reaping day. What I did was the radical 4
thing.
The mayor begins to read the long, dull Treaty of Treason
as he does every year at this point — it’s required — but I’m
not listening to a word.
Why him? I think. Then I try to convince myself it doesn’t
matter. Peeta Mellark and I are not friends. Not even neighbors.
We don’t speak. Our only real interaction happened
years ago. He’s probably forgotten it. But I haven’t and I know
I never will. . . .
It was during the worst time. My father had been killed in
the mine accident three months earlier in the bitterest January
anyone could remember. The numbness 5 of his loss had
passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling
me over, racking my body with sobs 6. Where are you? I would
cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there
was never any answer.
The district had given us a small amount of money as 
compensation for his death, enough to cover one month 
of grieving at which time my mother would be expected to get 
a job. Only she didn’t. She didn’t do anything but sit propped 7
up in a chair or, more often, huddled 8 under the blankets on her 
bed, eyes fixed 9 on some point in the distance. Once in a while, 
she’d stir, get up as if moved by some urgent purpose, only to 
then collapse 10 back into stillness. No amount of pleading from 
Prim 11 seemed to affect her.
I was terrified. I suppose now that my mother was locked
in some dark world of sadness, but at the time, all I knew was
that I had lost not only a father, but a mother as well. At eleven
years old, with Prim just seven, I took over as head of the
family. There was no choice. I bought our food at the market
and cooked it as best I could and tried to keep Prim and myself
looking presentable. Because if it had become known that
my mother could no longer care for us, the district would have
taken us away from her and placed us in the community
home. I’d grown up seeing those home kids at school. The
sadness, the marks of angry hands on their faces, the 
hopelessness that curled their shoulders forward. I could never 
let that happen to Prim. 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 12. So I kept our
predicament a secret.
But the money ran out and we were slowly starving to
death. There’s no other way to put it. I kept telling myself if 
I could only hold out until May, just May 8th, I would turn
twelve and be able to sign up for the tesserae and get that
precious grain and oil to feed us. Only there were still several
weeks to go. We could well be dead by then.
Starvation’s not an uncommon 13 fate in District 12. Who
hasn’t seen the victims? Older people who can’t work. Children
from a family with too many to feed. Those injured in the
mines. Straggling through the streets. And one day, you come
upon them sitting motionless against a wall or lying in the
Meadow, you hear the wails 14 from a house, and the 
Peacekeepers are called in to retrieve 15 the body. Starvation is 
never the cause of death officially. It’s always the flu, or 
exposure, or pneumonia 16. But that fools no one.
On the afternoon of my encounter with Peeta Mellark, the
rain was falling in relentless 17 icy sheets. I had been in town,
trying to trade some threadbare old baby clothes of Prim’s in
the public market, but there were no takers. Although I had
been to the Hob on several occasions with my father, I was too
frightened to venture into that rough, gritty place alone.