Jeopardy: The Fourth Quarter Quell

Jersey - Perry

Perry

"Connor!"

Connor carries on walking, holding his incredibly deadly branch in front of him warily. He jumps every time there's even a tiny noise, and keeps running a hand over his head and sighing.

He doesn't seem very happy with me. I've tried to explain that the only person whose name I could remember was his but he'd only completely ignored me and gripped his hands into fists, which looked threatening so I stopped. He can't kill me but he might hurt me.

My tummy growls again, and this time it hurts, not like when I fall down, but like it's coming from my inside, which is nasty. And I'm still sticky with mud and it's underneath my fingernails; gross.

"Connor," I moan, because having somebody else complain with me always helps, "I'm starving."

Connor stops walking so suddenly that I stumble and start to fall, except I don't because I land on his back. He pushes me away.

"Ouch! That hurt!"

He turns around to look at me and his eyes could have fire in them. My insides jump and I can't help myself from taking a step backwards because he looks angry.

"You don't know what it's like to hurt," he says, "You don't know what it's like to be starving."

For a moment I am stunned at this rudeness. Nobody has ever insulted me like that before, never ever! Father would have them sorted out in a jiffy if they did. But apparently all the worker children are rude. Some of the language I’ve heard them use before has nearly made my ears fall off, and even for reapings they’re not clean.

Besides, he’s wrong. “Obviously I do,” I point out, “Because my tummy hurts and is saying that it needs food.” I’m very proud of myself on this point and smile to prove it, because I’m right and he’s wrong, but he just stares at me.

The wind makes a really annoying noise.

I’m not sure why we’re having a staring match, but if Connor wants to play, I’m so in. So I just look back at him. His hair is still chopped really short, though the colourful ladies have cut it so that it’s at least all the same length now, and I can see his pink scalp through it. His eyes are all squinty; is he getting tired already?

“How did your parents do it?” he asks. I must look confused because he carries on, his voice shaking a little like Father’s before he starts shouting, “How did your parents manage to bring up someone like you?”

He’s blinked. He must have done. You can’t talk without blinking. Which means that I win! But I can’t be happy about it, because he sounds angry and I don’t know why.

And then I remember that Connor’s dad knows Father, because he said so at the reaping. His exact words were ‘say thanks to your dad from mine, yeah?’. Except I forgot, which is bad. But I had a good excuse because the reaping happened. And I remember the exact words because I was thinking about them all up until we got into the Capitol and the pretty buildings were more interesting than the red brick and black soot of the rest of Eight. Now I can find out why!

“Why does your father want to thank Father?” I ask.

Connor looks left and right even though there’s nobody around. His cheeks are very red, angry still, but his body relaxes a little. He still doesn’t drop the stick. “Your dad helped mine out a bit,” he says. It’s strange but it sounds almost like he’s forcing himself to say it, and I remember that he’d told me to shut up because the Peacekeepers were around. But there aren’t any Peacekeepers here and we’re not doing anything so we’re probably not on TV either. I give a wave up to the sky just in case. Through the trees the clouds are pretty and fluffy.

We don’t seem to be arguing anymore. My tummy still hurts, but it can wait. Now I need to know this more than I need to eat.

“How?”

Connor’s eyes flicker to the bracelet thing on his wrist, then back to me. I smile at him to show that I don’t think we’re angry with each other anymore, smiling so hard that my cheeks ache a bit. He sighs.

Then he sits down on a very uncomfortable looking tree root. Trees are strange. They burrow into the ground rather than sitting on top of it like I thought that they maybe did. I don't want to sit on it in case it sinks.

"My mom was very ill," he explains, and stops, twiddling his hands.

"Mother gets ill all the time. She gets headaches and she sends me to get medicines sometimes. She has to sit in a darkened room for a few days and Father and I have to look after the bakery. You just go and buy medicine to sort it -"

"Shut up. Not just headaches. She was coughing up blood and..." he shudders visibly, "...and she could barely even move. It was horrible. We thought she was going to die and dad was fretting what to do. She couldn't work but she needed to, and if the Peacekeepers came around, they'd make her work until she dropped."

He glances up at me, frowning, and looks around again before carrying on.

"Kier - my big brother - was off his feet trying to stop them finding out. He worked her shift straight after his and he never had time to sleep. He fell asleep at work once and got whipped for it. My little sister was only just walking and she went into the looms even though she wasn’t five yet. Everybody tried to help a little bit but lots of other people were ill too and…yeah.

“So my dad, he didn’t know what to do, and he says he went out to the fence and was going to touch it, to…you know. He’s got six kids and we were all working so hard and we didn’t have any food or any money and we’d got the tesserae limit, and he said, he said on the note that he’d just wanted it all to stop. Lots of people have done it before. So he wrote us a note and went out to the fence.

"And he says that when he got there, there was a man crouched down by the fence, doing something. The power was out so he didn't recognise him and he didn't know what he was doing, and he decided it didn't matter. Only the person saw him and he said, and my dad remembers his exact words, he said 'here, man, don't do something your family will regret. It's not hopeless. There's always something worth fighting for' and he handed him an entire pouch of money, more money than my dad had ever had in his life. And he says that then he knew that he had to live because there was still us and because change is always worth fighting for."

I don't know what to say, so I just stand there in silence thinking that this doesn't sound like my District Eight at all. It sounds like a horrible and a scary place. It sounds like here, like the way the wind rustles through the trees and makes them talk about you, and how the mud sticks and makes you cold, and how there might be a cannon at any moment. And the people in the Capitol with their bright and beautiful clothes and skin and their loud voices and stunning buildings don't do anything.

Connor laughs bitterly. "He went and bought medicine," he carries on, though it sounds like he's talking to his shoes, "And he went and bought bread for a feast to celebrate and as he was there your dad walked in and his hands were covered in earth and he was carrying a shovel. And as he bought it your dad said to him ‘here’s to new dawns’ and whistled a song, and my dad says he knew then that he was the man from the fence who had saved his life and then our lives too, and he says that that was when he knew that your parents were good threads and that the Capitol -" He stops.

“My parents are good threads,” I tell him with a proud smile. Like on reaping day, when I looked back and they were stood in the middle of all the worker people, and then were shining and clean and I felt proud of them then too. And now everybody in Panem knows.

But if they’re good, why were they talking about running away? It doesn’t matter. They said they weren’t going without me so even if they do, we’ll be together.

And then I remember that Connor didn’t tell me how the story ended.

“Your mother,” I ask, “How is she?”

Connor looks up at me, then down at his hands again, one clamped around the bracelet. His wrists are really skinny. “She died.”

And I have nothing to say to that.