GONE (The Hunger Games)

Getting Ready for the Interview

     The Peacekeepers lead me out of the room and I follow them to another room five doors down from President Snow’s. This time the Peacekeepers don’t bother to knock, they just push open the unlocked door and walk in, me right at their heels.

We walk into a dressing room, with a makeup counter running along the wall in front of us, and a long squeaky clean mirror hung up on the wall above the counter. I look at myself. My face is bruised, and I’ve got a slight cut at the edge of my mouth. My hair is dirty and lank, and my prisoner top is blood stained and stinky.

At the right hand side of the room, there are seven silver changing room cubicles, with dark purple velvet curtains, and green vine embroidered patterns at the rims. At the left of the room is a plain shimmery green wall, with a silver door right in the middle.

One of the peacekeepers walks towards the door and enters it.

 “He’s here.” He says to someone inside the room that I can’t see, and walks out of this main room, with the other peacekeeper that was still with me, leaving with him. They shut the door behind them and I’m left alone in the room.

After a few moments, out of the silver door come five Capitol people.

Three of them are the prep team, and another one is the stylist. The last person is a doctor.

The doctor walks right up to me, and tells me to lie down on a small first aid bed which is placed unnoticed in the left hand corner of the room.

I sit down on it and swing my legs onto the bed, wincing slightly as my bruises touch the surface.

“Hmm, Mr. Mellark,” the doctor says as he walks up to a small counter beside the bed and takes out some antiseptic wipes, bandages and various ointments from a cabinet below. “I will be quickly touching up your injuries, so that you can get dressed up for the interview and be nice and camera ready. Good thing you don’t have any fresh bruises, I see that your peacekeeper guards made sure to handle with you slightly more careful today so you would be tip top for the show. How very smart of them, very smart...” He trailed off, while dabbing antiseptic wipes onto small cuts on my face and arms. So that’s why the peacekeepers were all of a sudden gentle today, to not inflict more harm on me that would be camera cringe-worthy.

The doctor continued healing me, adding ointments to some of my worse cuts and bandaging them, then putting ice-packs onto my bruises so they wouldn’t hurt. This was the craziness of the Capitol, one minute they are torturing me and the next, having me all healed up and camera ready with excellent services. The Capitol people aren’t just crazy by their looks, but quite a lot with their thoughts, opinions and ways of life as well (with the exceptions of a few, like Effie, Cinna and Portia). And speaking of dressing madly, the five of them in this room were again, like every other Capitol citizen, adorned with crazy clothes and accessories.

The three prep team members, who I’m guessing were in their middle twenties two men and one woman, had the colour code uniform of bright turquoise and brown. The two men were wearing expensive suits with brown brick patterns on their jackets, pants, and bow ties, and turquoise shirts. Their eyebrows were also dyed turquoise, and freakishly their eyes where the same colour, but not a delicate sea blue, these were piercing artificial blue.  The girl had brown hair, with shimmery turquoise streaks in it, and she wore a blue puffy dress with water like silk sleeves. She wore brown tights which had blue wave patterns on the bottoms, with huge seven inch gold heels. This girl had yellow cat eyes, and her brown eyelashes also had turquoise glittery streaks in them, oh and not to forget her skin was tinted a pale turquoise- they all looked ridiculous. 

The stylist wore simple black dress pants, with a plain black button down. His hair was also a simple ordinary black. I was surprised by the simplicity of it all, it was calmer than Cinna- until he turned around.

I felt my jaw drop as the whole of his shirt, pants and hair were hot pink at the back. Perfect black at the front, and sudden hot pink at the back, resembling what would spot and fog my vision if I was having a headache from the sun. 

As he turned to face me again, done whispering instructions to the girl, I saw something I was surprised I hadn’t noticed earlier. His eyes were also hot pink, and he had diamonds studded around his scarlet irises. I don’t know how I missed that.

The doctor was looking normal enough in his medical white coat and grey pants, excluding the only fact that his hair and goatee were yellow, they would look blonde from a distance. They also happened to have glitter in them, more than the girl.

While I examined all these Capitol workers, the doctor kept on healing me, while the prep team got all the hair and makeup products ready, and my stylist went through a rack of suits, choosing the perfect one.

Within ten minutes, the doctor told me he was done fixing me up. As I got up I had to agree that I felt much better, more strong, less weak. As I walked up to the mirror, no longer limping, I looked at myself, and was shocked!

The person who happened to be me looking at himself in the mirror looked as good as new, healthy, strong and energised, not beaten down and injured like he had a mere ten minutes ago. 

I was led over to the silver door room, and inside they took me over to a bathroom. I went in and took a nice long shower, adding scented soaps and flavoured shampoos and conditioners. I came out and changed into the clean plain grey shirt and pants I was provided with for getting ready.

I went back to the main room and one of the prep team men told me to come over to his station and he started onto my makeup, a few powdered dabs here, a rub of some skin toning foundation there, after that they went on with my hair, adding lots of product into it to have it neatly sleeked back, the blonde of my hair looking gold.

The stylist had chosen a plain off-white suit, comfortable and stylish though with a nice cut, without a doubt made with expensive materials. 

I walked over to one of the changing rooms and changed out of my temporary makeup clothes into the suit, and slipped my feet into cream coloured dress shoes. I came out, and found myself face to face with President Snow.

“I see that you are ready Mr. Mellark, let’s get started.”