❁ mallory (d2)

We are very lucky to be here. 
That's what they told me, anyway. 

I prepare the fruit for the party. I run the tap over the grapes and strawberries. I slice them, knife cutting through the flesh, juice dripping down my fingers. I try not to lick them. They are arranged in the bowl, glistening, with tiny beads of water pirouetting over the fuzzy peach skins. Carefully, I peel the tangerines. It's satisfying, the way I can dig my fingers right into the flesh, the pithy white rind gathering under my nails. I take my time making sure that there are no stringy bits. The birthday girl hates those parts, she says they taste bitter. 

If they think that we don’t know what they say about us, we do.

I think I’ve heard a thousand different whispering. I realised first when I was eleven, and I was sitting on the stone wall outside the front of the school. It had been a good day - I had new, crisp white lace gloves from Aunty. I’d made it to three in the afternoon without soiling them, which I was excited about, because my sister had told me I couldn’t, and I was quite ready to rub it in her face. Two ladies were walking past, headed toward town. I remember looking up at them and thinking that their dresses were rather pretty - nicely hemmed, floral print fabric.

“— they’re doing something awful up on that hill, you can just tell it.” An affected, high-pitched laugh.

“I heard that the wine is just a cover for what they’re really selling.”

Poison, perhaps. A cellar full of pricey aged wines that date back before the rebellion, hundreds per bottle, interspersed with bottles of arsenic and potions that do a lot more than making you tipsy. A drug-front, maybe? Bodies buried beneath the vineyard, decomposing bones feeding the juicy grapes. I even caught word that if ever a young woman had found herself in trouble, if you know the sort I mean, she could approach our wrought-iron gates in the middle of the night and we’d welcome her into the cellar and make the trouble go away. Anyone who thinks that anyone would survive that particular procedure has never seen my mother chopping vegetables.

For us Wraiths, chess is a winter sport.

I’m the best at it, with the exception of maybe Father, because I’m never sure if he is letting me win. I, however, would never dream of letting anybody win. What’s the point in that? Once, Mother gave me quite the lecture, — you’ve got to give them a chance — she said. Her voice was all high and whiny and it made me sick. How would deliberately letting them win help them in life? Do they think that once they wind their way down the driveway, wander out of those gates and onto the streets of District Two, that the world will go easy on them? That despite our seat of relative privilege, despite our money and our family history and our big house, that Panem will go easy on them? That the reaping will go easy on them? Frankly, I think it would be cruel to create that sort of pretence. The Capitol would never throw a game just to make a fifteen year old boy feel good about himself (quite the opposite), and so neither will I.

Anyway, that night ended in me holding all of the black marble pieces in my hands and Mother crying, and then me throwing my fistful of knights and rooks and pawns right at the wall. They rolled in all directions across the floor, spilling this way and that, creating an awful racket until finally they each came to a stop, and everything was too quiet.