𝑯𝑶𝑷𝑬 | 𝑃𝐸𝐸𝑇𝐴 𝑀𝐸𝐿𝐿𝐴𝑅𝐾

𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖐 𝕺𝖓𝖊 • 𝔠𝔥𝔞𝔭𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔣𝔬𝔲𝔯

The idea pulls me up short. A kind Peeta Mellark is far more dangerous to me than an unkind one.

Kind people have a way of working their way inside me and rooting there. And I can’t let Peeta do this. Not where we’re going. So I decide, from this moment on, to have as little as possible to do with the baker’s son.

When I get back to my room, the train is pausing at a platform to refuel. I quickly open the window, toss the cookies Peeta’s father gave me out of the train, and
slam the glass shut. No more. No more of either of them.

Unfortunately, the packet of cookies hits the ground and bursts open in a patch of dandelions by the track. I only see the image for a moment, because the train is off again, but it’s enough.

Enough to remind me of that other dandelion in the school yard years
ago . . .

•ᚔ•

I had just turned away from Peeta  Mellark’s bruised face when I saw the
dandelion and I knew hope wasn’t lost. I plucked it carefully and hurried home.

I grabbed a bucket and Prim’s hand and headed to the Meadow and yes, it was dotted with the golden-headed weeds.
After we’d harvested those, we
scrounged along inside the fence for probably a mile until we’d filled the bucket with the dandelion greens,
stems, and flowers.

That night, we gorged ourselves on dandelion salad and the rest of the bakery bread.

“What else?” Prim asked me. “What other food can we find?”

“All kinds of things,” I promised her. “I just have to remember them.”

My mother had a book she’d brought with her from the apothecary shop. The pages were made of old parchment and covered in ink drawings of plants.
Neat handwritten blocks told their names, where to gather them, when they came in bloom, their medical uses. But my father added other entries to the book.

Plants for eating, not healing. Dandelions, pokeweed, wild onions, pines. Prim and I spent the rest of the
night poring over those pages.

The next day, we were off school. For a while I hung around the edges of the Meadow, but finally I worked up the courage to go under the fence. It was the first time I’d been there alone, without my father’s weapons to protect me. But I retrieved the small bow and arrows he’d made me from a hollow tree.

I probably didn’t go more than twenty yards into the woods that day. Most of the time, I perched up in the branches of an old oak, hoping for game to come by.

After several hours, I had the good luck to kill a rabbit.

I’d shot a few rabbits before, with my father’s guidance. But this I’d done on my own.

We hadn’t had meat in months. The sight of the rabbit seemed to stir something in my mother.

She roused herself, skinned the carcass, and made a stew with the meat and some more greens Prim had gathered. Then she acted confused and went back to
bed, but when the stew was done, we made her eat a bowl.

The woods became our savior, and each day I went a bit farther into its arms. It was slow-going at first, but I was determined to feed us. I stole eggs from nests, caught fish in nets, sometimes managed to shoot a squirrel or rabbit for stew, and gathered the various plants that sprung up beneath my feet.

Plants are tricky. Many are edible, but one false mouthful and you’re dead.

I checked and double-checked the plants I harvested with my father’s pictures.