Merrow Tattersall, District 8 {Done}

Capturing youth is like fireflies under glass.

Even the light has to die sometime.

I’m not ungrateful for what I have. That’s the first thing I have to say, because I’m lucky enough to be alive, to lived as well as I have. But sometimes I think there’s a difference between living and being alive; I think about how I would have much rather had a little less and more love, to know that nights were better spent being looked after than looking after someone.

When I was twelve, the whole of our world went pear shaped.

My father owned at a factory that made roll collar shirts—from decadent things that could sit out in shops in the upper districts, to the bland and itchy pieces we get the pleasure of wearing here. He’d inherited from his father, and said it stretched back even further still. He would tell my sister Singer and I how hard work had gotten him where he’d needed to go. The good and the brave, they’re the ones that inherit the world. I bought it wholesale that good things happened to good people; my mother and father had all they needed, and so did we, too. Sweets on holidays, warm blankets during the winter, and enough bread even when our neighbors went without. A broken window was never plugged with cardboard for too long.

I remember in the rolling heat of August, and sitting on the porch with Dooley and Davis, two boys that had been my friends just as soon as we’d learned how to write our own names (though Dooley may have taken an extra few weeks). We watched the heat on the blacktop create the haze that stretched the horizon, and talked how school would be coming around again. None of us were at the top of our class, but we preferred scribbling notes to sewing hems (I kind of like the repetition, though). Dooley went on about how they’d put together a fan for how hot it got at night, and mentioned how he liked coming to our house best, because he never felt as though the sweat was dripping down off his back.

“You must love living in a mansion,” Dooley’d said. And I scratched my nose and pushed back the hair in front of my brow and shrugged. And I uttered the phrase that had them roll over in a fit of laughter for a good three minutes.

“It’s a modest house, you know?”

They ripped into me like a hungry dog at a wounded bird for a bit. There was the gentle ribbing about its size (two whole stories), and then, when they saw my furrowed brows and slumped shoulders, got quiet. Did I not see how the other half lived, in tin cans at the edge of town, or crammed into drab apartments, shoulder to shoulder, some ten at a time in a tenement? And I saw all of those things but, what was it to think that we hadn’t deserved what we got? My dad worked hard, and was good, and so were all of us. I was sorry that they had less, and I’d shared what I could (weren’t they happy to be my friends?).

“They never had as much as you, so they’re not used to it.” Singer told me a week after it happened. I went to visit her in her new house, one with a fan on her ceiling in the kitchen and in her bedroom, with tiled floors and new wood in the living room. She was a whole head taller than me, but with the same brown hair and green eyes. She had delighted in telling me about how her stove wasn’t just pieced together from old parts, but genuine and made in district six not more than two years ago. My father had introduced her to Brooks over dinner, when she’d been sixteen and he just shy of nineteen. We’d sat and talked over boiled potatoes and a whole chicken; Brooks's father owned a tie factory in the northern part of the district. He’d started doing business with his father, pairing off designs and shirts together, working out what they could to be more profitable. And wasn’t it funny how their children were nearly the same age? They married last summer, when she was nineteen.

“But then why do I still feel bad about it?” I’d spent nights thinking that maybe it would have been better if I had to work as hard as Dooley, to have to take care of a younger sister and brother, and spend some nights sewing piece mail. He was good at what he did, too—always better at stitching than the rest of us.

“You’re a good kid, Merrow. Don’t let them make you feel bad for existing.” She gave me a freshly baked chocolate cookie and the world seemed to melt away. Between flecks of chocolate I had to nod along with her—she was a good sister, and a good person. And everything had worked out in the end for her, just as it was supposed to.

September came—nights that still stretched red on the horizon, but cooler winds that let us not sit in our own sticky sweat. School books switched out between out fingers instead of thimbles and thread, we would walk early mornings to school with sour faces.

The second morning, while I tore through a second slice of toast and butter, I could hear a din coming from my parent’s bedroom. They could be loud, working through disagreements but always resolving never to go to bed angry. Just normal—I thought, for them to yell at one another so. Things I would file away, but breeze over (like a modest house). But the din failed to subside; My father stomped down the stairs, mom trailing behind.

And we came face to face with what it was for all of it to fall apart. I want to say that it was like an explosion, like gas left on, filling a room and a match being struck. Except the world didn’t burst to flames and fall to ash—the fire would rage, and spread, directionless. Maybe it was better to see it like a wildfire, breaking through a clearing and further still, unwavering in its hunger to tear down what was in its path.

