The Ballad of Haymitch Abernathy

49 ADD (49 years after the dark days)

This is stupid. It's all so stupid. Hunger Games? Yeah. Stupid. Whoever invented the Hunger Games clearly didn't think about what they were doing before they made it. And those who are reaped are also stupid. All they want is weapons so they can kill and survive. Who needs a weapon when you have a brain? 

But only one person would agree with me. Beetee Latier won the games when I was five years old. If electrocuting one person isn't enough, what about six? Well, that's how he won his games. He is a literal genius, and if I'd had enough money back then, I would have taken a train directly to District 3 to me him in person. Since then, I've had a goal to be like him. I've had a goal to be a genius.

I would even go as far as to say that I would be fine with being reaped if only to show him that I can be a smart as him. But I don't want to be reaped. No one does. I've attended the reaping every year since I was 12, and every year I see people that I know go into the arena and never return. Until last month, I'd been under the belief that no one had ever survived the games in District 12.

First I heard it from one person. Then two. Then three. Now, I hear it every day, just from walking the streets. Rumor has it a girl won it 40 years ago. An old lady from the Seam, Maude Ivory, told her son the story of a girl named Lucy Grey Baird. Maude and Lucy had been sisters of a sort, and had been part of a band together. One year, Lucy Grey had been reaped—an action of betrayal. The games had been erased from history because of illegal cheating on behalf of her mentor, Coriolanus Snow. No wonder we knew not of it. No wonder it had been erased from history. A few months after the games, story says the two of them, Lucy Grey and Coriolanus, went missing. Later that day, Snow was seen walking out of forest, Lucy not in his wake. No sign of Lucy Grey Baird was ever seen again. Maude believes she is still out there, living all alone in the woods. Others believe she is dead by now, probably of natural cause. The rest believe Coriolanus had taken her in the woods so he could kill her. 

The story had been so altered and twisted, and everyone had different opinions, that by the time I heard it, I didn't know who to believe. I didn't believe it, actually. Coriolanus Snow was the president of Panam; why would the president have been a mentor? It got to the point where I couldn't stand to hear people talk about it anymore. So I knew I had to figure out if it was real or not by looking at real facts. I know the games have been erased from history, but District 12 typically keeps all the old records in an abandoned library, even after they were supposed to be thrown out. 

It was difficult to navigate that abandoned library, and typically there was no point to exploring, other than to fall to your potential death. I liked to go in there simply for the fact of challenging myself. Walking along fallen planks, ducking under tipped bookshelves help up by a fraying wire, dancing on your toes trying to avoid smashed glass, and then my favourite part; climbing the walls. The cracks between the planks are large enough for someone nimble to use a footrests, and the nails jutting from the walls are good for handholds, if you have enough common sense to tell which are sturdy and which are weak. Once you get high enough, you can sit on window sills without being seen, lie on the bookshelves if they are stable, or stand on the peak and watch the district below you. Being near the black market, the library was gossip central, and I love gossip. The ins and outs of relationships, the problems that people are having with their families. But today, I was focused on finding a book. 

I forced myself to sit through our meager dinner of beans and rabbit stew, talking politely to my fragile mother who would break simply at the mention of a homeless child I saw during the day. Once I'd scraped my bowl clean, I offered to help her wash the dishes. So while she filled our cooking pot with the remains of our daily water supply and put it over the fire to boil, I rinsed and put away the dishes. She sat down before the fire, heading into her evening silent time, and I slipped away into my room, claiming to have homework. She didn't question it, even though school was over for the year.