Bea Button / D8 / finished

Name:
Bea Button 
Age:
15
Gender:
Female
District/Area:
8
Appearance:

Bea loves colors, and to everyone else's eyes the girl seems to be pulling them in, collecting shades and patches as she walks through life. She was born a colorful child, her mother would say, with russet hair unlike the traditional dark brown locks of the Button family, happy chestnut eyes, and rosy cheeks. The moment she could crawl, they could not keep her away from the dyes and paints, and the family soon gave up forever on trying to keep her hands, or any part of her clothing, any one shade for more than an hour. Bea gets into things, and gets out of them with more colors than she had before.
Bea has been, Mother would say, a plump child, and at the mature age of fifteen some of that roundness still sticks to her. She has a round, open face and a ready smile, a soft figure, and the nose that reflects the family name. She most often is seen in comfortable clothing, dominated by knitted and woolen items, many of them handed down from her older siblings and all of them permanently dye-stained. When it is cold outside, she bundles into a comfortable shape not unlike a larger potato. A very colorful one.

Personality:

Bea is the baby of the family, and it shows in everything she does. She is caring, overly friendly bordering on annoying, somewhat sheltered, and unreasonably optimistic. She likes people. She likes all kinds of people. She likes to hang around people, and work with people, and generally loves feeling helpful. She is rarely seen idle - she usually find something to do, and if it involves people, all the better. It usually does.
This, of course, doesn't meant that Bea is oblivious to the hardships surrounding her district, or her family. In fact, she notices more than she chooses to be distressed about - she has a "how can I help" mentality, which is essentially her way of coping with the world. She also has a fierce kind of love for her family, and genuine caring for the people that become her friends. She can be overwhelmingly friendly and excitable at times, but she does go the extra mile to make someone feel better any way she can. She tends to be more timid around boys her age, but she is comfortable in the company of her brothers.
Just like every other child in the Districts, Bea has also thought about how she would fare in the Hunger Games. She is aware, like most of her family is, that she would not stand a chance. Her only redeeming qualities are being very likable, being good with her hands, and knowing colors well enough that she might blend into the background, given the right materials. This is the one thing Bea has little or no illusions about - and also the one thing she refuses to discuss with anyone.

History:

Bea is the baby of the Button family. The parents, Jared and Sitha, work with textile dyes (hence all the colors in the household). It makes a bigger mess than what it pays, but it is one of the less dangerous jobs in the industry, and the family has long settled into a habit of never, ever complaining about it. The Buttons are hard-working, careful, and try to go unnoticed. Sitha is very good at knitting, and courtesy of a few sheep the family has a small side business making plain winter clothes. Jared and the boys do the more physically taxing full-time work of making dyes and dying cloth.
Bea has three older brothers - 18, 19, and 20 years old, respectively. Even though the age gap is not big, all three consider themselves her perpetual guardians - while at the same time also considering her a perpetual annoyance. Bea likes to follow them around when she can, and tries to befriend their friends (or, sometimes, has crushes on them), which has gotten her into trouble before. But more often than not, since the boys work for most of the time, as do their parents, Bea has to find her own entertainment. When she is not in school, she usually does so by helping out with her mother's yarn work.
During the years when the boys were within the age range for the Reaping, Bea was worried sick about them - and once she turned 12, it was their turn to worry. Not being able to volunteer for her if she got Reaped, the boys did everything else they could to keep their sister safe - as if all of that could have made up for one unlucky moment. Now that only Bea is still up for the Reaping, all three of them keep their eyes on her all the time. People have been saying the Buttons have been lucky to be untouched by the Reaping for generations... but they are also whispering that luck might run out eventually.
Bea and Sitha share a secret. Once, when Bea was about ten years old, she woke up at night and caught her mother sneaking out of the household. She followed Sitha down the street, slipping from shadow to shadow, until she saw her stop and talk to some people. Bea heard a baby crying, but her mother was soon turning around and heading back, and Bea had to run to make it home before her. It took her weeks to work up the courage to ask about it, and when she did, Sitha got angry at her. At first. But the next time she sneaked out, she allowed Bea to follow. Sitha makes clothes for the poor people of the district - plain ones, with fabric and yarn saved up from odds and ends, so it is not recognizable as a product of her family's work. But she hands them out for free, and lately, Bea has been helping her as well.

Other:
Bea is not-so-secretly fascinated with high fashion. She has dreams she doesn't even admit to herself, involving textures and styles and, most of all, colors.