TWO -
District 2's Academy opened long before I was born, perhaps before my parents were, even.
The cavernous institute built to instruct 2's best teenagers in the art of killing has become somewhat of a trademark of the District. Though technically illegal by early Hunger Games standards, the Capitol have over the years, elected to ignore the obvious training the kids of the lower Districts receive before the Games.
Once in the arena, Academy students like me are known as Careers. Young boys and girls with a flair for death.
Most of the merchants avoid sending their sons and daughters to train, as it poses a small risk that there will be nobody to eventually take over the businesses. But the stonecrafters' kids, who make up the bulk of the District's youth, and those from the rare families who have begun to provide the Capitol with Peacekeepers, like mine, tend to get signed up by their parents at an early age.
Not only does it make them stronger and more capable of dealing with physical strain, useful for when they will go to work harvesting stone from the mountains or loading trains on course for rest of Panem, but it helps with discipline too. For that reason, it puts the kids more at an advantage for later life, even if they will never actually use the skills acquired in an arena.
But then there are families like Cato Hadley's. Victors families.
There are only a couple of them left in District 2 now, but the Hadley's are by far the most infamous. Darius and Elena Hadley won consecutive Hunger Games during their teenage years, and later married to produce what they hoped to be a winning line.
They train from birth to hunt and kill, to build strength and stamina to a level far surpassing any ordinary Career and are forced to volunteer once they reach seventeen. For them, there is no greater honour. With four former Victors sharing the name, the Hadleys are the most successful family in the history of the Hunger Games.
And the boy standing in front of me is next in line to the throne.
"Squeezing in some last minute training before the Reaping tomorrow, are we?" Hadley smirks, and I want to punch the smug look straight of his perfect face.
Sometimes I wish he were ugly, but then I wouldn't have anything to stare at, to pass by math class. Not that he has ever noticed, and not that I wouldn't hesitate to turn one of my knives on myself if he had.
"I could ask you the same, Hadley." I spin my blade around my hand in an attempt to look bored. After years of friendly rivalry, the nonchalance at his sudden appearance is easy to feign, but my mind is racing. There is no way I am planning to volunteer myself tomorrow. I have at least a year left before Xavier would even let me consider stepping up to the podium.
But Hadley is only a few months away from his eighteenth birthday, and as the last eligible member of the family glory hunter cult, his father must be itching to send him off to war. I'm not trying to catch a last minute training session, but maybe Cato Hadley is doing just that.
If that is his plan of action, it doesn't show. The golden boy just shrugs and swings his blade in hand, chuckling lightly to himself. "I was kidding about the Reaping, but it's almost pack up. What are you doing here so late?" He stares down at me quizzically, something which is not hard considering the height difference bordering on a foot, between us. It is times like these when I despise being short.
Out of nowhere and once again, Loren interjects for me. "Our father's back from the Capitol for the event." She shouts across the hall, over the clattering sound of the boy in the corner dropping his spear. "Clove wasn't too happy to see him."
I draw my lips into a tight smile as Hadley starts to laugh again. "My mother wasn't too happy about it either, which means our house was an imminent warzone. I wanted some peace and quiet." I say.
"So, you came here?" He questions, looking around the room mockingly. In cruel but perfect timing, Xavier's trainee drops his spear on his foot and begins to curse, the instructors half-hearted scolding trailing after him. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, counting to ten and hoping that when I open them Hadley will not be grinning down at me as if I'm the joke of the Academy.
But of course, he is.
° ° ° ° °
We train until Xavier tells us to move our asses back home and get some sleep.
I pack my knives back into their chest, strip off my gloves and belt and replace them in my bag, while Loren kicks the remnants of the training dummy she's spent the last half hour hacking away at into the corner for the cleaners to take out as trash. Hadley is talking to Xavier on the other side of the hall, the two of them muttering in low voices as the instructor watches his student tidy up the last of his station.
I pull my leather jacket back on and shoulder my pack, checking my sister is at my heels. She sets the last of her training blades back into the steel rack and we fall into step together towards the door. "Goodnight Xavier, Cato!" Loren calls out, waving at the two still chatting in the corner, oblivious.
I elbow her in the ribs, but she doesn't react, still beaming over at them. Xavier waves back at us and wishes us the best for the morning. He knows it's not either of our years – there are plenty of older girls vying for that spot, hoping a merchant kid gets picked so they can volunteer - but that doesn't mean the whole day doesn't rattle everybody's nerves to the bone.
