FIN :: Eight :: Elena Ebowe

namedelena marisa ebowe
agedeighteen
locateddistrict eight
presentedfemale
orientatedheterosexual
appearance

If people embodied seasons, my father tells me I would surely be spring. Although my eyes are a foliage green much more apt for late summer, when the marshlands that surround District Eight are steaming, and songbirds gather in the rafters of our generation-old house and fill the rooms with melodies, the rest of my countenance suggests a fresh redemption from a particularly harsh winter. My skin is pale, and unfreckled, seemingly stretched taut over my shallow cheeks and narrow nose. My lips match, premature blossoms that opened too soon and so are almost the same colour as the skin around them. They are thin, yet pouty – made uneven by the poor formation of my teeth underneath. When I was a toddler, it was a habit of mine to chew solid objects (that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have been playing with anyway,) and, as a result, I was left with a gum structure that the professors and scientists who analyse every inch of my body and mind have always described as “unpromising.” Like rose-coloured curtains that veil the main attraction at a freak show, my lips hide the horror of my teeth from site. Needless to say, over the years I have learnt to smile with my mouth shut. I can feel them, too; constantly aware of the most repulsive feature of my appearance. However, when the scientists ask me, as they do every half-year when I’m travelled to the Capitol to take my tests, if they hurt me, I (mentally) grit my teeth and shake my head, not wanting to make my parents worry about me as they stand behind the one-way window and watch me, invisible.

I decided to grow my hair at fifteen, and having a boyish hairstyle started to mean something other than an unprovoked, and more convenient, decision. Teenagers always assume too much from every situation – it’s something I observe and make note of all the time. Even the most innocent of actions can mean something severe, in their eyes. It became easier to conform, and to let my hair reach my jaw, then the nape of my neck, then my shoulders and now my biceps, than to argue against their bizarre accusations. Blonde, with a red tint reminiscent of a bashful blush, my sister and I could stand next to each other and you wouldn't be able to tell who's who, from the back. Of course, if you ignored the height difference, because I stand a good four inches taller than her five foot five. I was blessed with a runner's frame, but, as a consequence, Ripred always gave me so much to run away from.

You couldn't call me girly, my legs are always covered in scrapes from scrambling through ruins and my nails are so short and ragged they're barely there, but I've always preferred wearing dresses to more masculine garb. My taste is less than befits the privilege of my family – I'm found wearing crudely sewn together sheepskins over an assortment of dirty, loose-fitting panes of fabric more often than not. The tight, tiny numbers that other young adults force themselves into make running away almost impossible, so I wear clothes that keep me warm in Eight's horrific winters, dry in sudden rainstorms, and agile all year round.

The first time I was taken to the Capitol, I was five years old and learning to write. It was the writing that caused it, really – all the treatments and the tests and the cameras and the isolation stemmed from just one night, when my father came into my room and saw the open notebook on my bed. His job is straightforward: if Peacekeepers are the equivalent of Old World soldiers and policemen, Frank Ingram Ebowe is somewhat more of a bouncer or bodyguard. Father does the jobs that our District's Peacekeepers always feel too high and mighty to do – checking identities of parents on Reaping day, standing security as trains are unloaded or deliveries made to shops, with no gun, armour or title, of course, just a humble servant of the President and his country – and so his way of looking at what he found in my little thought book was, I suppose, not what you'd expect from a father who finds pages and pages of Satanic-looking symbols, scribbled in his five year old daughter's yearning scrawl. My pictograms became an "unexpected circumstance" – a word that's been used countless times as I've grown up – and unexpected circumstances became top priority to resolve.

I can still remember the conversation my father and I had about that notebook. It's a detail the scientists have asked me frequently to bring up in their checks and diagnoses. A memory recall, to see how many details I can store over a long period of time, and how I associate them with one another, but I reckon that I've recited the story so frequently that it's become a routine more than a recall. I was out, playing with some of the other girls from my class. I had so many friends at that age, before things started mattering and my extraordinary brain got too difficult to control, and I was never far from a gaggle of other girls, playing and laughing carelessly. But when I saw my father standing in the doorway of our large house, dressed still in the jacket and boots he always wore to go to the Justice Building on important days, and holding my journal in both hands, I knew the time for laughter must be over. It smelt like mutton and yeast as I walked with my father to my mother's study. Our house was large, but there was barely anywhere quiet (and soundproof) enough to have a private conversation, but my mother's writing study was one of them. Merion Scarlett Ebowe, at the time, was working at home, writing a new book; she's part of an inter-District team who write and regulate the history books on the Dark Days that circulate Panem's schools. The hours she didn't spend researching, writing, and sending letters all across the continent, were instead spent cooking, or playing the piano, and so our house was always either filled with the lingering notes of a freshly finished melody or the rich smells of dinner. The warm aroma comforted me as I trudged through the corridors behind my father, supressing the fear that I knew would all come pouring out when he said whatever it was he had to say.