He’d taken to drinking on the job, and being more selective with who he called into his office above the factory floor. I can smell it now—the breath that marked a relapse to bad behavior, but, I was twelve and all those days he’d come back, bleary eyed and smelling like onions (sweat soaked shirts from drinking and the heat, I’ve come to realize) I thought it was just another good, hardworking man. He’d take women from the floor up to his office. Did they want to make more (of course they did)? Did they think he was handsome (a nod, because how could they not)? Were they willing to do what it took to get ahead (and they would cross themselves, or say a prayer)?

She was pregnant, a girl of just eighteen. Pretty, fair skinned, I’d seen her in the halls of my school last year, before she’d gone to work for my father. She was a liability—her parents wanted her taken care of, they wanted money, they wanted to ruin his reputation. And there were other women watching, too, to see what he would do to clear his name. Would there be more money for them, too?

But there wasn’t money, he said—because she wasn’t the first. The other girls had gone and made the babies disappear (Oh god— My mother’s voice is still caught in her throat, in my head), one way or another. But this was the first to be so bold, for so many others to be listening. And the bills were coming in, and he didn’t have the cash to make things right. I’m sorry, he had said, and got on his hands and knees in front of us, I’ll never do it again. And I believe him, because the fire raged on, and on.

We walked to my sister’s, my mother and I. It felt as though we were ghosts floating across the pavement, as though I could walk through the people around us. Did I still have a reflection in the shop front (I did)? Singer took us in, shaken at the sight of my mother in tears. She listened to the anger that flashed through my mother, how her fist slammed against the hard wood of her table, enough to send her tea cup off and onto the floor. She heard how the money was gone, a savings of not much dwindled down, that the factory was in trouble, too—having borrowed against, and how many more girls would come forward.

“You have to help us,” My mother said, and I looked at Singer’s face. I saw her wide eyes go from my mother to the broken tea cup, and the mess on the floor. I saw her think about how this woman was coming undone, that we were facing an unknown that knew no answer. Singer stood from her chair and smoother her skirt, and fixed her hair, and shook her head.

“I can’t help you.” She said. “How can you expect me to bring you into our house and pay—I’d never be able to. I can’t help you, I—” She kept shaking her head. “He has to pay for what he’s done, I can’t… I can’t help you…”

And I believed her, too. He was a bad man, who’d seen what he’d wanted and taken it. We were his consequences, but, that didn’t mean that Singer had to be dragged down with us, did it?

He smelled of onions when we got home at sun down—his eyes red, too. They took to hollering at one another, and when I stared at them in the kitchen I felt as though the fits that I’d seen so often growing up were uglier, now. The red in their faces, and how they snapped at one another, was less a painting of normal as an ugly abstraction. I locked myself away in my room, and lay atop my bed, staring at the ceiling. It would be hours before the quiet came.

It felt as though there were always eyes on me. In school, on the street—the folks that whispered that it would be any day that our house would be taken from us. Or that they would shutter the factory, sell off the machines, and send all the workers away. We didn’t buy new clothes, or sweets, or whole chickens. We sold my mother’s jewelry first, and then furniture, clothes, odds and ends that could stave off another notice.

I was angry, angry enough that I didn’t speak to either of them. Him for putting us in this space, her for letting it happen. And that I had to live in a world that every day felt as though it were unraveling. They cared more about who could make the other feel worse, to scream and shout at one another as though there was ever an answer. They both drank, and sobbed, and slept in different rooms. But never talked of how they could tear away from one another, to start again without having to fall apart together.

I must have buried the anger, or let it be smothered in sadness.

My mother tried to escape—she drank a whole bottle of wine and took a whole bottle of pills, to find an out easier than going on with life. I remember she was pale as a sheet on the bed when I found her, sleeping as though she was having such a glorious dream. There was a smile on her face. I asked my father if I should run and get a doctor, if we needed to try and do something. And he shook his head, and shrugged, and said that we needed to let her make her own choice. And I was afraid, of what it would mean if anyone else could see her like she was then. I felt the shame of a world falling apart, condensed deep into my heart, locked away.

So I sat by her side, and held her hand. I stayed with her until morning, when she opened her eyes, and asked for some water. I got a glass and turned on the faucet. I helped hold her head up so she could drink. It was easier to extinguish the anger in favor of the calm, I felt. The need to help her, and to help him—that I could do what they needed, take care of them until they could stand on their own two feet. The fire and anger in my chest put out by the need to make them breakfast, wash their clothes, to get them to the factory and make sure the bills were in order. That in spackling over cracks and pushing forward, never backward, I could go on live.

I don’t sit out on the porch anymore—Dooley and Davis don’t come through these doors. I don’t let anyone see them, either. It’s better, then. Taking watch over them, growing up and doing what needs doing.

We’re just fireflies, under glass, anyway.