"Bye Loren!" Hadley calls, then directs his gaze at me. His smile is brighter than the sun. "Good luck tomorrow, Clover."
I follow Loren into the corridor, muttering a quick thank you before we disappear out of sight.
I wish he wouldn't call me that.
As soon as we're back out on the road, Loren groans loudly. "What the hell is up with you?" I chuckle, watching her spin around in circles as we make our way up the hill towards home. Her sneakers kick up the dust in spirals.
"Cato Hadley was totally flirting with you and you didn't even acknowledge it!" She shrieks, wide eyes trained on me accusingly.
One eyebrow quirked, I stare her down in disbelief. My sister has completely lost it. Perhaps the looming threat of the Reaping tomorrow is affecting her more than I'd bargained for. "Lor, are you serious?"
"No, you're just blind." My sister counters.
Cato Hadley was not flirting with me.
Cato Hadley is nothing short of a celebrity in District 2, and I am not. I'm well known in the Academy, the short knife thrower girl with her sword-wielding sister, but Loren and I pretty much keep to ourselves during training. We have acquaintances, but when it all boils down, the only people we need are each other.
Hadley has an entourage made up of all the best youth of 2 – the students at the top of their Academy class from the later years, pretty girls fawning over him left right and centre. Even Mayor Grigson's daughter, Aviva is part of his crowd. They gather over the stone benches in the school courtyard, laughing and hollering to each other as if they're untouchable. Which they are. Even in the Academy, Cato Hadley and his group rule with an iron fist.
He is District 2's very own golden son. Quite literally.
It doesn't seem fair, somehow, that a person could get away with being that talented and popular and beautiful, all at once. It almost seems as if the rest of us were left to make do with what little greatness Hadley had left to spare on his birth, forever destined to be something less.
But then an image of his father, Darius, cheering his last tribute child on to the stage with something cold and dark in his eyes, springs to mind and suddenly the Hadley life doesn't seem so perfect anymore.
I remember Saren stepping out of the section of eighteen year old girls a couple of years back, her curtain of flaxen hair billowing out behind her as she valiantly laid down her life for District 2. I thought she looked like an avenging angel, decked out in whites and golds, destined to bring showers of gift and riches down upon our cobbled streets.
She was shot out of a tree by the boy from 4, three days into the Games. I still remember the scene in slow motion as her body tumbled to the ground, the arrow piercing her chest like a bird caught mid-flight.
Loren leads the way back through the winding streets surrounding the Market Square, my boots clacking against the cobbles as we attempt to navigate the maze of camera crew now completely overwhelming the town centre. As a low numbered District, our Reaping is one of the earliest. At nine o'clock tomorrow morning, every teenager in 2 will be corralled into the Square to sign in and wait for our fate to be decided.
Though neither of us are preparing ourselves for a journey to the Capitol this year, the thought of the extra Peacekeepers inside the District – and my father's unexpected arrival – puts my teeth on edge more than normal.
We emerge on the opposite side of the Square with the Kentwell house on the horizon. Loren is still berating me for my ignorance, adamant that Hadley must have some kind of a thing for me, and that I'm lucky as hell if he does because the boy is practically a god. I can't argue with her on the grounds of attractiveness, I would be lying to myself if I tried, but I fight back against her romantic theories all the way to the front door.
The house is silent when we enter, and I presume father has probably been exiled back to whatever building the other Peacekeepers are staying in over their period of official duties here. I lock up behind me and follow Loren up the winding staircase to our bedroom.
We decorated the place when we were younger, so it still has that same little girl feel to it. Loren's side is pale blue and dotted with clouds, a round butter-yellow beacon of a sun painted into the top left corner. Mine is the opposite, a dark midnight sky bestrewed with interconnected stars, fashioned into neatly depicted constellations. A silvery crescent moon hangs above my headboard, and ringed planets and rainbow-tailed comets adorn the far borders.
I thought about changing it, even asked Loren last year, but she refuses to part with the masterpiece our mother painstakingly constructed on the walls. She wouldn't say why, but I think the room reminds her of a time when mom wasn't so hostile, before dad went to the Capitol and before her young daughters stopped wearing bows and started wielding blades.
