Alyssa of Nine (Reimagining the Hunger Games)

Chapter One: Alyssa Whitestone

Two and a half years earlier

Reaping Day

District Nine

For thirteen years after my parents were taken away and killed I have lived in the orphan's community home, under the supervision of Caretaker Grimes and Mrs. Bryant. But even though we were provided for as far as the barest neccesities went, we often barely got enough of those things, and we never knew the love of a true family, because we never had anyone but ourselves.

Since it is Reaping Day again, the first thing we did is wash up as best we can and dress in our best sets of clothes, the kind we were only allowed to wear to the reaping which happens once every year, a week before the Hunger Games begin.

The Hunger Games are a disgusting, twisted, and cruel punishment that has been in existence since the Dark Days and the failed rebellion against the Capitol. Once every year at a reaping, one girl and one boy from every district from the ages of twelve to eighteen are to be reaped to train in the Capitol and then compete in the annual Hunger Games.

The way the Games work is that once they have gone through the training, been shown off to the Capitol, and spent one week in the lap of luxury, they are sent into an outdoor arena which can hold any kind of landscape and any kind of dangers. And they must kill other tributes or get killed for the entertainment of those in the Capitol.

But half of the time, it's not only the other tributes that you'd have to worry about. The elements of any arena environment, depending how harsh it is, can wipe anybody out if they aren't prepared to survive it, or they don't get enough sponsors to provide the tools or even medicines they may need. I've seen it happen on television before in Games past.

Once Caretaker Grimes had ordered us all into orderly and precise lines, he went through the usual mandatory roll call. And then we filed into the orphan home cafeteria for our daily breakfast rations of mushpaste. A watery and lumpy kind of cooked cereal that is just as good as the name sounds, which means it isn't good at all. But it is better than starving to death.

Another rotten deal that those of us with no parents in District Nine would get is that we had to sign our names on paper, even after we've paid for each meal. This is to make sure that we haven't tried to run off in an illegal attempt at escaping the district, and also to make sure our names get entered even more times than anyone else's for every reaping.

As I sit down with my tray, two of the other older orphans of the community home take their places at the same table. One of them I know as Mace Grant, and the other is Natasha Blackburn. Mace's parents were so impoverished by the time he was born that they had one day just left him on the doorstep of this place, crying and unwanted.

Mace wasn't by any means particularly good-looking with his sullen face and murky-brown hair, and never had been, but he was a loyal friend. He once scared off a bunch of merchant's kids who tried to bully me, one day when I was six, and after he stood up for me, we were friends ever since. But I'm not interested in Mace in the way of anything more serious than a long standing friendship. I don't think I'll ever be interested enough in any guy for romance. I get by just as well on my own since I've mostly been left to fend for myself from an early age anyway. I don't need a man to be dependent on, and I can't stand the kind of girls who think they do.

I also can't stand people like Caretaker Grimes and Miss Bryant, but without them and the orphan home, as they once reminded me in so many cruel ways on a daily basis, I would have been left to starve to death or die of some terrible illness since no one else would ever want me. Something to do with the stigma of having your parents die trying to change Panem only to have them   vilified by so many as criminals anyway. It was almost like they died in vain, which is in no way depressing.

Natasha Black on the other hand, was actually quite pretty, and she knows it. She really liked Rowan McCain, but a lot of girls, even in the orphan community home do. But she knew she sadly didn't stand a chance, since Rowan comes from as well-to-do a family as you can find in District Nine. The District Mayor is his father. I don't know about the other districts, but any integration of the classes is strictly forbidden here in Nine.

Natasha at least had a decent roof over her head. Natasha had a family who actually gave a damn about her, and she could always count on the fact that she also had never had to rely on signing up for a tessera to feed her family nearly so often as the desperately poor of District Nine. She  would certainly never have had to sign her name for the Reaping for every single week's worth of meals like any orphan had to.

Even as notoriously rigged as the Reaping System always had been, the odds were still more likely to be in Natasha's favour, once again, than mine due simply to the fact that her place in our society was always several steps above ours. Everyone in every district in Panem still had to accept and even love the class systems in each district by law like everything else. That's another thing they never failed to remind us of in the orphan community home.