Jacklyn Garnet, Capitol {FIN}

Well she's not bleeding on the ballroom floor
Just for the attention, 'cause that's just ridiculous...ly on
Well she sure is gonna get it, here's the setting
Fashion magazines line the walls, now the walls line the bullet holes

( N A M E ) Jacklyn Adelaide Garnet.

( A G E ) Seventeen.

( G E N D E R ) Female.

( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) The Capitol.

Have some composure
Where is your posture? Oh, no, no
You're pulling the trigger
Pulling the trigger all wrong

( A P P E A R A N C E )

I am a walking contradiction.

It's hard to say how many times I've heard it from other people and myself, although it's hard to trust the shifting seas of my mind's allegiance at any given time, but it's a generally known fact that everything about me is its own antithesis. I am not what a wealthy daughter of the Capitol should look like, short hair that comes to the nape of my neck only occasionally amplified by extensions and always limited to the natural brownish-blonde color I was born with or in rare instances dyed to a lighter but still nondescript shade, skin smooth and blemish-less through the miracles of dermatological treatment but still nowhere near fashion-forward while since it remains the same pale peach color I was born with rather than a vibrant neon shade. There are some who whisper that I'm plain and I pretend not to hear them because it's okay except for when it isn't. I am allowed to be plain because Mama makes Septima outlandish enough for both of us. Even though the rest of me has been a canvas for my mother and her army of stylists, scrubbed clean and painted over a thousand times, I never let them touch my eyes because they are too much like me, wide and a strange shade of brown that can't decide whether it wants to be chocolate or amber, windows to a soul that can never make up its mind. There are worse things whispered about me than my apparent plainness, things like volatile and rebellious and imbalanced, but the words no longer weigh enough to curl the shoulders of my five-foot-seven frame the way Septima's do, my spine no longer weak enough to let me bow to anyone's wishes but my own. They all mean less than nothing, every last one of them, except for when they mean everything.

So yes, maybe I am plain compared to my living billboard of a sister, but I wasn't always. The traces remain that show the shackle-scars of my former slavery to my mother's will, a tattoo identical to my sister's that I cover up with clothes or makeup, a slim hundred and twenty pound structure gained by surgery and maintained by gymnastics classes that I started to help me gain an edge in the pageant circuit but stuck with because I loved it even more than the tiaras and applause, enhanced cheekbones that make me look more fierce than elegant (and that's the only reason I kept them, except for the fact that maybe some part of me didn't want to be too plain). And then there are the scars, ragged outlines of gems that no longer glimmer from the surface of my skin like I've been rolling in a treasure chest, imprints marring the surface of delicate wrists and slender pianist's hands and arms and legs and soul from where they were ripped away with bloody nails and clenched teeth and screams at the pain injustice of it all. I could have them removed, scar tissue sanded away until I'm nothing but a blank canvas once more, but I like to keep them around. Memories of the person I can't let myself become again.

Give me envy, give me malice, give me your attention
Give me envy, give me malice, baby give me a break
When I say shotgun, you say wedding
Shotgun, wedding, shotgun, wedding

( P E R S O N A L I T Y )

It would be easier to describe who I am if I actually knew who I was. After a whole lifetime of my identity changing at the drop of a hat it's become difficult to pinpoint what's me and what's something else, a by-product of medical cocktails meant to bring my mind to balance but that usually only serve as a means to get me out of my own head. Bipolar is such an ugly word, one that turns heads and widens eyes and makes my mother's skin flush with shame whenever the label is branded invisibly onto my skin by behind-back whispers that no one thinks I hear. There have been a million explanations shoved into my hands along with a rainbow of pills and pretty reassurances that it's perfectly possible for me to live a normal life, everything from not enough serotonin to an influx of hormones, but everyone knows the real reason. The all know but will never say that I am a product of my environment, my mother's flawed creation that broke something inside after being bent into too many different shapes.

