The Hunger Games: The Untold Story of Peeta Mellark PART ONE

chapter one

Peeta Mellark Part One:

It's pitch black apart from the sinister glow of the moon. I'm racing through the trees, feeling the splintered branches and jagged leaves scraping my skin. For some reason i'm terrified. Someones chasing after me. I keep running and running until my foot get's caught on a root, sending me flying head first into the dirt. I try to scramble away but it's too late and i know it. I see a shadow inching    closer and closer, i'm desperately trying to get up and run but i feel a heavy weight pushing down on me, trapping me, holding my squirming body to the ground. A hand emerges from the shadow and it's grasping a mallet. The face to which it belongs is still hidden in the darkness. I scream with no sound as the hand prepares to smash my brains out. The mallet swings in the direction of my face and then, black. Suddenly, my eyelids fly open and i jerk upright in my bed.  I realize that i'm in my room again. I'm panting and clutching my chest, feeling the rapid beating of my heart. Another nightmare. Once i fully regain conciousness, i am overcome by a sudden dread that could mean only one thing, Reaping Day.  

Just then, my father hurtles into the room. “I heard screaming!”  he pants. “I’m alright!,” I say reassuringly, forcing a smile, although, he's not convinced.

My father has never been a man of many words but, we’ve always had an unspoken understanding and i can read the worry in his desperate blue eyes. I sort of understand the difficulty of having to bring up children in a world like this (even though i'm no parent). The old man is constantly being undermined by the capitol with their annual reminders of his weakness and powerlessness to their every whim.  On this day two of his sons could be sent to their deaths and there's nothing that he can do about it. One little word of protest, one small breath of contempt, and he's dead. Or worse.  My father tries to create the illusion that our family is safe, that he can protect us, but we all know the truth. 

There must have been a time, years ago, when things were different. When parents could protect their kids, shield them from the evils of the world, at least for a little while. But here, in Panem, children are introduced to the intricacies of evil and death by the time they can open their eyes. In this world we have the hunger games. It’s sick enough, forcing the whole world to watch people kill eachother, but these games are a special kind of monstrosity. In these games, children twelve to eighteen are the contestants, and their parents are forced to sit by and watch idly.

I guess I feel sorry for the guy. I know that this is hard for him. I wish he’d talk to me about it, I wish I could tell him how scared I am for my self, for Strucla, for everyone I know in district 12.

I look back at the old man's hard face hoping that he will initiate some sort of heart to heart, but all he says is, “Get dressed and come down to the bakery, boy. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.” Then he walks out the door, shutting it softly behind him.

On reaping days my father tries to keep our family busy, to distract us. Sometimes i resent him for being weak, but i know he tries to protect us in every way he can. Protect any strand of dignity not yet confiscated by the capital.  At the bakery we make as many extra loaves as possible to so that we can sell cheap bread to people who live in the Seam. They have enough to worry about for one day, however, my mother hates when we do this. She despises the Seam and all those who live there; so much in fact, that many times before i've heard her shout at a person rummaging through our garbage cans who is starving on their death bed saying something like, "Scram you filthy rat, why don't you scurry away back to your nasty little villiage or i will call the peace keepers to whip the living daylights out of you!"     My mother... well, she's certainly a piece of work...

I hear people from town call her an evil witch when they think I’m not listening.  I'm pretty sure that my father is afraid of her. Whenever she comes into a room, he mysteriously dissapears, or find some excuse to leave. He says that  she hasn't always been this way...she changed after the accident.

When I was just an infant I had a third brother, Rye. He was seventeen when he died. He had a bunch of friends in the Seam and they would always fool around near the mines. My father was very vague about the detals, but from what I gather, there was a mine explosion while Rye and his friends were there and no one survived.  My mother loved Rye so much that after this occurred she became hysterical. She blames what happened on Rye's friends "coercing him" to go to the Seam, she believes that "he would never have gone there on his own if it weren't for those dirty Seam rats." She generalizes this to the fault of all Seam residents and now in her nastiness, she tries to makes them pay the price.

Sometimes I hate my mother. I try to be understanding, I try to be forgiving. It’s not her fault after all… she’s heart broken. But it seems that ever since she lost one son she hasn’t made much effort to hold on to the others. When my brothers and i were little she would hit us whenever she got into one of her "moods." Often we would get slapped or wacked with a belt without even doing anything wrong. Now that we're all bigger than her, this doesn't happen as often, but when i was a kid, i used to make up stories of “accidently falling down the stairs” or “banging into a wall” in order to ward off suspicion about my black eyes and bruises. Nevertheless, my mother is my mother. And i love her,  i just don't like her. Sometimes... i wish things were different. She always used to apologize (after my father talked with her) but it didn't stop her from doing it again. The worst was when we all started being interested in girls. And of course, there's only one school in district 12 and most girls are from the Seam... I mean she couldn't keep us isolated to a tenth of the district forever! If you think she gets  mad when Seam folks  look through our garbage, you should have seen her when she caught one of us with a girl from the Seam. There was hell to pay! One time, she nearly gave Barley a concussion. Of course that was when he was about fourteen, he's twenty now so even though she doesn't like it, she can't really stop him from doing what he wants to. 

Unfortunately, I'm still 16, and as her youngest son, my mother is most protective over me.   This has been a slight issue ever since I met  Katniss Everdeen when i was five years old. Luckily (depending on how you look at it) she doesn't even know that i exist! Obviously, i've liked plenty of other girls besides her, but there's just something about this girl, and ever since the first time I met her something like eleven years ago, i haven't been able to shake her from my head. It was the first day of school the first time her and I crossed paths,  she was in my music class and she got up in front of everyone and sang this song. She sounded something like a song bird. I've heard her sing a few times since then and it's the same angelic, birdlike sound.  As it happens, when my father was a kid he was in love with Katniss' mother. Like father like son. However, it didn't work out well for him. She never even thought twice about my father and ran off with a coal miner. She even moved out of the nice part of district 12 to live in the Seam with him. 

I've never been shy about talking to girls, except when it comes to Katniss. She's very... intense. A lot of other guys talk about her, but no one has the courage to talk to her. Ever since her father died,  her whole day consists of going from school to the outskirts of the district to go hunt, to the markets. She's basically single handedly supporting her family and keeping them from starving. I'm sure she'd have no interest in talking to some bakers son who's never had to worry about going hungry or having to take care of anyone. While i've been too much of a coward to really talk to the girl, we did have one encounter… about four or five years ago, after her father died in that coal mining accident.

She must have been starving because she was going through all the trashcans on my street. It was pouring rain and I was watching her through the window. I so badly wanted to help, but before I could do anything my mother ran out screaming her nasty list of words at the pour twelve year old girl. Out of desperation, I took two loaves of bread and dropped them into the fire. When my mother came back inside she saw the bread burning, slapped me around for a while and Katniss saw the whole thing. I was humiliated. My mother yelled at me to throw the burnt loaves to the pigs. I ran outside hoping Katniss would still be there so I could hand her the bread. Luckily she was, but I could sense my mother watching me and honestly, I was a little nervous to talk to Katniss in person. In the end, I just threw the loaves in her direction hoping she’d pick up on the fact that they were meant for her, not the pigs. She did. And thankfully, my mother didn’t see her run off with them. I was so mad at myself after. Why hadn’t I just handed them to her personally? Instead of throwing them into the dirt as if she were an animal. To this day i feel like such a dumb coward for not going up to her and handing her the bread, like any decent human being would have. Now (if she even remembers the encounter) she probably thinks that i'm a stuck up jerk. Which is just great.