The Boy From District 11- DNF + Quackbur

The Reaping

I wake up and roll on my side, expecting to feel Drista next to me. All I find is air.
She must have gone to sleep in my mother's bed.

Of course she did. It's reaping day.

It's her first reaping day, but she's as safe as she can be. I haven't let her take any tesserae. She only has one slip in thousands.
Still, it's a nervous day.
I get up and put my father's worn hunting jacket on and my leather hunting boots. They're soft and supple, having been moulded to the shape of my feet.
I see that Drista's left me a goat's cheese wrapped in basil for good luck.
I smile and pick it up, then head out of the door.
There usually would be defeated, silent men and women going down the mines at this time of day, but the roads are empty.
The reaping's not til two. May as well sleep in. If you can.
The air is warm and the sky is blue as I slip underneath the chain-link fence that's supposed to be electrified twenty four hours a day, but in District 12, the poorest district, we're lucky to even get an hour or two of it in the evenings.
Still, I check for the telltale hum that says the fence is live before going under. Right now, it's silent as a stone.
I retrieve my bow and arrows from a hollow log. My bow is a rarity, crafted by my father before he was blown to bits in a mining explosion. I was eleven years old then.
I still have nightmares about it and wake up screaming for him to run, but of course he does not. He is still gone.
Drista still polishes his shaving mirror every night as he hated the layer of coal dust that covers our part of District 12, nicknamed the Seam.

The poorest part.

I head down past the Meadow, one of the only nice places in District 12 that is supposed to be forbidden to all residents but the appetites of the Peacekeepers keep those who go there protected.
I walk into the woods, past the Meadow, gripping my bow and arrow, looking for any game that may pass by.
"Hey, Dream," says a voice from the side of me. I grin and turn to him.
"Hey, Sapnap."
Sapnap is my hunting partner, even though he's two years older than me.

When we met, it was during the worst time. My father had been blown to bits in the mine explosion in the bitterest January anyone could remember. The government had given us a small amount of money as compensation for his death, enough for one month of grieving, which after my mother would be expected to get a job.
But she didn't.
She just lay there, in her bed, or rocking on her rocking chair, staring out into the distance and muttering inaudible things. It scared me and Drista half to death.
We begged for her to get a job, to feed us, but our pleas fell on deaf ears. She just stayed there, watched while her children turned to skin and bone.
I'd remembered that my father had stored his bows and arrows in the woods, so I, a terrified eleven year old, headed into the woods. I stayed at the edge of the woods for several hours before I had the good luck to kill a rabbit.
I slowly gained confidence after that, verging a little deeper into the woods every day.
One day, I came across a fat rabbit that had been caught in a snare. Mine had never caught anything, so I went closer to the snare to examine it.
"Stealing's punishable by death, you know," a voice had said from behind me.
I wheeled around to see Sapnap watching me with a frown.
"I wasn't stealing. Just looking at the snare. Mine never catch anything."
It was clear that he didn't believe me.
"Is that a bow?"
"Yeah."
"Can I see?" he said, reaching one arm out.
"Okay. But stealing's punishable by death, you know," I said.
That was the first time I'd got a smile out of him.
Still, it took a long time for us to start trusting each other, sharing knowledge and, eventually, game. He showed me how to trap rabbits and squirrels, and I taught him how to shoot. He showed me the best places to go in the woods, the ones that were teeming with wild plums or turkeys. I taught him all I knew about wild plants, and eventually gave him one of my prized bows.
Slowly, surely, we became a team.

