Noah Linwood: Tales from the 67th Hunger Games (ON HOLD)

Chapter Two: Another Cruddy Reaping Day

I sit down beside Amber, "Morning. Happy Hunger Games, not that there's much to celebrate when another 23 children will be murdered, honestly. Are you feeling okay?" I ask my sister. And she says to me, "I hope that you don't let Mom and Dad hear you talking like that about the Hunger Games, let alone any outsiders or peacekeepers. The last thing we need is to get into that kind of trouble."

I snort, "As if I'm going to run into the District Square and shoot my mouth off about how disgusting the Hunger Games really are, even if it's the truth. I'm not stupid." But when I talk, it's with a much lowered tone than if I were to speak about anything else even now. "Besides, it's another year when we might not have anything to worry about, as far as the Reaping goes anyway. So don't worry about it."

I tell Amber things like this every time another Reaping Day comes around, doing my very best to reassure not only my sister, but myself that we'll never be the kids who'll get reaped. That we might be two of the fortunate ones who manage to escape it. But I know deep down that neither of us can fool ourselves. Anyone in any district from the ages of twelve to eighteen can be reaped, for all the others who are spared the dangers of that arena for another year.

We may be better off than the grain farming and factory working class, but plenty of supposedly better off kids have been sacrificed before. Many Careers in particular, from what I've observed from Hunger Games in the past will claw, fight, and trample all over each other for the chance to be representative tributes, for the opportunity to bring honour to their districts and further fortune and glory to their family names, and they will kill coldly, ruthlessly, and brutally in the arena for it all---if any one of them can win.

If any one of them can stay alive.

For the rest of us, we know better. Nobody in their right mind would want to be reaped, especially in districts like Seven, Eight, Nine, (which is our home), or Ten, Eleven, and Twelve, which are the worst off in Panem. But we can't change the way things are any more than we can end the Hunger Games. Certainly not in our lifetimes, if at all.

My father is Sterling Linwood, the local District Nine Jeweller, and throughout my whole life up to this point, he has taught me and Amber what are places are, not only in our family but in our society. He has always reminded me that I would one day have to be the one to take over as the District Nine jeweler when he can no longer work and after he is gone. I can't say that I am looking forward to it very much, but I would still be doing a hundred times better as a Linwood than most District Nine citizens. There are worse things that can happen to anyone in this poisoned world we live in.

As for my sister, our parents have taken care of her as far as the obvious basic things, but do they love and treasure her or hold her in the same confidence as as I have always seemed to be? I just can't say that they have. It's one thing for my parents to be proud of me, another for them not to love my sister equally, and I know they never did. To them, I was the future of Linwood Jewelers, plain and simple, and everything else that Amber just couldn't be to them.

If she is fortunate, she might marry some other guy from our class and they would start a family of their own. But if not, she could either be forced into one of the bottom jobs that nobody really wants in one of the factories or working in the fields or at the granaries of District Nine, or at the very worst, she might be forced into the illicit sex trade of this District or be left to starve to death. But I won't let it happen. Not to Amber.

Not ten minutes later, we both see a rare sight in District Nine, even in the nicest neighborhoods. There's a very official looking car that drives on the dusty street right up to our house, and both of our parents, who I had assumed were sleeping in today, get out of the backseats of said car and my father appears to say something that I can't really hear to the driver and the man in the front passenger seat, both of them are obviously peacekeepers.