Matilde "Scout" Watson //D11

Matilde"Scout"Watson

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Twelve Years Old
In District Eleven
Female

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The problem with being a girl is the synonyms.Pretty. Dainty. Slender. Even homily. Unattractive. Plump.

[/I] They pop those words into your mouth like candy and you gotta chew it. My candy has always tasted bitterly sweet like, you could be so pretty if you just slowed down…if you brushed your hair…if you washed up…

I’m proud to say that in my thirteen years of life, I’ve done nothing of the kind. In fact, in my thirteen years of life, I’ve taken that candy that you’re supposed to let melt, not suck, and I’ve blown it right back in their faces…or at least I think so. If you lined me up with all the boys in my year and measured the layer of dirt on our very backs, I think I’d win. Ardal (that’s my dad) says that since I was a baby it was such a trial to get me into the bath he’s given up entirely(though he would like me to be clean and so I try to bathe every three days…which, since making him that promise, has turned into a week). My brothers say I’m even dirtier than them and they’re the ones who taught me how to wrestle and mud-fight, so that’s saying something.

Of course, when I’m clean, my eldest brother (that’s Bertie) says I’d make a fine lady-if the man looking after me was okay with bugs in the house and burnt dinners and always having to buy me new clothing on account of me ripping everything. In that respect, me ripping everything and burning everything I try to make (see, Ardal gets tired often, so I try to make dinner sometimes), you could say I’m clumsy. Bertie and Carlos (that’s my other brother who is sixteen) say I am and that if I wasn’t always dropping this and breaking that maybe, just maybe, Ardal wouldn’t be as tired. “He wants a nice little girl,” Carlos chides me sometimes, but I think he’s just bitter that Bertie moved in with his girlfriend, above the nice little apothecary she maintains, and left him all alone with me.

I swear, I can’t help it. There’s something awfully slow about cooking some soup on the gas stove…I just want to turn up the fire just a little…to speed some things up. And setting the table can take a little bit since you have to get all the plates and the cutlery and the cups and the napkins. Who can blame me for wanting to speed things up just a little bit?

On the other hand, I think I can blame my quickness on getting my blonde hair pulled in class. I used to wear it in pigtails, but now I think it’s best left down or cut short even (the problem being that my hair grows notoriously fast for unknown reasons-Bertie and Carlos says genes). In class, I’m the fastest at reading and doing my workbook problems. I don’t think Teacher minds too much, long as I’m quiet once I’m done and I wait for the others. I learned that the hard way in the days I would announce my completion loud and clear to the entire class and get my hair pulled for it. Those were also the days when the stitches across my knuckles never seemed to come out because I was always splitting them on some kid’s lip in the schoolyard. At thirteen, Ardal says I need to knock it off, I’m too old for it, but it’s hard when some kid is saying something nasty about you or your Pa or your brothers and your blood is boiling and he’s got some nice front teeth and you’d just like to knock them down. It’s hard when you don’t have some little sister to take it out on like Bertie and Carlos.

They say I’m naïve, Bertie and Carlos do, and I know they say it with love and then strive to fill my head with the knowledge to fix it, but it still sticks in my mind when they’re talking about something and then they quiet when I approach. That’s when I turn to Ardal. He always listens some and never quiets, but he has this habit of avoiding some of my questions entirely or answering in some cryptic way that forces me to turn to the ancient dictionary he’s got under his cot. I think that’s the goal though. It’s his way of banishing my naivety whereas my brothers’ way is lecturing me on what they choose to lecture me on (not those things about girls and boys, of course. They say I’m too young for that, but do they really think I don’t know where babies come from?).

Ardal doesn’t like when they take us out of school for the harvest. He doesn’t like to see me up in those trees. He doesn’t like to see Carlos pulling that wheelbarrow and Bertie with the scythe. Ardal hurt his back some years back and has since been exempt from harvest season gathering. I don’t think he minds too much. He likes to read his books in the shade, usually under the trees I’m up in. Sometimes, he reads up to me if I can hear it. I like when he does. He’s got this nice, calm voice. It’s like a smooth blanket, rippling ever so slightly in the wind. He’s patient with me when I ask questions and he always repeats a sentence if I miss it.

The other kids make fun of me for liking books and liking school. ‘Course, they don’t do it to my face unless they’d like a bloody nose, but they do. I think it’s because they just don’t get it. Carlos and Bertie tell me to keep doing what I’m doing. Maybe, they tell me, I’ll be like Ardal one day. He keeps a careful record of the harvest. No errors are allowed. He has to submit it every week to the Head Peacekeeper and the Mayor. I know it doesn’t take him too long. He’s good like that. It wouldn’t take me long either, but where he’s always meticulous and his handwriting is neat and tiny while my work would be riddled with holes and my handwriting is a monstrosity. Sometimes, when I’m up in the trees, I use a little knife and work on my handwriting in the trunk…to make Ardal proud, of course.

Bertie often hints that he is. I’m not our mother, Bertie reminds me. Our mother was gorgeous apparently. She didn’t have this beak-like nose nor the long philtrum. She had my blonde hair, apparently, but it was a lot curlier and didn’t turn lank and greasy in just hours of being dry. Apparently she was lovely. I bet she had breasts when she was thirteen, not some flat boy chest like mine (not that I care very much. In physical education, I hear the other girls often complaining about the pain of running the mile with their new grown-in breasts bouncing this way and that whereas I can sprint without such discomfort). I bet she wasn't small with chicken legs and thin little arms (though they pack a good punch, if I may say so myself). Bertie’s girlfriend (she likes to act like my mother) says my lips and my eyes are my most redeeming factors. My lips, the bottom lip rather rectangular and the top rather like the top of a heart, are often chapped, but still retain their pinkness and my brown eyes, tipped with long lashes, are large and round. According to her anyway. And only when she’s sat me down and won’t let me get up until she’s smeared enough gunk onto my pale cheeks and chapped lips (make-up, she calls it. She makes it herself, but I’m not sure what it’s useful for, really. Especially since when I sweat because then it dribbles right off). But, anyway, I’m not beautiful like my mother was, but I instill pride in my father like she did. I heard she was feisty too. I heard she was spunky. I heard she had pride. I heard she was brave. Maybe that’s what led her up into that tree. A young boy was stuck. It was raining. There was thunder and lightning. It was hard to see, it was loud, the branches were slippery.

None of us ever bring that up to our father. I don’t remember it much. I was only two, so the only memories I have of my mother are maybe a flash of pink lips, the tickle of eyelashes on my chubby cheeks. Never that day that Carlos, at five, waited expectantly for Mother to come home and Bertie, a sensible nine year old, understood Ardal’s teary eyes immediately and knew, he just knew. Ardal doesn’t even speak of it and we take our cues from him and never press the issue. My father would never leave a book unread without good reason. We leave that chapter of his life untouched.

Today, I can attribute my dirty overalls to my upbringing, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I like the smell of wet soil on the carpet. I adore the feel of worn, withered pages under my fingers. I long to taste blood in my mouth after a particularly good fight. When they tell me to clean up, to straighten up, to shut up, I am polite, just as Ardal taught me. But, at the end of the day, I’m back in the pages, back in the dirt, bloodied, rolling around, climbing. My new favorite word is tenacious. That’s what Bertie called me the other day. That’s me.

My name is Matilde Watson.

Call me Scout.[/color]


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