Now I'm looking at him and smiling. We head over to the grassy area that overlooks the valley, which also has a very good berry bush.
"Drista left us a goat's cheese," I say.
"Ah, also," Sapnap says, pulling something out of his game bag. It's a loaf of bread with an arrow stuck in it.
"Look what I shot."
I chuckle and pull the arrow out of the bread, inhaling the delicious scent. It's real bakery bread, not the poor, disgusting bread we make with our grain rations.
"Mmm, still warm," I say.
"I was up at the crack of dawn to trade for it."
"What'd it cost you?"
"Just a squirrel. I think the old man was feeling sentimental today. Even wished me luck and all."
"Good trade."
He takes the goat's cheese and spreads it over the bread, plucking a few blackberries from the bush.
"Oh! I almost forgot. Happy Hunger Games!" he says, mimicking Puffy, the maniacally upbeat woman that comes every year to draw the Hunger Games reaping slips. "And may the odds-"
He throws a blackberry in the air, and I catch it in my mouth. The flavours seep out on my tongue.
"-be ever in your favour!" I finish, mocking the affected Capitol accent.
The alternative to mocking it is to be scared out of your wits of it. Plus, the Capitol accent is so ridiculous, anything sounds funny in it.
It's a perfect day, really, the sky is blue and it's warm, the bread is delicious and the flavours of the berries are seeping along my tongue. We have good food and we're in a beautiful spot. It feels like a holiday.
Everything would be perfect if it wasn't for the fact that we have to be in the square at two, waiting for the names to be called out.
We finish our food and I start to fish. Sapnap gathers some chives and roots for our families to share.
I have a good hunt. Predators have better prey elsewhere, so they ignore us. I catch eight fish in all.
This will be good for a stew later, I think.
When we're supposed to celebrate. And many do, out of relief that their children have been spared another year.

But at least two families will lock the shutters and try to figure out how they will survive the painful weeks to come.

We both get out of the forest and slip under the fence.
"See you in the square," I say glumly.
"Wear something handsome," he says flatly.

I return to my house to see that my mother and Drista are ready to go. Drista is wearing one of my mother's old blouses from when she was a child.
I'm surprised to see that she's laid out one of my father's suits for me.
"Are you sure?" I ask her.
"Yes," she answers.
I put it on and look in the mirror. I look good. And nothing like myself.
I'm still worried for Drista's safety, but she'll be fine. She hasn't taken any tesserae.
The way the system works is that when you're 12, you get your name put in once. When you're thirteen, twice. It goes like this until eighteen, the final year of eligibility, where your name goes in seven times.
But here's the catch.
Say you're poor and starving, you can opt to put your name in again for a meagre year's worth of grain for one person.
And the entries are cumulative.
You may as well do this for the rest of your family, as well, so there is the name Dream Wastaken written on forty two slips in careful handwriting.
"Let's go," I say flatly.
We file into the square silently, and when the clock strikes two, the mayor begins his speech. It is the same every year, how the country of Panem rose up out of the ashes of a place once called North America- a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts.
But the districts all rebelled against the Capitol, and twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated.
In punishment for this uprising, the Capitol gave us the Hunger Games.

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. The districts provide one boy and one girl, called tributes, to be put in an arena with twenty two other tributes. The tributes have to fight to the death over a period of a few weeks. Last tribute alive wins.
How they take our children from our districts and force them to fight to the death is barbaric.
There must be more to the things the mayor is blathering on about how much we owe the Capitol, but I don't see how it will help me put food on the table.
District 12 have had exactly two victors over the seventy four years the Hunger Games have been going. Only one is alive.
Schlatt, who is always drunk, is a paunchy, middle aged man, who doesn't care about anyone but himself. He spends all his victory money on alcohol.
Now, Puffy steps to the stage.
"Welcome to the seventy-fourth annual Hunger Games!" she says excitedly. There is silence.
"Now, before we pick our lucky tributes, there has been a little rule change!"
The whole district starts listening.
"Before, only boys could volunteer for boy tributes and only girls could volunteer for girl tributes! Well, now anyone can volunteer for anyone! Isn't that exciting?"
There are groans from the crowd.
In some places, where winning the reaping is a great honour, there are complications with the volunteering system. But here, where the word tribute is pretty much synonymous with the word corpse, volunteers are all but extinct.
"Now! Ladies first!" she says excitedly.
She reads out the slip.

"Drista Wastaken!"