gwenyth aberforth | district seven | fin

G W E N
i see you under blue skies
i need a little sunshine

It was all a trick of the eye. Just her way of keeping the attention from herself. No one ever suspected that the reason Gwendolyn Aberforth had the highest marks in class was that she was actually smart. No, that would have ruined who she wanted to be. "Simple girls," she called them. The girls that cared about boys and having fun and didn't bother to think about their futures. The way she saw it, people were born simple, or they were born like her. Because Gwen was never simple. It was never as easy as that.

She was a girl who didn't care about what her wedding dress would look like, or if she would ever have to wear one. She was a girl who dreamed of becoming the best healer in the district. She wanted to own her own practice with time, and that was not something easily won. It was not something simple.

She pretended to be one of them -- the simple girls. She laughed at their stupid jokes and acted like she felt the same butterflies they felt when they were flirted with and, honestly, she wondered if she wasn't the only own lying. Not once had she legitimately felt weak in the knees and the idea of love was certainly not as simple as they all seemed to think. It was not simple. It was complex. It was a lot like Gwen-- confusing and not always that great but rather spectacular. But that was a joke she could really laugh at-- she was like love and she didn't even understand what love was. But then to be fair, she also didn't understand what she was, so it made more sense than she first realized.

She did know she liked to read. Since she could remember, her nose was buried in one and the only proof that it was truly her on the other side of the binding was her auburn tangles. She had a habit of tapping her finger on the spine at the end of each sentence-- a reminder to pause. She liked to race through and get things over with by nature, but she preferred to enjoy them at a slower pace by choice. She just had to remind herself of it from time to time. Mostly, her interests in literature were in the animals that made their homes in the very same forest her house was swallowed by.

"Fauna of Panem," "Creatures of the Wild," and "The Secrets of Seven's Forests" were among her favorites, but the list could have went on for miles. Ah, and how ridiculous it would have sounded if she admitted she hated fiction. The stories were not real and they never seemed too likely to ever be real, and books with facts and real-life stories, nonfiction, were just more... well, realistic.

She hardly thought it was fair to allow children to believe in things such as fairy tale kingdoms and true love's kiss or terrify them with stories of dragons and monsters just to watch the wonder in their eyes fade as they grew older and realized none of it was ever true. The truth was that they were all in a place called Panem, and most of them did not matter. And the truth was that maybe Gwen wouldn't ever matter either. And the truth was that it would devastate her if she didn't.

But she would. She was different for a reason.

She wondered if she was the only one who pretended to be something she wasn't. She wondered if she was wrong for it, for hiding who she was and pretending to be a simple girl when she was really so much more. She wondered if girls like Alice Dexter or Blanche Summit had to try to be so dangerous and exciting, or if they were like Gwen and had to try so hard to hide who they were, to pretend to be someone people would love, to fight to be people everyone feared.

Red hair and lying eyes and a beautiful smile. Porcelain skin and pouty lips. Beauty on the outside to hide the lies on the inside. She was a hypocrisy in her every fiber and the shame was almost becoming bearable. Who cared about what she did? No one, because none of them knew the real her.

She wrote down who she was going to be on a piece of paper one day. She came home with paper wads in her hair and tears in her eyes and the mean words burning through her young mind. Never again would she be treated that way. Never again would she be treated like a lesser being. If the world didn't like who she was, she was okay with hiding herself from the world, at least until it was ready for her. She could do that. She could accept it. The only problem with hiding who she was: she no longer remembered which parts were real...

and which parts weren't.