It was an anti-climax, when all he did was open the book to the first page, and ask me what it said. I was expecting him to ask me what it meant, instead, and so all I could do was walk over to him, point to the first line of letters symbols and say quietly that all I'd done was written my name. He frowned – the way he must frown when he's at work and something isn't quite legal – and corrected me, saying, no, your name is Lena, and this is just three pictures in a row. He even traced it out for me with his index finger: two corners of a square, a backwards spiral, an arch and a tailed circle, L-e-n-a.

It was because I told him he was wrong, and traced back angel, marionette, anchor, that my mother and, consequently, much larger authorities than that, became involved.

Looking back now, thirteen years older and wiser, I have realised what it means, that my mother saw it in her power to start my diagnosis and treatment but, even when I begged her to make them stop testing the limits of my emotions and my perceptions, she pretended that she didn't have enough influence to. Even my father, who held an important position despite his lack of title, promised he could do nothing to end it. But they were on the other side of the one-way glass, looking in to the padded white room, and have no idea what it was like for me, alone and under pressure, trying desperately to look out.

As a child, the train to the Capitol seemed much bigger and more exciting than it was for the adults that accompanied me. I stood behind the automatic doors, imagining being a glorified tribute, voyaging away to become a hero. Everything existed in a way that I had never experienced, like the first time I went ice skating on the frozen reservoir and realised how close humans actually were to flying. District Eight was boring; the psychedelic chaos of the Capitol was what I craved for my normal, now. Even the Institution was dazzling, with its spindly aerials reaching high into the air like believers pleading with their gods. But that was where the magic ended, because beyond the double doors it was just bright lights and white coats and bland, unyielding rooms. The first set of tests they carried out blended together, and now the only way I can look back and recall anything except the pressure, the pain and the isolation of the mental and physical examinations I had to carry out is by rereading the transcript. I keep that hidden between the mirror which sits in my room and its frame, never daring to study it unless it’s truly necessary.

It's incredible, how so much of how I feel has changed as I've come to understand more about my 'condition'. Comparing each record to the next, through all the years that I've headed back to the Capitol to go through the same procedures again and again, I always find how I was the previous year laughable. How could I be so ignorant, to come back and gloat to my peers: "I'm Elena and the doctors said I had an 'overactive and highly stimulated imagination'"? I thought it was a blessing, that my quasi-synesthetic brain had created its own language, making it almost impossible for me to read maps and write the standard alphabet, because both interfered with the random connections I made subconsciously between particular senses, feelings and objects.

There are many reasons why I've found it easier to cope without friends, running my errands and exploring by night, staying at home, writing or painting during the day. After four years of being asked repetitive questions by bland men in an even blander examination room, the other children got bored of my almost unchanging stories. And my condition, how forming sentences was difficult enough honestly, let alone with exaggerations to make it more exciting, prevents me from ever having been able to lie effectively. I was a novelty, at first, and old dog with new tricks, but soon enough I was just another boring plaything. Long after all the others had grown up and moved on, I was still held back, losing my chances to keep the friends I once had because my parents worried for my mental wellbeing.

I think that's what sickens me the most, that my parents thought it was my fault, and the faults of the people I know, that I was different. And the only way to fix that, of course, was by subjecting me to psychological torture that wasn't proving anything, curing anything, and exiling me from the normal life I had had in the District. I have never confronted my parents about it, because my anger is blinding and devastating, and passivity has always suited me better, but I live in a bitter semiconsciousness that I know, once I'm no longer eligible for the Reaping and gain the independence I need to tell the Capitol, and my parents - their minions - to let me be, I'll get out of this nightmare that is my life. When I'm finally my own self, not obliged to submit to the orders of parents, teachers or clipboard-wielding doctors, they'll learn that if you cage a demon all its childhood, afraid of its power, it will only come back so much stronger once it's free, prepared to exact its revenge.