I know Loren doesn't feel quite as connected to the Academy as I do – I always though she would've fared better as a merchant kid, picking up a useful trade and hawking her wares at the Market. She wouldn't look out of place in that world, and she could charm the patrons without even trying.
In another life, my sister could be something different.
But I am not like her. People talk about Loren as if there is more to her than just her skills with a blade, whereas I hold nothing but destruction to my name. The only thing anybody has ever expected of me is to be sitting on a throne in the Capitol, with blood on my hands and a victor's crown on my head.
One day, I will be. But this is not my year.
And even though it is not, my sister refuses to let me walk out into the corral pens looking a mess. "Can I start on your hair now? It's getting late and we can't oversleep tomorrow."
I roll my eyes but relent, dragging up a chair beside the bed so I can sit backwards on it whilst Loren brushes out my mahogany waves and twists them into rollers. Her fingers are quick but gentle, working the hair expertly into what will be beautiful curls by the morning. She has always had a talent for this kind of thing.
I'm often mistaken for the younger one of us – after all, Loren is taller, curvier, and prettier than I could ever hope to be. She grew into her hourglass figure last year, and while I hoped and wished that I was just a late bloomer, nothing ever seemed to happen. Now, at sixteen, I'm still petite and shorter than Loren by at least four inches. But the wonders she works on Reaping days and birthdays and other celebrations give me hope that I don't always have to look like somebody's lost kid.
"There, all finished." She exclaims with a flourish, wrapping the last lock of my hair into it's roll. "Hadley's eyes are gonna pop out when he sees you tomorrow."
I glare daggers over my shoulder as she wiggles her eyebrows up and down, giggling to herself. "The Games haven't even started yet, but I will kill you." I deadpan, which only makes her laugh more. I unfold my legs from their position crossed up in front of me and swivel around in my seat, shaking my head slowly.
"Speaking of, who do you think's going in this year?" Asks Loren, eyes wide and sparkling in the dim lights. She gasps suddenly, flapping her arms as she taps me on the shoulder repeatedly. "Do you think Hadley was there tonight because he's planning on volunteering?"
"I'm not sure, it's possible." I muse, picking at a loose thread on Loren's duvet.
There's every chance that he will. He's seventeen and has been training far longer than most of us for this. Plus, he's the last of the Hadley kids eligible for a while now, since his younger twin siblings Fallon and Ares aren't even old enough to attend the Reaping yet, and his older brother and sister are already lost to the Capitol.
Bringing home a fifth crown for his family would be the greatest honour Cato Hadley could ever hope to achieve. For the rest of us, the glory is what we strive for – to help prove that District 2 is the best of the best of Panem. The strongest and the most loyal. But for him, it's clear there is something much more than pride at stake.
Loren insists we get ready for bed when the clock in the hall strikes ten. We have to be up early tomorrow for the Reaping, signed in at the Square before nine o'clock rolls around, and my sister always takes forever to get herself ready, without having me to worry about too.
I slide under the duvet and pull it tight around my body as Loren shuts off the light, plunging the room into darkness. The crescent moon beyond the window mimics perfectly, the one etched on the wall above me.
I fall asleep with sparkling blue eyes in my head, wondering all of a sudden how on earth I became important enough in Cato Hadley's orbit to warrant a nickname, and whether perhaps my sister isn't going crazy after all
Good luck tomorrow, Clover.
AUTHOR'S NOTE -
I am literally on a roll with this I'm so proud, I don't write properly for three years and then suddenly I can't stop! I'm so happy to be writing these two how they should have been in Sharp Objects - probably already acquainted from the Academy and both with a desire to go into the Games. One thing I'm really happy I've been able to expand on is Cato's family background. I've always had this horrible theory in my head ever since his iconic 'I'm dead anyway, always was' speech on the cornucopia, that Cato was part of a family with previous victors in it, and that family and the impact their dynamic has on its children will play a big part in this.
Either way here's some more cute D2 life before we get into the Reaping and the Games (I'm lowkey mad I can't write much of Loren because I actually love her character already haha!) but hopefully you guys enjoy it! I'm amazed by the response from my first chapter and I'm so happy for this resurrection of the Clato fandom! You guys made my teenage years that bit less crappy and now you're helping with my lockdown anxiety at 22, so much love! - Vee xx