Windgrass (A Hunger Games Fan Fiction)

Five: Storybook

We had a free hour in class today. Willow and I went to the library, since all our work had been finished early. The library was mostly empty, with only an elderly, rather shriveled woman manning the desk. We exchanged brief greetings and wandered down the aisles, looking for nothing in particular.

Bored, but unwilling to return to class and be just as bored, I pulled a random book off the shelf. There was a picture of a lovely young woman with hard skin and dark eyes on the cover. The summary on the back was actually a diary entry. It sounded intriguing, so I grabbed a seat at one of the many tables and began reading. I heard Willow pull out a chair across from me and plop down. With her… considerable girth, she’s hard not to notice in such a deathly silent room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a veritable wall of books.

The girl who was ‘writing the diary’ was a princess in some far off country called ‘India.’ Having never been outside Nine, I questioned the country’s existence. The year the ‘diary’ was ‘written in’ was very old… the sixteen hundreds! It’s hard to imagine that people were alive so long ago. The book must be fiction. There was no way, even if the person and ‘India’ were real, that her diary would survive until today. After all that happened to Panem… it was hard to believe anything other than the Capitol and the Districts existed. Could there really be other people out there? Did ‘India’ really exist? Did this… Princess of Princesses really live?

Her life was fascinating. She was a princess, and lived a life of glitz and glamour (a predecessor to the fools living in the Capitol?), but it wasn’t without hardship. Her father faked his own death, her brother seemed to become more and more untrustworthy… I couldn’t help comparing it to the Capitol. The lavish living quarters, the fancy food, the riches and glamour… the cunning of the political struggles…

Before I knew it, the bell had rung, signaling the end of school for the day. I was about 3/4 of the way done with the book and wanted to take it home. As I stood and followed Willow and her stack of books, I noticed there was no barcode on the book so it could be scanned and checked out. All the books had a barcode on the back cover. This one didn’t.

Quickly checking that there were no cameras or spying eyes, I stuffed the book in my backpack. I did my best to appear calm and, well, normal… as Willow checked out her mountain of books. Inside, I was scared half to death. What if the book set off the alarm as we left the library? What if I got caught? So many horrid thoughts raced through my mind and I was so scared that I didn’t notice I was halfway home until Willow said ‘goodbye’ and walked down her street to her house.

I ran home, my heart pounding like crazy. I’d done it. I’d… stolen, basically. I rammed my shoulder into the stupid front door that never opened easily and raced to my room, slamming the door closed behind me. Mom and Dad were still at work, and Rye was out in the fields. I huddled in a corner, clutching my backpack to my chest as tightly as I could. I heard a few pencils and plastic things snap, but I didn’t care. I read the rest of the book the way a starving man ate.

Lying face-down on my bed, the book dangling from my fingers, my thoughts ran around erratically. One in particular stood out to me the most:

Had I defied the Capitol in some way? Was this what it felt like to defy them?

I wondered if I’d ever know…