I can still do this

chapter 17

When I feel him let go of me and sit up, I give up the pretense of sleep, pulling myself up on all fours. I can feel his eyes on me. "Were you ever really asleep again?" he asks.

I don't answer, and then the phone rings. He answers it while I rub my eyes and half-listen.

"Hello? Oh. What do you want? ...no, I was going to... I guess not. Okay. Fine. Yeah. ...yeah, she will, do you... fine. Yep. Bye." He hangs up. "We gotta go visit my parents again," he says gloomily. "Sorry."

"It's fine," I assure him. We get dressed, eat some kind of breakfast, and leave. The walk to his parent's apartment is silent. I guess neither of us is in the mood for flirting. But we hold hands, almost as a reflex, though he separates from me on the elevator ride up, just like last time, and I don't argue with that. He knows what he's doing.

The kids aren't there this time, already gone to training, so I hang back rather awkwardly while he searches the apartment for his mother. Apparently there's a rule against yelling or something.

But that rule doesn't seem to apply to his mother. When we find her in the dining room area, the conversation between the two of them rapidly escalates from hostile civility to her yelling at him and him not saying a thing, her yanking him around behind her so she can look at him and yell more effectively, from a closer distance, and him not even trying to resist. At one point, she thinks he rolled his eyes, so she grinds her fist into his hand on the table. I can hear something in his hand snap, but he doesn't even flinch. When she finally lets him go, he doesn't even talk to me, just walks right past me into the elevator.

I follow him, of course, and I wait to speak until the doors are closed. "Hey," I say softly.

He doesn't even move.

"Cato."

He glances up at me from underneath his eyelashes for just a second, and I can see his eyes aren't strictly dry. His hand is already swollen and bruised, his arms bleeding now from several tiny little gouges, and now I know where at least some of those scars on his arm are from. He probably had them before, I realize, but they got stripped off before the games. Nobody probably cared before me. That's all.

"Listen," I start to say, but he shakes his head.

"I'm going to go train."

"I'll come with you."

He almost shrugs, just a twitch of his shoulders, and then he doesn't do anything, say anything, except when we get off the elevator. "Don't hold my hand," he says flatly.

"Okay." I'm unreasonably hurt by this, but I refuse to let myself show it. So I walk to the training center in stubborn silence.

We go different ways without speaking inside the training center, him to spar with other similarly oversized physical wonders, and me to teach another class. This time, it's younger tributes, the ones closer to Clove's age. These kids are slightly less psychotically one-minded; all of the joking hasn't been trained out of them quite yet. There're a few serious ones without the ability to smile, but only a few among the hundred or so kids I teach today.

But it's harder, too, because these kids are also closer to my age. If they'd grown up in twelve, they would've been my classmates. Maybe a couple would've even been my friends, like the girl with red hair who can't stay still, or the boy with almost white eyes that hits the target dead-center on his third try. I guess I'll never know.

Today, I explain away my training them by telling myself it's a wartime sacrifice. Necessary. I need the district to like me, and I made a promise. And more importantly, like I said before, it's not like I'm increasing the body count.