FIN // D9 // HARMON ANGELIS

harmon angelis
fourteen
female
district nine

"Anything you can do I can do better," chants the fourteen year old, her blond-brown hair swinging in braids around her dirty face, "I can do anything better than you." Her sister looks up from the heaped pile of potato mash on her dinner plate with a dark look. In response, Harmon smiles sweetly, displaying a row of small white teeth from between her symmetrical thick lips. The song perfectly summarises her and Eden's relationship from the moment they emerged, fists clenched threateningly at each other and both bawling burbled insults. Their mother thought it was sweet, at first, that the two seemed to play fight together, but soon it was clear that the 'healthy competition' was much less harmless than it seemed.

At school, the twins hang around with very different crowds of people. Harmon is much more choosy about her friends, disapproving of the way Eden is happy to talk to just about everyone. Some might call Harmon snobby or self-righteous, but the truth is very different: above all things, Harmon is afraid of humiliation. Social policies mean everything to her, because being on top of the inescapable playground hierarchy guarantees that she can always do, say and get what she wants. Eden spends her nights running through alleys with their father - who Harmon has never had a strong relationship with - but the other sister prefers to practice airs and graces in the bathroom mirror, brushing through her feathery hair with long, clean fingers and practicing arching her strong brows in an intriguing and intelligent way. Harmon's biggest insecurity is her feet, which point slightly outwards and give her a rather ridiculous waddle. When she first realised that posture and presence were so important - in her first week of middle school - she tried to condition her feet by only walking on tiptoes, and sometimes even trying to copy the easy silence with which her taller, more slender sister walked. However, it was a part of her physical existence that she found no way of changing - not through any means the Angelis family could obtain.

Harmon thinks she's always known, deep down, that her family was poor. As she watched old victor parades on the Square's projection screen in the weeks leading up to the annual Games, or saw the lavishly dressed escort swagger out onto the podium on the day itself, the young girl dreamt of being dressed up like that herself, with thousands of pairs of eyes watching her with admiration and desire. Still so young, she doesn't understand that one day she might find someone who will look at her like that unconditionally. The narrow-minded child throws the notion of her future aside, and besides - when would one pair of eyes ever be enough? On her first Reaping Day, she strutted confidently into the Square, having been promised by her parents that, as a twelve year old, her chances were very slim. That gave Harmon the perfect excuse to treat the Reaping as a day to present herself to her peers, rather than something to be dreaded. With a thick red ribbon tied around her skinny waist, and the pale flesh of her wide, angular face shadowed under her mother's white bonnet, Harmon may have looked slightly overdressed but she felt like a princess.

The Reaping passed, and as it did, Harmon continued to dress as smartly as she could for school and days out. Teachers looked down on the little girl with patronising bemusement, but Harmon was all but oblivious to it. She would help her mother with washing clothes, scrubbing furiously so there would be no stains on what she wanted to wear the next day. She put dedication, although she had little, into braiding her hair into different hairstyles each day and then, after the compliments she received at school, doing the same for the other girls in her class. For birthdays, Harmon asked for new accessories, whatever could be found at Market or in trading fairs that her mother loved to go to. However, there was one problem that Harmon refused to face, and that was that most of what she wanted, they just couldn't afford.

Harmon has only ever felt disdain for the profession of her father, and passion of her sister. Rat-catching wasn't exactly a job she wanted to boast about to her friends - and certainly not something she could talk about during a careers lesson at school. Granted, within her circle of friends - who came from backgrounds much like her own - rat-catching seemed like a normal form of work. However, Harmon is afraid to no end that the other kids will find out about her sister's involvement with it, and it will reflect badly on her. She always tries to be in bed before Eden returns home with their father so she doesn't need to witness the grins on their faces, the rodent corpses in their bags, or the clinking coins in their pockets. Because that's another part of the problem: Harmon isn't just humiliated by the fact that her twin has a job, and a filthy one at that, but by the fact that she herself doesn't.

The clear solution seems to be for Harmon to simply find an interest and turn it into a money-making scheme. A girl who's always been so reliant on her adults, she refuses to look to her future, and see that she's already growing up. Her childhood has been so sweet and so easy that she's in constant denial that it would ever change. The spots that keep showing up on her temples might disagree, as well as all the other signs that her easy life may be evolving into something different, but Harmon is happy to keep playing pretend, and avoiding the inevitable, for as long as she can.