sophitia kershaw | district four | fin

S O P H I E

I think I was eleven when my father died. Fishing as a career had always been sort of funny to him since he claimed he would have spent his days fishing anyway in a world where working wasn't his only option. He called himself lucky, and until that day, he might have been. He had a happy wife, a daughter he loved, and a house right next to the beach. Luck, he had claimed, was his best friend. But it was luck that took him away in the end.

Mother did her best to raise me but honestly, there wasn't any hope for us without help. She tried washing clothes, twining ropes and net, and she never quite held the talent for it. Her parents had to step in and give us money to ensure our survival, an act I knew she was ashamed of even if she never dared to mention it.

She had always prided herself on independence. She had gotten married to the man she wanted to marry at an age she found appropriate, despite everyone else saying she was still too young. She had me years later, when she decided it was time for her to have a child. She and Dad selected their home together without any outside help: a three bedroom, two bathroom house with a fenced in yard and a short commute to town. An even shorter commute to the harbor, where Dad used to travel for work every morning. My mother was independent, and in the end it had killed her.

Or that's what the peacekeepers said. A man had decided women with power was a joke, an abomination that needed to be stopped before it got any more out of control than it already had. My mother with her pride and beauty happened to be one of the examples of punishment for independence.

Call me crazy, but things like good luck and independence don't get people killed. Bad attitudes do. And lack of motivation. And breaking the rules. Those are things that should result in a seventeen year old girl having to live with her grandparents because both her mother and her father were dead. But there were no rules, I had learned, at least not in death. In life, sure, rule after rule after rule, and I was made to believe that the only way to keep my life was to obey. Now look at where that has gotten me. In death, however, it's a card trick, a chance to take without knowing the outcome. Do I work for a living? If so, I might just die while working. Do I refuse to accept boundaries? Because those who built the boundaries certainly wouldn't approve, would they? Fate. That is what decides our death for us. The rest is up to us to decide, I think.

I lived with Mom's parents for a while but it became too much for them to handle. It's understandable: I am a teenage girl who is admittedly high-maintenance and certainly a perfectionist in my own right. And the cherry on top is that I happen to be a replica of my mother: same hooked nose and large brown eyes, same frizzy hair and olive skin and plump lips, same tiny stature and beautiful voice. My family often claimed Mom had conceived me on my own, without help from Dad, which was completely plausible since her independence would have certainly permitted such things to occur. I couldn't blame my grandparents for wishing me gone: If I had to see a clone of my dead daughter on a daily basis it might just hurt me a bit as well.

So, I was sent to live with my father's parents. His Dads were both overly friendly and honestly, hadn't ever been around very much. They were young to be grandparents to a teenager but, well, fate had played death (and my father) to their advantage. One of his dads, Lester, had a sister who died giving birth to him. Lester and his partner, Jordy, had taken Dad in and raised him as their own. They were rich beyond belief and acted a bit as if they were better than most in District Four but, well, to be fair, Mom and Dad had felt the same and in turn, so had I. But they weren't bad to me. Really, they were wonderful.

They dared me to dream. They accepted my artistic needs to paint and to sing and to cry if I felt like it, or scream when I was upset. They pushed me to be the strongest version of myself, and for unknown reasons, my dream of becoming a singer became less significant, and the idea of becoming a peacekeeper became more of interest.

I liked the idea of saving people like my parents from people like the man who killed them. I liked the idea of being a hero with the ability to use her voice in more than one way, in ways that got things done. So, I guess I obtained as much of my mother's personality as I did her looks. I had innovation, drive, a will to make a change and with time, I would have the power to see it all through.

I enrolled in District Four's Peacekeeping Academy after studying for weeks. The boards, (the test taken at the beginning of each term,) decided just how much money a person was going to have to pay in order to attend the academy. A full ride was ideal. I loved my grandparents but something about the idea of letting them take care of me still didn't sit right. So I studied after school every day, before bed, on the weekends between other leisure-time activities, and eventually the entrance exam boards had arrived. The worst thing that could happen was completely failing, which would have required about 20,000 dollars a semester, so 40,000 dollars would have to be spent before my next chance at the test. The best thing that could happen was a full ride, which would mean zero dollars a semester, zero dollars a year, and if I chose, exemptions from future board exams until my graduation exams came about.

This time, luck was on my side. And I should have been thrilled. I should have jumped with joy that I, a girl from a broken home and an ocean of dreams, had made it. But the only thing that kept running itself through my mind as I read the words printed on my acceptance letter was something that made it impossible to be happy.

I had inherited her father's personality too, hadn't I?

Luck killed my father.

Independence and motivation killed my mother.

Somehow I, Sophitia Kershaw had ended up with both traits, and that meant only something terrible would happen to me in the end. The question was: What?