Juliet Verona - D1 - fin

I was scared my first day in a career training school.  Of course, people told me I was rightfully so.  It was a scary place that chewed kids up and spit them out.  I didn’t try to think about the other kids too much, but when they were usually beating up on you because you weren’t quick enough, it was hard to not want to attack.  To retaliate.  To tell them that they were all mean spirited people.  I remember one girl punching me in the face because she said I looked like an easy target.  I went home crying that day because honestly, I couldn’t handle it.  When I told my mom, what happened, she told me that I needed to grow a back bone.  She wasn’t going to baby me from there on out.  If I wanted something, I was going to have to earn it.  Everything from the clothes I wore to the food I ate, I had to earn it.  She told me that people didn’t like girls who were weak, and she was no exception.  Weak girls got nowhere in life.  She wanted me to be strong.  Just like her. 

So she sent me out the next day, and told me that I needed to prove myself before I could earn anything from her.  I didn’t know how to do that though.  I was young, and quite honestly dumb.  Just like last time, I got bulldozed by a group of kids that took advantage of me in any way they could.  From pushing me down and telling me not to get up, to pulling my hair and calling me a loser.  I was subjected to horrible acts of bullying that eventually would go away.

It was days like this that I wished I had my dad with me.

Things ended up getting better though.  I learned to stand up for myself in class.  When someone came up to me to try to steamroll me, I found a way to topple them over themselves and pin them to the ground.  That same girl tried to punch me in the face again, except, after a while of connecting, I grabbed her hand and punched her square in the face.  She wasn’t expecting that, and neither was my mother.  She told me that she was proud of me for finally sticking up for myself.  That I could finally take a stand and not get pushed over.  She told me I still had a very long way to go, but still, I was showing promise.  The kids though got more vicious, trying to find new ways to torture me while in the academy.  When I moved, they moved quicker, and when I stopped, they pounced.  They wanted to prove something to me.  That I would always be weak.  For a while, I believed them, and but then I remembered that I still had something to prove to everyone.  That I wasn’t weak.  That I was able to handle whatever they might have been able to throw at me.

My father was a kind soul, who told me that I could do anything I wanted to because the sky was the limit.

I had to get tenacious in my ways or I was always going to be walked over.  I had to think on my feet, I had to act like I was air.  While I was someone that people thought was a punching bag, that didn’t mean that I was.  Juliet Verona was someone who could rise up above the people that she was in the academy with and show them that she wasn’t someone to mess with.  It also didn’t help that my mother held to her word, and I got nothing unless I proved that I could protect herself.

He told me that I could be a model, or scientist, or a medic, or even win the hunger games if I just put my mind to it.

As I grew older, I started to grow into my body more.  I noticed how dexterous I had become, and started to calculate my moves just a little bit more.  Instead of taking my usual path to the academy, I took a sharp left and ended up getting the ambush on the students who usually tormented me.  Then when the girl who bested me in hand to hand came up to me, I pulled her forward quickly and snapped her nose like a twig.  I wasn’t playing around anymore, and I needed these kids to understand that.  Juliet Verona was no longer the girl that you could pushover.  That was until she was pushed back down by a new group of kids.  It was like she could never win at the end of the story.  Every time she would conquer one obstacle, another two would pop up in its place.  It was just something that I had to learn to get used to.  I was in District 1 after all.  The kids here were cutthroat while I was a little nicer than most of the kids.  I tried to hide that personality trait, but it always seemed to come out when I felt stressed or overwhelmed by the number of things that were going on.  It tried to fix this constantly, but I never really got the hang of it.  Even to this day.

I noticed things that I could have done differently, and I realized that it was the little things that were setting me apart from the people I trained with.  They were things that seemed like they were trivial, but they caught up with me each time I tried to challenge myself.  I had to teach myself the rhythm of a fight.  When I thought about it, every fighter had a sort of pattern they followed.  At first, this seemed a little weird to think about, but then I started counting beats as I spared with various people. 

As they threw a punch, I counted a beat.

       1.

            Kick.

                    2.

                        a block.

                            3.

                              A lunge for another weapon.

                                 4.

                                   Anything else that might have been in the routine.

                                        5.

That’s when I saw the pattern build, and that’s when I could start to tell what people might do when I spared with me.

Sometimes it was easy to predict, and I would be able to dodge their punches, and then sometimes I would get punched straight in the face.  It took time to practice, but after a while, it got much easier to predict what they were doing.  Of course, this was never perfect.  There would times when someone would connect right with my nose and break it.  There were times where I would get the upper hand and be able to throw my body on top of someone and pin them to the ground.  It just depended if my timing was right.

There were days where my father would protect me from my mother.

And when I got into this groove, my mother took notice of it and started to praise me more and more for the hard work I was putting into my work.

However, that didn’t last much after my eleventh birthday.

She told me that she thought I was destined to volunteer for the games and win it all.

He couldn’t take it anymore.

She told me for the first time, when I turned seventeen.

He left her because all she cared about was proving him wrong.

That she was proud of me.

He told that I couldn’t come with him, because

It took her seventeen years to tell me,

There wasn’t room for me in his life anymore.

That she was FUCKING proud of me.

I wished he took me with him,

I wished she would croak.