Maybe that's why sometimes I'll lay in bed for hours, too sluggish to move, and then suddenly leap up, throw the covers off and do cartwheels down the hall in my pajamas. Go from laughing to crying. Have the energy of ten people one day and be unable to move the next. I am so used to constant change that it's ingrained its way into my blood and bones and brain, rooted there even after I've cast off the spun-gold shackles I was raised in. The only things that make it stop are the constants, the piano and the pills, an overdose of each that sets my veins humming something like content and a homeostasis long forgotten. They know better than to say anything, Mama and Papa and Septima do, know better than to reach into my world that I construct with glazed eyes and fingers that map out an expanse of ivory and runs of notes so intricate that my very soul sings along. They leave me to my own devices because I proved long ago that I can't be tamed.

I was born a maker of music and a dreamer of dreams, two things that have remained stable in a life that warps around me until sometimes the girl in the mirror is an utter stranger with her uncertain eyes and scars that tell stories old as time. Where Septima was always the quiet one I was flamboyant, all vivid dreams and rich fantasies that played out over the canvas of what I wanted my world to be. As a child I was convinced that the world was mine for the taking and I took with reckless abandon, throwing myself into the colorful whirlwind of Capitol galas and stylists whose careful fingers could turn me into the dream-paintings of what every little girl my age envied with hair like spun-sugar candies and skin that gleamed like the sun. But that was before I realized that I was not the embodiment of my own dreams, but my mother's. Maybe it was then that I broke, felt my fantasies burn bitter on my tongue as I ripped away at my gilded bindings with clawed fingers and bared teeth. If there is anything to be made of me then it will be mine. I will never again be a footnote in someone else's happiness.

Perhaps Imbalanced Possessive Selfish Black-Sheep is my nom de plume, but it doesn't bother me as much as it should. It's well known that if I find something rare and beautiful in this world to have and hold for my very own that I will dig my claws in and never release it. They say that if you love something you have to let it go, but am I a bad person for saying that I don't care so much about love as making something mine? Maybe it's not so much about love as affection, as the touch of a hand or the gift of a smile that makes me feel like this hollowed shell of too much change might still have some glimmer of hope inside, maybe it's that to which I'm addicted as much as I am to the pills and the music. In the end I know I'm not something worthy of love - broken and angry and selfish and far too unstable for something that solid - but maybe one day my self-medicated haze can make redemption sing in my veins loud enough to rebirth me into someone deserving of devotion.

Or maybe the loneliness is just a song I'm meant to play on an eternal loop.

She didn't choose this role
But she'll play it and make it sincere
So you cry, you cry
Give me a break

( H I S T O R Y )

I was supposed to be beautiful.

That was the word Septima and I grew up with, repeated in mantras and sung in lullabies and taught as the gospel to us, unknowing little parishioners of our mother's high-society cult that promised the world in exchange for the sacrifice of one's identity. Beauty was nirvana and in her spray-tanned-silicone-filled evangelism she promised to lead us by the hand down the path of enlightenment. I suppose in the end she made good on her promise although it was the beginning of ruination for my sister and I. In an exquisite apocalypse of expensive pageant dresses, cosmetic alterations, and carefully honed parlor tricks, we became idols of the Church of Self-Indulgence by the time our toddlerhood was over. Mama made us into beauty queens. We won all the crowns, but somewhere along the way we lost ourselves.

The loss came without awareness or warning; there was never a day in my childhood when I woke up and was terrified because I didn't know who I was (I have enough of those mornings now to make up for it). Identity was fluid and changed with the seasons and styles. When it no longer behooved me to be a wide-eyed sweetheart who could win a crown and sash by tap dancing and having the prettiest dress, I underwent the necessary changes to become a smoldering temptress who was never defeated in gymnastics or the swimwear competition. When that wasn't the proper facade, I could snap my fingers and turn into an elegant daughter of high society with a few ball gowns and the artful sweep of a makeup brush. I was a girl of a million titles