on the edge of summer. [eliza]

Eliza Rosenthal

Eliza will admit that Frederick had seemed impressive to her, the first time she met him.

Her roommate Doretta had spent the past two weeks head-over-heels for him after she'd attended one of his talks, and Eliza could certainly understand why. He was a tall and well-dressed young man, his neatly trimmed beard and sturdy jawline giving him an impression of maturity on par with some of the professors, and with a confidence that put him somewhere in between the chiseled stature of Serge Bryze and the more relaxed, rugged poise of Patrick Starr.

He was also a good five years older than Eliza and her classmates, and married to boot. Eliza saw little use in indulging herself in the same impropriety as her roommate, even if she couldn't deny that the young man was quite a dreamboat indeed. After all, they were here to study, not to go around swooning over boys and getting distracted from their schoolwork.

Her father would tell relatives and friends how Eliza must've hoarded all the practicality in their house growing up, and left none of it for her brothers. She'd been the one to sit by the fireplace with bandages and an "I told you so" when Willard nearly lost his toes to frostbite on some stupid dare or another, or when Charlie's ex-girlfriend (who she'd never managed to like) stole an entire month of his paycheck and used the money to run off with another man.

Boys would be boys, Eliza reasoned, but she could do better; her parents had enough worries on their mind about providing for them and keeping the three of them safe from the annual reapings. After all, she still remembered the walloping her parents had given her, the time she'd absentmindedly set her house key down on the playground and forgotten about it during recess - not for the birch-wood switch her mother had used, its sting long forgotten, but for the look of fear etched across her father's face and the way he'd kept glancing toward the front door, as though anticipating that someone might pick up the key and visit harm on their family. She would think of that day, whenever she felt the temptation to be impulsive or thoughtless, as a reminder that if she did not manage herself, it would only wind up hurting and worrying those who cared about her.

She'd chosen the Institute - and the Institute had chosen her in return - on that consideration. Eliza knew well enough that she was no brilliant genius like her classmate Gertrude, or creative visionary like Frederick. But brilliance and creativity meant little without hard work and persistence, and Eliza was nothing if not persistent - not like her brothers, she sometimes grumbled to herself, even when they're allegedly studying they'd always hear you if you called their names, as if they were constantly listening for an excuse to take a break.

By graduation she'd landed in the top four percent of her class in their outskirt high school, and seventeen-year-old Eliza could already see the trends written on its dark concrete walls. Science and medicine was to be District Six's future, and new technology would make over half the water treatment workers obsolete in the next decade. There was no better way to set herself up for the future than by studying what the Institute had to offer her.

She was wearing her newest, nicest dress that day for the student-faculty dinner. It was a modest sage green dress that she'd bought with the first spare dollars she'd ever had to spend on herself, and she tugged at the sleeves and waist, trying not to get too preoccupied by how much of a disappointment it was for the expense. On second thought, the fabric style, though finely made, simply was not flattering for her short, curvy body, and the seams stuck out at angles she hadn't noticed when she'd tried it on in the shop. Ah well. Maybe Mira would like the dress, and then it wouldn't have turned out to be such a terrible purchase.

She glanced around the circular table. The organizers had seated them all evenly - there were two other students her age, neither of whom she recognized; then Frederick, one other of the assistants, and her chemistry professor, who she was sitting up close with for the first time. Frederick gave a nod of acknowledgment at his peer before his keen, calculating eyes seemed to sweep over the three students, finally settling on Eliza.

"Eliza Rosenthal," she introduced herself, her steady, confident grip returned in kind by his own. "It's a pleasure to meet you."
"Likewise," he answered. "Professor Kordillus has made mention of you to me, before."
"Only good things, I hope?" she asked, the corner of her mouth quirking into a slight smile.

Granted, she practically knew what the professor would be saying about her to his assistants. Eliza shows up early, sits in the front row, and is always meticulous with her assignments and exams. When she put it that way, it sounded so simple, but so few of her classmates took full advantage of the library and of the professor's office hours, even when their scores inevitably began dropping towards the middle of the semester. It was all quite wasteful, in her opinion, how they'd chatter on about the next party during study hall and get neither the party planning nor the studying done well. Then again, Eliza had always been better than most people at frugality, and her roommates and friends all knew they could count on her for advice on optimizing both their study habits and their budgets.

