Not a Tale of Love

Chapter 2

     This is not a tale of love, nor is it the tale of the Hunger Games. It is the story of how Gale and I came to grow apart. How our love ended. How I, too, ended...

     I jolted awake in my mother’s arms. Buttercup was laying at my knees, guarding me from the morning light. Katniss had gone out hunting. She had probably gone to the hob as well. She’d done these things nearly every morning since a few months after our father died. But it was not every morning that I awoke from a nightmare. My first reaping was to begin in only a few short hours, and, even though my name had been entered only once, I had the strangest feeling that the odds were not in my favor that day.

     I tentatively arose from the bed, taking care not to wake my mother. She could’ve done with a little more sleep. I tiptoed out to the kitchen. Katniss had taken the goat cheese I left for her and Gale.

     When Katniss returned, our mother was awake, wearing a fine dress from her younger days, I was clothed in Katniss’s first reaping outfit, and Mother had laid out a lovely blue dress for my sister. Katniss bathed, put on her dress, and let my mother put her hair into a rather eccentric and beautiful braid. My sister then tucked the back of my shirt in saying, “Tuck in your tail, little duck.”

     “Quack,” I said, playing along. We ate the food Katniss had brought home, and left for town square at one o’clock. All of District 12 was required to attend the reaping.

     After signing in and finding my place among the other 12-year-old girls, my eyes found Gale. He looked back at me as if he could tell that I was watching him, winked, and mouthed, “Good luck, Prim.” Looking up once again, I saw the quite odd-looking capitol woman, Effie Trinket, stride up to the podium on the temporary stage in front of the Justice building.

     Effie Trinket did her usual speech for the reaping, the mayor spoke, et cetera. I was too distracted by my fears to notice what was going on until I heard Ms. Trinket say, “Ladies first.” Pulling a slip of paper from the bottom of the big glass ball which held the girls’ names, Effie spoke the two words that I had feared hearing, “Primrose Everdeen,” I stood there, frozen, shocked. My name had been called, despite the 1-in-thousands chance. In that moment, I thought to myself, I am going to die.