Marguerite "Maggie" Harvard | D2f | Done

 

Marguerite Threatts Harvard

18

Female

District 2

There were things in life getting upset over. Not being noted as top career in her class? Meh. Having no money to her name? It is what it is. Getting ghosted by your ex, who, while they tended to say condescending shit about poor people could finger her to another ethereal plain? Whack.

Marguerite learned early on not to get too disappointed in the choices people would make. When her mother had told her when she was four that motherhood made her tired, so she didn’t want to do it anymore? She felt that shit in her soul nowadays. Being around kids her own age was tiring as fuck, let alone having some toddler at your side. Probably changed her name and moved to a different district because she knew if she ever could remember what she looked like and they crossed paths, she would’ve beaten the shit out of her.

She blamed her dad for a lot more though. Because at least her mother had been honest. She cut and run when Marguerite was still small enough she could find some other adult that would love her. And she still had half of the people in her life she was supposed to, hadn’t she? Enough that she could be made whole.

So even if her father had to be the one screwing in lightbulbs at a set of gyms or washing off the matts in the training center, she didn’t have to complain about the off-brand jackets she wore because her father was the one to give them to her. Even if Risky Pope’s head was too big for her body on the backpack he bought her. Or she got knock off “Satern City” branded merch so she could stand next to all the other kids on picture day and not feel so out of place.

And she didn’t even blame him when her stomach ached or she got dizzy training – that was just how things were. Maybe some people could film themselves gorging on food they never needed, hell, some of them threw that shit away like it was nothing, but Marguerite would marvel at them all the same. She got what she needed from the man who kept the lights on in their little one bedroom apartment.

Well, most of the time.

She remembers the time they slept out in the bus depot for a few weeks while he was between jobs. She was nine and he made a game of it. They would try to guess the name of the different lines as the buses came around the corner – all the little outlying towns around district two – until she fell asleep. They’d do a soldier’s shower: scoop up water from the flooded sink under the arms and across the face with a little bit of the watery soap mixed in there for good measure.

Maybe it’s why she doesn’t mind that her clothes reek of weed until every laundry day. Kids called her smelly like that nonsense could hurt her feelings. Half the time she didn’t have a bed anymore, of course she was going to smell.

But they were going through it, and even if she wasn’t ten, she could tell her father was doing his best.

Because life isn’t just some great unending tragedy, at least, it can’t be, always. Then they’d have just laid down in front of one of those buses and died.

He’d get another job and they’d find another place to live.

Each time, he’d give her one of the spare keys. She’d put it on her little key chain, until it started to get so heavy, she could be heard halfway down the hall when she had the thing in her pocket.

She never got rid of any of the keys, no matter how heavy it’d gotten.

Their last apartment had been a two bedroom – at least, he’d put up some fake walls to give Marguerite her own room, and sliced the living room in half. Their little house upon the hill. Which was really a fourth-floor walk-up in a building that reeked of cat piss and mildew.

His death wasn’t some horror story. Nothing that she got to see, nothing that broke his body. A stroke that went right through his brain and put him out in a few minutes. He’d been cleaning a hallway in one of the office buildings mid-day. Just out cold across the floors he’d waxed.

She’d been sitting in class when they came to her. She could still smell the perfume the guidance counselor had been wearing. She could hear the clack of her chunky jewelry as she leaned in to whisper for her, to take her hand so that she was out in the hallway.

It’s funny how some people announce death. As though there’d ever be a way to keep someone safe from an ending.

She had no one –

And she had nothing –

Some foster care took her in but she bounced around from place to place when they decided it wasn’t enough for the work or that she wasn’t the type of child to adopt. Too quiet, too small, too inside of her own head.

Didn’t she have a mother alive somewhere, anyway?

At least one time she did get her own self kicked out. She’d been close to thirteen and had brought back one of her friends from school – Marcy – to study geometry. Or algebra. The point was, she wanted to see if they could multiply, and her poor foster mother had caught the two of them half naked on top of one another when she’d walked in with peanut butter sandwiches. And Marguerite had cursed her the fuck out, somehow hot under the collar more than she’d ever been.

But then there’d been Harvard house.

She could set down her roots and learn how to grow for a while. Marguerite promised she wouldn’t bother nobody – that all she really needed was a place where she could kick off her shoes and melt into the couch. As long as they put food on the table and she stayed out the cold, she’d never look for another place to be.

So she added one last key to her key chain.

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