The Candidate [A Hunger Games Story]

Chapter Eight

There was a cold feeling resting in my heart as I woke up on reaping day. A shiver ran down my spine as I sat up on the sofa. My bones ached and I could feel the gnaw of hunger in my stomach, but I didn't feel able to eat anything that morning. I knew I might regret that later in the Games when I didn't have the privilege of a hot meal waiting for me on the table, but I thought if I even tried to eat what Drew had laid out for me, I'd be sick.

"You should try and have something. I don't want you fainting as you walk up to the stage," Drew told me as he chewed on a piece of bacon. "How is this going to work? Is only your name in the bowl? Do you know how you're going to play this? What's your angle?"

I didn't know the answers to any of his questions. President Snow hadn't told me much. Only that he'd rigged these things before. He'd know what he was doing, surely?

Valeria came over to Drew's house briefly to hand me a cotton dress to wear for the reaping. It was a plain, but well made outfit, clearly befitting of some of the District's richer residents, but when Drew saw it, he shook his head.

"No, that won't do. It needs to be dirtied up. No one around these parts is rich enough to look that clean, but me."

He took me into the backyard and smeared some dirt onto the dress until it looked just as dusty and dull as anyone else's. I think he enjoyed making my dress dirty far too much, but I said nothing. My nerves were too frayed to care that I'd never have been seen dead looking such a state in the Capitol. And soon, all eyes would be on me at the reaping as I stepped up to the stage as a female tribute. Everyone would know my name. Everyone would know my fate. Everyone would be waiting for my death to come on live television.

I didn't want to think about that. Even when Drew sent me onward to the reaping alone, I tried to distract myself by looking at my surroundings. The people of District 10 had a way about them - hunched shoulders, dirty skin from all the mud and eyes that seemed to have no life left behind them. I knew the livestock District provided the bulk of our meat and milk in the Capitol, and the likes of leather, wool and cashmere came from here too. Without District 10, my studies in fashion would never have been able to go ahead. Perhaps if I won and could provide the District with money and food, it would be a step toward paying them back for their labour.

But even I didn't believe that. I could barely believe the amount of time I'd spent fawning over expensive clothes and indulgent meals and crazy parties in the Capitol when the people of District 10 were barely able to drag themselves out of bed in the morning. I'll never pay back what I owe you all, I thought.

And I'd never be able to stomach the kind of fear they endured each year as they marched toward the town square for the reaping. The fear I knew was from something certain, something unavoidable. But the girls walking into town had no idea that they were safe from the horrors of the Games. They didn't know that everything was going to be alright for them for another year. Even if they did, they'd still know that they'd have to go through it all the following year, and the year after that.

And the mothers and fathers who gathered on the sidelines would be sick to their stomachs, knowing they had no control over whether their children lived or died, were picked or weren't picked. The ones who had been forced to take tesserae would feel the fear of how that a handful of extra grain added another handful of their names into the bowl. Older brothers and sisters felt the fear that their siblings names might be called, and that they might be expected to volunteer in their place.

I was only realizing then, as I walked among the damned, how much politics was woven into the Games. President Snow wanted to crush these people? He'd succeeded. The rebels were too scared and tired to fight against their own oppression anymore. These people were worked to the bone until they couldn't help giving up their dreams of another revolution. I'd been told so many times that they'd brought this fate upon themselves. But thirty-five years had passed. The people in the District probably hadn't even been a part of the uprisings that sent Panem into chaos. At that moment, I couldn't understand why they were being made to suffer because of their ancestor's places in our history.