Among the many activities she'd looked into was the senior honors thesis, of course. Students who maintained high enough grades were eligible for the honors program, which meant that three extra classes and a research paper based on two semesters of independent study would earn her another distinction at graduation - a small effort, all told, compared to her current coursework. And Professor Kordillus' developmental psychology class had given her a number of promising leads that she could potentially choose as a topic for her thesis. Unfortunately, the professor was also known for not taking any students for independent studies. His assistant, on the other hand...

"Ah - Frederick," Eliza began during a lull in the conversation. One of the other students had moved to a different table after the chemistry professor excused himself, and two neighboring students were leaning over in their seats to listen to the two assistants hypothesizing about a recent discovery. Eliza had floundered momentarily on what to call the young man - he was an assistant and not a tenured professor, so Dr. Arocratus was wrong, and Mister made her sound as though she was addressing someone her father's age - but the syllables of his name still felt too naked and informal coming from her mouth. "I was wondering if you'd be willing to advise me in an independent study...?"

The young man's eyes lit up as soon as Eliza began suggesting her proposals of topics and theories. That was something all the educators, researchers, and faculty at the Institute had in common: they loved having students who expressed interest in their fields, they loved students who strove for more than the baseline, and most of all, they loved when Eliza asked questions about their work. Frederick was no exception. His booming voice and enthusiastic rapport with Eliza lasted the rest of the dinner, all the way until the organizers had cleaned up the tablecloths and needed to shoo them out and lock up the room.

They were blithering idiots, most students were, he'd started grousing to her about midway through the conversation. Always messing things up, or being lazy, or making up ridiculous excuses. The District's bureaucracy was so horribly inefficient, too - why, it seemed like most people didn't even care about knowledge, and it was a waste of his time to keep having to humor people who didn't want to learn.

Privately, Eliza agreed with his assessment. Her friends were all studious and determined, like she was, but - not that the lives of strangers were any of her business, if it made it easier for her to get ahead - so many of the other students didn't even seem grateful to have the opportunity to be here. Nonetheless, something about Frederick's complaints, or perhaps it was the fact that he had been so nakedly disparaging with them, didn't sit quite right with her as she left the dinner and headed back through the snow to her dorm.

She did have a promising topic and an advisor for her thesis now, though. And if his standards for his students were high, well, she had high standards for herself too. She'd just have to make sure to live up to all of those expectations.

"Well, this just sounds like a whole load of nonsense." Eliza narrowed her eyes at the latest paper spread out in front of her.

"Nonsense?" Frederick scoffed, snatching up the paper and shoving it in front of her face. "This is science, not intuition. Since the author of this paper obviously demonstrated an effect size sufficiently large so as to reject the null hypothesis -"

They were spending more and more time arguing over papers recently. Frederick called them 'counterintuitive results'; Eliza thought they were just wrong. People couldn't possibly be seeing obviously short lines as long just because others next to them were giving the wrong answer, or they were even more weak-willed than she assumed. In Eliza's experience, when everybody around her had wrong answers it was usually because a teacher had given all of them some kind of trick question, and she was the only one to notice a detail that her classmates had all missed.

Then there were the men who allegedly could measure how pro-Capitol people were just by looking at reaction time, or could change people's minds by flashing random words across a screen. Most of the time, Eliza was highly dubious of their theories' ability to dictate her thoughts or actions. That was the sort of knowledge that only somebody's loved ones could truly understand.

She'd grumbled about this to Mira over a glass of wine the other day, and her cousin had laughed that of course, Eliza would be simply too stubborn for their theories. That only served to bolster her point, she thought; Mira and she were practically sisters, and there was no one else she talked to as often or confided as much in.

"Whoaaa." Eliza stepped back from the fluttering edge that was dangerously close to giving her nose a paper cut. "I'm not saying the data's wrong! I just think we oughtn't go drawing all these conclusions from such a tiny difference in the numbers."

That was the trouble with a good portion of the Institute folks, she figured. They'd spend so much effort writing paper after paper about trivial effects and claim they were being "innovative" and "revolutionary", or go squeezing publications out of facts that really ought to have been common sense, if those researchers paid any attention to real people instead of just observing them in labs. But then again, even someone who just kept pumping out one harebrained theory after another was bound to stumble on results that seemed meaningful, if only by chance.

