Let them go, I tell myself. Say good-bye and forget them. I do my best, thinking of them one by one, releasing them like birds from the protective cages inside me, locking the doors against their return.
District 12: Where you can starve to death in safety.
So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.
So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.
You can tell by the way the girls whisper about him when he walks by in school that they want him. It makes me jealous but not for the reason people would think. Good hunting partners are hard to find.
But there’s food if you know how to find it. My father knew and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. There was nothing even to bury. I was eleven then. Five years later, I still wake up screaming for him to run.
Gale and I were thrown together by a mutual need to survive. Peeta and I know the other’s survival means our own death. How do you side step that?
The star-crossed lovers.
It’s lovely. If only you could frost someone to death.
The morphlings from District 6 are in the camouflage station, painting each other’s faces with bright pink swirls.
We could do it, you know.
It’s as if I’m Finnick, watching images of my life flash by. The mast of a boat, a silver parachute, Mags laughing, a pink sky, Beetee’s trident, Annie in her wedding dress, waves breaking over rocks. Then its over.
Scores only matter if they’re very good, no one pays much attention to the bad or mediocre ones.
Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes, and when again they open, the sun will rise.
If you’d been taken by the Capital and hijacked and then tried to kill Peeta, is this the way he would be treating you?
What does this mean? It means I get to spend the morning having the hair ripped off my body while Peeta sleeps in.
They don’t know that I’m already asking for the moon.
I try to forgive her for my father’s sake. But to be honest, I’m not the forgiving type.
Since my father died and I stopped trusting my mother, no one else’s arms have made me feel this safe.
So what I’d really like is to try and conceal him somewhere safe, then go hunt, and come back and collect him. But I have a feeling his ego isn’t going to go for that suggestion.
Instead of satisfying me, the kisses have the opposite effect, of make my need greater. I thought I was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.