Re: cassandra hearsh/d3/fin

FF8240; text
FFA474; speaking
BF6230; other speech

Aside from smooth patches on her legs, Cassandra has the skin issues and blemishes that nearly every teen faces at some point. Acne dots her forehead, freckles dot her cheeks, and small bumps constantly appear on both arms. She tries some of the remedies she purchases from the local apothecary, but the creams and lotions usually don't do anything but leave her skin red, rashes blossoming where she lathers too much on. People have tried to say she has sensetive skin, but she has proven time and time again that this is not the case, for people with sensetive skin walk around during the summer time with a cherry-red tone, while she does nothing but tan.

Though rarely washed, Cass's hair always seems to shine. Her mother tells her it's greasy, her father says it's because she's truly a star, kidnapped from the dark reaches of outer space. She beleives her mother. Dirt cakes the crown of her head, along with flakes of dead skin and dandruff. Split ends await a careful observer, and there are always a few strands sticking out, even after an hour of brushing and straightening with her fingers. It seems to her that the only positive fact about her stomach-length hair are the auburn highlights that are streaked down the length here and there, a striking contrast against the dark shade of brown.

Extremely bushy eyebrows pull tight around wide eyes, in dire need of plucking. Because of the shadows these monsters throw, it's nearly impossible to glance at Cassandra's eyes, which are a pretty shade of turquoise, accented by naturally-curled eyelashes, the thick hairs here more showing off the beauties than hiding them.
Cassandra was constantly made fun of in grade school because of her eyes. She was diagnosed with "lazy eye" (a term tagged to an eye incapable of focusing, way back from the time before the War) in the third grade, and her sight steadily declined after years of neglect. Eventually her mother spent the money required to buy a pair of eyeglasses, which Cassandra refused to wear when attending school. Because of this, words will blur when she tries to conentrate on them for too long, and people will remark on how she refuses to look at them.

A shiny peircing in her right nostril usually draws attention away from the hideous state of her nose. Bent to the left at a crooked angle (most people associate this fact with a fight gone wrong, though she always assures them this isn't the case), it only just hides a birthmark on her left cheek, in the shape of a deformed heart.

Lips, almost always turned in a frown, are almost always chapped, more from her lack of care than strong winds and the beating sun. Though her mother has a tube of lip cream in the cramped bathroom, she refuses to apply it, either from the smell or just plain laziness. But she pays the price, the creases in her thin lips sometimes bleeding from lack of moisture.

Several bruises dot the skin on her abdomen. Shapes of fingers on her throat, fist prints on her chest, and marks on her arms suggesting someone has squeezed tightly. There isn't enough cream or powder around the house to cover the marks everyday, so most of the time she relies on long sleeves and thick necklaces to keep her secret a secret.

With mild curves, there isn't anything else particularly eye-catching on her body, besides a little peircing on her bellybutton. Constantly fighting away infection, the peircing and the soft flesh around it are almost always coated in a thick anti-infection medicine. Cassandra is forced to clean the area daily, or risk losing the peircing to infection, so it's the only part of her body completely void of dirt.

Though nobody would beleive it, not with the winning smile she throws to everyone, with the dazzling personality she shows when out in public around her parents, Cassandra is extremely rebellious. She loves her family and her friends of course, but she'd kill, quite literally, to be somewhere else. Someone else. Even if that meant doing something the people who cared for her would look down on. Her father would always picture her as his perfect little girl, but she had done several things to dissapoint him. And, to be honest, she enjoyed upsetting him. It would leave a pang of guilt in her chest for a few days, but it always releived her when she stepped out of the box she had been forced in from day one. She refused to let herself beleive she was perfect, as her parents always claimed she was.

