Panem High: Freshman Year

Chapter 22

Valentine's Day Dance: February 14th 7pm, Annie read off the poster. It was tonight. She had wanted to go with Finnick, but he hadn't asked her yet. Then again, they were dating. Did he even have to ask her? It was customary, after all, but if they were together did it matter? Was it just a given? She felt a pair of hands on her shoulder. She turned and smiled when she saw who it had been.

"What do you say we skip that and do something just you and me?" Finnick asked cheerfully.

Annie sighed with relief. "I'm good with that," she replied.

"Good, because I have something planned for you. Come over at five, alright?"

"Do you want me to... should I eat something first?" She never knew how to ask something like that. She didn't want to imply that she expected dinner, but five o'clock was just before dinner time, so should she eat before then, or wait to eat after, or would there be food then?

"Don't worry," Finnick chuckled. "There will be food."

Annie smiled awkwardly at him. He squeezed her hand briefly before starting down the hallway to his last class.

"See you at five!" he called over his shoulder with a Finnick Odair trademark grin.

She didn't answer, because there were people in the hall, and would they think she was weird if she called back? Or would they know she was talking to him? Did anyone even know they were together? But she didn't want to leave him hanging... She finally decided to call back to him and say yes (or would yeah be better?) but by that point she realized that if he had already turned the corner he probably wouldn't hear her, and then she'd just be making a fool of herself in front of all these people in the hall.

So she just tried to look casual. She looked at the mirror in her locker and put a bit more mascara on. She looked at the shimmery lip gloss in the little console attached to her locker door and then at the people around her. Glimmer always said it was a power move to put on lip gloss while people were looking at you, so she did, and she tried to look cool while she did it, but she realized shortly afterwards that she had probably just looked really weird. She sighed and walked down the hall to her Journalism class, then had to turn back around when she realized she'd left her binder in her locker what with all the fuss she was making over her lip gloss.

Journalism had never gone slower. She usually found it fascinating, and she loved Lyme, her teacher, but she was so anxious and excited about whatever would be happening with Finnick, and as usual, when she was looking forward to something, the clock ticked by at a snail's pace.

But finally, finally, it was over.

"Don't forget the stories you're supposed to be covering for the paper!" Lyme called as the students scrambled out of the classroom.

Any students taking Journalism were automatically signed up to work for the school paper, The Panem Herald, unless they chose to opt out. Annie had been looking forward to an extracurricular, and she had been really excited to learn that she could work for the paper. It was one of the less popular classes (J9L, the freshman course, only had 14 students, and the largest was J11L, with 19), and at least half of the students in J9L and J10L usually opted out of the paper, and most of the J11L and J12L students only did it for extra credit and something for their college applications, but Annie liked it so far.

J9, J10 and J11 wrote the reports and J12 handled printing and editing. J12 had exactly ten students, so each student got one month to be the "official" student editor for the paper, assigning and arranging the stories and writing editorials and reviewing the final pages, while the others made corrections to the articles. Annie couldn't wait until grade 12 when it was her month to be editor.