maddy deerling, five.

i. I find out about a girl named Cecily the same time that my mother does, when she holds out a receipt for the child support he'd sent to the girl's aunt.

I am five years old.

Dad slept on the couch for what felt like a lifetime after that, but hindsight tells me it was just under a year. I remember sneaking out of my bedroom, making a special little bed next to him on the floor. I'd clutch my lovie, a stuffed cow named Moo, and bury my face in his belly for a pillow. Curled up on the floor, I thought I was so careful, so quiet. Come morning, I always woke back in my bed.

ii. When I am seven, we get our first cat, a fluffy grey thing that I named Spooky because it was coming up on halloween time and I'd never been more excited. I shouldn't say we 'got' him so much as I found him. I had to crawl up under the base of our house, wriggle between into the little crawl space under the foundation. I don't know how he found his way in there, but I could hear him meowing from where I'd been splayed on the floor.

I'd come inside, caked in mud and dirt, face a slick of dust, the tiny creature purring quietly in my small hands.

Mom took one look at me, sighed, and just said his milk bowl was my responsibility. Maybe he'll take care of the mice.

iii. Meeting Cecily is something that rots inside me slowly.

"I think you'll like her sweetheart," my Dad said to me, tucking my freshly short, spiky hair behind my ears. I just recently cut it all off in the bathroom at school. I'd been in art period and we were cutting up tissue paper to make paper mache art, and it'd been three whole minutes of me staring blankly at their stupid purple handle before I asked Mrs. Cho to be excused. It's uneven, blonde bits poking in the wrong directions, but that's but I get for doing it in a mirror where I couldn't see the back of my head. Dad's mouth stayed a thin line when I came home from school, so, message not received I'm pretty sure. Not that I know what the message really was. "It would mean a lot to me."

iv. I like her. I hate her for it.

Give me hindsight, call it sisterhood, the suspense kills me over and over. Dad starts talking about her after that, often, and Mom stops listening when he talks. It's confusing, because I don't know her, I don't understand what it is about her that I am not. Why doesn't he talk about me the way he talks about Cecily? What shadow was I born in? She's perfect. She doesn't need him, doesn't need me, doesn't need anyone. I think about her, and my fists are clenched balls—I hate her, I want to be her, I want her to pay attention to me. See me, I want to hiss at her. 

I'm ten and I sneak out my window on a Saturday, ride my bike too many miles for it to be reasonable and show up on my half sister's doorstep. When she opens the door to her aunt's home, I swallow my heart, thrust forward a stolen bag from my mother's bathroom sink.

"Do my makeup," I say, intending for it to be a question, but it comes out more like a command. Smaller, mouth twisting, anxiety bubbling up, up, up up—"please."

v. I'm standing in the crowd, a year and a half shy of reaping age, and Cecily runs away from the reaping. She has the audacity. Fear in her ears, not a glance over her shoulder of doubt, just—bolts. You know what she doesn't have the audacity to do? Take me with her.

Mom doesn't either. She runs away from Dad, leaves me behind in the dust. The note she leaves me is sitting under a pile of dirty laundry in the back left corner of my room, under a stray sneaker. Maybe I'll burn it eventually.

Dad buries himself in work, starts to come home late into the night. I think he doesn't want to sleep alone, starts crashing on the couch instead.

It's always the 89th Games on a loop as I click the television volume a little bit lower while he sleeps. On good days, it's her interview, Cecily wearing that headpiece, eyes soft. She doesn't look like a girl who wanted to ruin everything. Shadow usually curls up on the television stand, the second cat I brought home that year.

Bad days, it's the home cuts that he's made of her in the arena, each flash of her that we get. Sharp cuts, fragments of conversations, and so much pain, so much pain. 

vi. I hate her, I miss her, I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.