d9f edith keller / finished

Queen of the underground — she tucks a blunt behind her ear like a makeshift crown, returning her microphone-scepter back to its stand with a click and a smirk. All in a drug-hazed day’s work.

"Anyway, that was my new song, and these are my new wheels!"

Two fingers against her forehead, she salutes at the audience before skateboarding down a ramp propped against the stage, cackling like a mad woman as she charges straight at the wall of bodies rushing to avoid impact. Expressions of shock and delight are bathed in the neon blur of strobe lights, and she hollers at the top of her lungs and throws her hands into the air, shrieking with such joy that for one brief moment she's louder than everything else in the bunker-turned-nightclub. Every guitar strum, every slurred word, nothing could dare speak over her. A girl is a song.

She searches melodies to find herself — that’s the prettiest way to describe her self-sabotage. It’s as terrible as the mornings where she wakes up after a blackout, in some public bathroom stall reeking of alcohol and sifting through the lapse in her memories, her bravado, reminding herself that her finals are only a week away; and she’s already played hooky for so many days in a row that she’s screwed all her potential scholarships. She hasn’t slept in her own bed for going on three years now, carrying around a suitcase of borrowed clothing, little memories of all the wayward souls she’s crossed paths with, and who have sacrificed some small piece of themselves to belong to her always.

Her favorite shirt smells like sage. She’s only had it for two weeks.

What does it matter? The evening always wraps her in technicolor, inevitably.

It's incredible.

☾

It's temporary.

Edith Keller, who hates her own name and insists on Edie, just Edie, is the kind of girl that the world is content to write off as "passionate." Like it's a bad thing, a fault in her coding. Too brash and opinionated for her upper middle class parents, she spent many a family dinner confronting their past sins with open rage — a child growing up in the aftermath of a war, walking past shattered people each day on the way to school, only to find out that her own mother and father had sided with the Capitol when the situation turned dire. It makes her furious in the way that a part of herself becomes forever enraged, tucked away inside her mind even in the best of moments. Everything is cruel, and a scheme, and she understands this.

She feels capable of anything /

as much as she feels hopeless.

With all the energy inside of her, she bounces between hobbies — she started with ballet, forced by her mother, and then followed that up with marksmanship, encouraged by her father, only to eventually find herself begging her parents for a musical outlet, some sort of practical reasoning she could use to make sense of the things running through her mind. The shame, and the selfishness, a girl that changes like a kaleidoscope in bedroom mirrors that change with her. She can begrudgingly play piano, and deeply enjoys the drums, but her passion is in writing lyrics and bringing them to life.

It’s a little funny, how the one thing her parents spent the least on, a journal now weathered by time, is where she found her true calling, her true home. Edie is a true rebel in a generation where all of the citizens know just how terribly rebellions end. But she still bleaches her hair and dusts her eyes with black shadow, wrapping her hand around the mic and repeating the moment like it’s the newest experience, like she could never grow tired of speaking at full volume. She wants to be heard.

Her life is lived carelessly, carefully, until fate intervenes. When they call her name at the reaping, she only smiles and begins to laugh, raising her hands in mock-mercy and wasting no time with escorting herself exactly where they want her to go. "Took ya enough time. ‘Bout missed your chance.” There’s an annoyed grunt, and she quickly recovers. "But no hard feelings. Happy camper here, sir.”

Yeah. There’s a lot going through her head. She wonders what sounds they will play at her funeral.

But of most priority, she knows that the nicer and more compliant she is with the peacekeepers, the less likely they are to search for and find the blunts (and lighter) hidden on her person. If the Capitol expects her to stare down the barrel of a gun, the least she deserves is a nice buzz to ease the experience.

At least that’s what she tells herself.

That’s the lyric that makes the page.