96th reaping [District Eleven]

Moving houses isn’t the arduous ordeal I think it’s going to be, in the end. Turns out it’s actually very easy to pack up nine years of your life into a few cardboard boxes and move three streets down the block. Especially so when your mum insists on no clutter, no unnecessary baggage.

Yani helped us move. Vasco, too, though his back started aching after ten minutes of heavy lifting. He ended up being the moral support, all cheery smiles and excitement and optimism at what Nekane could do for the good people of Eleven. With his help, if she wanted it, of course.

I wish he’d never endorsed her.

I know that if Vasco had run again, he would have been re-elected, and I wouldn’t have a room to call my own like I do now. But the fantasy of my own space isn’t the shiny dream I thought it was going to be. Without personal keepsakes and memories to decorate the walls, my new room feels lonely and sterile. It’s too big – too quiet, in a way that reminds me of the cemetery. For the first time since my adoption, I find myself missing the orphanage. Because even though the rooms there had been far too crowded, there was something comraderic about breathing the same stale air as five other forgotten kids.

I think of Yani some nights, who might have lived in the same room as me, if life had gone differently. A different time, sure, but a shared space nonetheless. But trying to keep her close is hard – my imagination isn’t what it used to be.

Now that Nekane is Mayor, she can’t keep me as her secret any longer. She’d used me in the election, knowing fully what revealing me to the rest of Eleven would mean for her. Guess that’s what they call the risk-benefit analysis. If I’d thought it would change our relationship, though, I was bound to be severely disappointed. At the end of the day, I’m her bargaining chip. That’s all I am; all I’ve ever been, and will ever be to her.

The eve of eighteen approaches, and I’m scared of what it means for our fragile relationship.

Yani’s final reaping approaches, and I’m scared of what it means for my life.

Because maybe I have a new room now, and maybe I’m not a ghost any longer, but who’s to say a year won’t reverse the fates yet again?

I tie ribbons in my hair, alone in the kitchen on Reaping Day. Nekane’s leftover breakfast plate sits unwashed in the kitchen sink, a sure sign she’d overslept and left in a rush. Domesticity feels different this year. There’s a strange heaviness in my bones that makes me drag my feet along the floorboards in a way Nekane would berate me for, if she were here. It’s only Yani’s waiting silhouette at the back door that spurs me into action. There’s probably something taboo about the Mayor’s daughter being late to the first Reaping her mother is in charge of.

Yani holds my hand as we walk – refuses to let go, even as we approach the check-in table and prick our fingers dutifully, smearing blood across the blank spaces of our twin names. If she senses my anxiety, she doesn’t speak on it. She just squeezes tighter, finally relenting to solitude as the Peacekeepers shepherd her towards the rest of the eighteen-year-olds. She stands at the back of the District Square, twenty minutes from freedom, if it’s up to me, but there is this realisation:

I don’t want to have to save her.

It turns out I won’t get to.

“Ines Izar!”

The world stops. My heart stops. The crowd parts around me. It’s a god damn cliché.

I’m going to die, inevitably, but all I can think of is Yani.

Someone has to volunteer. Someone has to save me, so that I can save her, maybe, because of course she would get Reaped in her eighteenth year. Of course two Izar names are about to be pulled from that wretched bowl barely six months after a new Izar comes into power with promises of a better future: less suffering, more certainty.

It’s a cruel fucking joke.

The Peacekeepers approach. It’s easy to find me these days. Funny, how I always wanted to be somebody.

“Stop! Stop!” I’m pathetic; I can’t help it. I feel more eyes on me than I’ve ever had to endure in my life.

Not for the first time, I find myself wishing I’d never been rescued from my birth name.

Yani cries out, somewhere. I hear her voice, familiar these days, but it doesn’t comfort me to be loved, to be missed, to be mourned. She doesn’t know the deal. She doesn’t know I can’t save her if nobody saves me.

“Take someone else!” I don’t know what speaks for me: martyrdom, or self-preservation. There’s an irony to being saved, just to be doomed all over again, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I’m dragged to the stage with my heart in my throat because they’re going to call Yani’s name and there’s not a single person in the crowd who’s going to save her like I think I would have.

I’m hyperventilating. Full-blown panic. So, so pathetic.

The escort reaches into the bowl; I stop struggling.

Please.

Not.

Yani.

“Marcellus Rhodes!”

Thank.

Fuck.

Yani.

Safe.

There could be screaming, or sobbing, or silence, in the aftermath of the second name. I don’t know. Will never know, for as long as I have left to live, because Yani is safe, and the only thing I know how to do with that realisation is turn my back on the crowd and the sounds that don’t touch me.

Turn around.

I look at her.

She looks at me.

The tears form in my eyes, blurring my vision. Nekane becomes a watery image; I want to scream at her to cry for me like I’m crying for myself.

I look at her.

She looks at me.

Holds my gaze like a strong woman would. Not a mother, for she’s never been one. She’s a Mayor second, an Izar first – two things I will never be. She lets the Peacekeepers drag me towards the Justice Building and doesn’t even flinch at the fact it takes five of them to restrain me.

Yani is safe, like she was always going to be. My duty is fulfilled, like it was always going to be.

And I am going to die, like I was always supposed to.