juliet cry again // tat & dante

juliet cry again // tat & dante Oct 1, 2021 19:01:56 GMT -5

Post by lucius branwen / 10 — fox on Oct 1, 2021 19:01:56 GMT -5

Another Reaping – and while I was fidgeting with a loose thread on my sleeve, tying knots into my best dress, I contemplated volunteering and all the epicurean delights that death would bring.

To die or not to die.
How could life be so dull.

Some irrelevant had been called but then there was Bastian Fray, struck in a heavenly beam of light. He rippled through the crowd, the people breaking their necks to catch a glimpse because he's got that kind of power – oh, a sudden scuffle and Stone Arc or whatever landed the first punch. Blood was spilt, egos were bruised, life moves on. It's another Reaping in District One.

There goes the class crush though, a boy burning, the kind of beauty that's alight and disastrous, the kind of beauty to daydream about.

Rest in peace.

He was a real hottie.

Now knee-deep into the school day, we're at the reaping seminar replacing fourth period when we usually have fencing. Wow what a shame – me and Tatton have gotten so good at waving our swords at each other and then ditching to go sit in the middle of the track behind the school, lying down on the hot asphalt and watching cloud animals lazily drift by.

Outside the auditorium, Jasper is going on about how he would've volunteered, how the last good victor was Ridley, how he doesn't think Bastian's coming back, and he's talking a lot of shit for someone who I made cry in the fifth grade when I didn't even do it on purpose. I'm nodding along to the blah blah blah, lost in the modern mood of a painful boredom – "Uh-huh," "Oh yeah, totally," "Crazy."

Someone punches me in the shoulder, I turn, and Tat signals down the hall. "Vape break?"

Um. Oh my god? Finally, someone thinks I'm cool enough to do soft drugs.

I remember in middle school they would always play weird vintage movies about the perilous dangers of drugs with psycho violin screeches in the soundtrack. Then, they'd point to District Nine, an apparent cesspool of gangs and narcotics, and be like that's why they only have one victor except that's not even true now. And my mom used to say that smoking led to hard drugs which meant meth which led to jail and then death.

Death seems to be happening anyways.

So I follow her to the bathroom. There are people staring in the halls, and I remember now, shit, it's also the anniversary of Emerson's reaping. And now that she's dead, it always will be.

Sitting up on the sinks in the bathroom, the faucet drips and the water fills the silence. I think about saying something sympathetic. But when Clementine died and people offered their condolences like offering dollar bills to vending machines, I began my personal vendetta against my existence.

So I don't. Instead, I say "Cute shoes. I love them."