Though she could never bring herself to hurt another human being, Cass secretly enjoyed the Games. When she could pretend they were actors, people from some of the shows she heard they had at the Capitol, it made all that blood and gore a little less painful, and a lot more entertaining. She could see why the Capitolites could sit there for hours at a time watching starving tributes beat each other to death. She might winc as an arrow dug itself into a throat, as a knife burst through a heart, as a mace crushed a brain. But to her it was all for show. What use was it to mourn for people who weren't mourning for themselves, she would ask herself. If they were still fighting, fleeing, or whatever they were doing on screen, that meant they beleived doing whatever they were doing would grant them life. It wasn't hers, so why should she care?

Though rebellious, Cassandra tries her best at school. Unlike in some of the other districts, her parents forced her to attend class every day, even if there were more important tasks to be done at home. And often times there were. But they swore up and down that their baby girl needed an education. So she was smart enough. She knew the Earth wasn't flat. She knew the basics of mathematics. And she knew how to read and write well enough. But was that what her parents had wanted for her? Good enough? So she forces herself to do better. To acheive that she would once see as impossible. If not for her, than her parents, whom she cares deeply about.

Born to a family of average wealth in District Three is no small feat. Sure, many families are well-fed, due to the high need in the ever-growing cluster of black smoke and pollution that is the factories. Even so, a little less than half of the district's population sit in the streets, starving and exhausted. Exhausted of living. And Cassandra Hearsh managed to avoid this tragedy.

With a father working in one of the manufacturing buildings creating and modifying the landmines, there was always the threat of losing a parent. But Cassandra and her mother trusted the middle-aged man around the explosives. He had a gentle hand, a calm touch. It was the others they didn't trust. One misstep of his co-workers would end his life. And they were all very aware of this fact.
And then there was her mother. Just plain old Patrice. While it was obvious why she had chosen her father, it was not so clear as to why Cassandra's father chose her mother. Not particularly beautiful or talented with anything, it must have been a simple love, blossoming into something much more. Cass would always wonder if that love still existed between the two adults now, or if it was just kindness that provoked my father to tell the woman he had married she was beautiful every morning.

Nevertheless, Cassandra grew up happy. Her parents rarely fought in front of her, and when they did it was a small tiff, like how my mother needed to get started on the laundry because all of his uniforms were beginning to smell like rotten milk. And not only that, she had the best friend she could ever hope for. Mister Kenneth Walth, her next-door neighbor. He would accompany his mom when she came to visit Cassandra's on play-dates. They would sit on the carpet watching the two middle-aged women gossip about the happenings of the district while they gangled around some plastic keys. Kenneth, or Ken as the family called him, would pretend like he was starting up a fancy car like they saw on recaps of the Games, and they would laugh and laugh at the serious expression as he turned a paper steering wheel.

Cassandra began to fall in love.

It was puppy love at first, being in grade school she wasn't even sure how to define true love. She would tell her mother it was a crush, tell her father he was just a friend. But both of her parents would eventually see something she didn't. She was wrapped around his finger, and he hers. They became an inseperable pair.

They went through grade school like this, and half of juniour high. Ken told Cassandra it might be time for them to see other people when he took an interest in girls with curvier hips and a more ripened chest. Cass would cry herself to sleep, wondering what she had done wrong. But her mother and father swore to her he would come back if he loved her like she did him.

But she never did.

Cassandra hardened herself up, not allowing anyone else into her heart, blocking the male species out of her mind entirely. As she aged, she began to realize that she was unnattracted to the gender entirely. A sudden interest in those of her own sex flared in her. When telling her parents she thought she was bisexual, her father had back-handed her, sending her sprawling across the room. She had attended school with a bruise spanning the entirity of her cheek, and she received no apology from either of her parents. She was furious with them for several weeks, but the tension between them eventually died down. She figured the shock had driven her sweet, loving father to resort to violence and nothing else. The topic was never brought up again.

Though she had been informed it was quite illegal, Cassandra began to prepare herself for the Hunger Games. Not necessarily in the same manner as the tributes from districts one, two, and four did, with private trainers and deadly weapons at hand. But she joined the afterschool track team at school, learned to dash long distances, to endure the most grueling of tasks. She toned up her body, and was eventually transformed from the scrawny teenager she had once been to a healthy young woman.