❝𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐎𝐒❞ | k. everdeen

chapter 15: i'll be good.

It is said that lies have short legs, that it is easier to catch a liar than a lame person. Sometimes it was true, perhaps because it was unnatural for some people to lie, the tremor in their voice giving them away, the movement of their body that prevented them from looking into another person's eyes while telling a lie, the strange twitch that each person had of their own and that revealed that they had never really been telling the truth.

For Nola, however, it had never been like that. She had been lying for as long as she could remember, and she had always prided herself on lying so well that she had never been caught in a lie. From the most banal things when she was in the orphanage and going to classes, to more momentous things after winning the Hunger Games. She was a compulsive liar, obsessed with making people think she had it all under control, preventing them from seeing that behind those green eyes was, at times, a very scared little girl. But at least she knew how to lie.

However, she was so used to following a story line of her own life so far removed from reality that sometimes she couldn't even remember what was true and what was a lie. She would look at herself in the mirror, grazing the glass with her fingernails, tracing her silhouette on the glass, asking herself, am I real, am I alive, or is this something my brain is imagining? She answered that she was real, and that she was alive, but she didn't know if she was lying or telling the truth. It comforted her, at least, to know how to lie so well that she didn't know the certainty in her own words.

That's why it hurt her so deeply to realise that she had lost that ability. No. She had not lost it: it had been taken from her. The tremor in her voice had gradually appeared, she felt unable to hold her gaze in the same way, she moved her legs in an exaggerated way when a lie tried to escape her lips. Nola had been sitting in that chair for days, sometimes for hours at a time, and she had lost half of what gave her life meaning: her ability to create truths that could turn out to be false.

But not only that. She was also beginning to lose the other half, and although it didn't hurt as much as feeling so stripped of her most hidden treasure, Nola was afraid because she knew that soon it would start to hurt even more.

Her memories were beginning to fade.

She had noticed it a few days ago, when Snow had pressed happiness back into that fucking machine, as if he was out to destroy her happiest memories. Nola had tried to make eye contact with the man in the dressing gown who always accompanied them, but the guy hadn't dared to look her in the eye, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose nervously in response. She was tired of having to relive happy moments, because they were becoming more and more horrific, with dark and vicious undertones that Nola thought she had never experienced, but she saw them so clearly in her head, so clearly, that she was beginning to think they had happened.

With an incredible pain in her chest and temples, she remembered Cashmere again. This time in a different way, though. In her memory, Nola had just turned nineteen, a couple of months before she re-entered the arena, and on her answering machine, as soon as she woke up, the voice of the young woman from District 1 rang out, as if she knew she had just woken up.

"Hey, Nola. I know you don't like your birthday too much, but remembering you on this day is unavoidable. It's Monday. A sad Monday, because here in District 1, it looks like it's about to rain. I also know that things haven't been like they used to be for a long time, so the fact that I'm talking to you now will probably be a bit awkward. But it's impossible not to remember you, Nola. Your presence would make the day bright even if there was a storm here," Nola rubbed her eyes as Cashmere seemed to think about what she was saying, sighing to herself but audible into the phone. "What I meant to say is... Happy birthday. I wish you were here and we could talk like nothing happened. I'd like you to call me back when you can. Oh, one last thing. Enobaria is going to get you a present, but don't tell her I said anything, okay?" Nola remembered stifling a giggle at that, still a little sleepy. Cashmere said goodbye with three words. "I miss you."