"There is a clear correlation," Frederick enunciated each word slowly, as though Eliza were eight years old and her mother was allowing her a real, sharp needle for the first time, "between the nine personality types and twenty-seven subtypes the author categorized in his previous paper, and the results shown here -"

Frederick was so, so misguided. Eliza almost pitied him, the way he clung to terms like 'correlation' as though they held any significance. She could arbitrarily divide people up, too, if she wanted to churn out papers as prolifically as some of the professors, and what use were all these labels really, classifying say, Frederick to be a Type Three or Type Five or hell, Type Eighty-Seven -

That last part, she'd said out loud, and Frederick's face filled with fury before she'd even finished her sentence. "What use?" he roared. "What use?! I aim for nothing less than to conquer the human psyche and to shape that understanding into the future of Panem!"

"Understanding, my ass!" she snapped back, heat rising in her chest at his empty grandiosity and bluster. "Does this tell you anything about what -" she picked up a page, roughly crumpling the edge in her fist and briefly scanning her finger across it, looking for and failing to find any names - "Subject 14 is like? What they enjoy, where they work, who their friends are? You think you can understand a person by measuring them?!" She set the page back down. "This paper's all meaningless data, is what it is."

She'd disliked that particular paper from the moment he'd given it to her to read. When she'd first brought up her objections, Frederick had responded that yes, it was a very dense and difficult to understand paper, and insisted that she would come to appreciate it if she just went through it slowly, page by page. She appreciated it even less after she finished doing so.

"There's meaning for those who want it," Frederick snarled, his voice dropping even lower than usual, and Eliza could only recall their first conversation, and how he'd ranted about students who didn't want to work. "If you don't, then leave."

Now, his finger added as he jabbed it towards the door of his office. Eliza decided against insulting him further and left. Maybe she oughtn't have lost her temper at him, she considered briefly; then again, Frederick had really, really deserved it. There were few kinds of people she detested more than those who thought they understood everything when they knew just barely enough to fool others with some pomp and arrogance.


Eliza never finished the honors thesis. She'd dutifully returned to the office the following week at their regularly scheduled time; after a meeting consisting only of one half-hearted apology on Eliza's part and several minutes of glaring, they'd abandoned the effort altogether. It didn't matter anyhow, she told herself. She'd been offered a position early in her final year from a company with few strong ties to the Institute, and she didn't see herself using any of those limited, specific subjects in her future.

The incomplete paper still nagged at her. She wasn't a quitter, and it felt wrong to walk away when she'd always persevered through her doubts and prided herself on finishing what she started. It felt wrong to give in to her impulses and shout at Frederick. Yet that dissonance never quite rose to the level of regret; Eliza refused to wish she could take back her words when she still wholeheartedly believed everything she'd said to him. She just hated knowing that the smarter strategic choice would've been to not have burned those bridges forever, whether or not she planned to cross them.

Then again, Frederick could have the ambitions and fame that he acted as though he was entitled to, for all she cared. Eliza was not so narrow-minded as to find worthwhile the chasing endlessly at theories, nor the obsessive lifestyle of an academic, slaving away at intangible achievements that would never truly belong to her the way a family or even the bonnet Mira had embroidered for her graduation gift could. She was clever and hard-working enough to secure herself a comfortable job, one where she never wanted for money nor feared being tossed aside by a poor economy, and that was gratifying enough.

Twenty years later, a familiar face caught Eliza's eye from the living room TV. His hair was thinning now, his beard bushy and white, but Frederick had the same cheekbones and square jawline, the same uncompromising glare that she remembered from her college days.

For all she'd loathed the man back then, she was almost surprised not to feel anything in particular, watching him announce his latest experiment and proclaim how it would take the study of psychology to new heights. But then, why would she? She had dinner to cook, a newborn who still cried to be fed or have his diaper changed every couple hours, and a four-year-old she ought to discipline for making a mess all over the newly cleaned house. Jackson really needed to tone down some of that energy of his before he got himself into trouble with the wrong sort of people; but boys would be boys, she figured, and managing that was all part and parcel of bringing them up.

Eliza Samuels had neither the time nor the energy to waste thinking about a man that held no importance to her anymore. She shrugged. Good for him. Frederick had realized his dreams, but Eliza had earned hers too, and she felt reassured when Noah popped out of his room and glanced only briefly at the screen before heading out to play.

She was raising her sons better than to be lured by the piper-call of Frederick's advertisements. They would not turn out like that lowlife Ethan boy, roaring in excitement last week at being reaped, nor like those who'd undoubtedly line up at the Institute to be Frederick's playthings. There was so much in the world that would be all too eager to take advantage of them, but her children meant far too much to her for Eliza to allow that; she would do everything in her power to pass on her wisdom and her protection, in the hope that all of them would grow up to be successful and secure.