chanel sato, capitol.

Doc and I sit in silence for thirty-seven minutes and twenty-six seconds before, finally, I break the quiet.

"You know you're supposed to ask me questions, right?"

"Do you want me to ask you questions?"

The edge of my thumbnail has been dragging along the other's cuticle, pushing the skin back and gouging it off. I didn't start there though. My nails have been ripped raw in the last near hour, the skin around them bleeding and ripped from where I picked at them. My ministrations stop when Doc finally asks me the first question as a response to my own, a dick move that doesn't go unnoticed, causing every muscle in my body to go still. Something shudders over my skin, cold, goose flesh rising in its wake.

"I don't care." I will my mouth not to frown, find indifference instead by looking away and shrugging my shoulders. Something thick sits in my throat. "Your time to let me waste."

"And your father's dollars."

I almost laugh, but it'd ring hollow so instead I just let it echo in my chest, letting out a faint huff that sounds a little too much like a scoff. Mind your manners, I hear my mother scold.

"Don't let yourself be fooled," I quip. "It might've been my stepfather who made the appointment, but those aren't his dollars. You can thank Tanaka Holdings for that fat paycheck you're going to get."

"Tanaka Holdings, your mother's company you mean?"

"Said as if she has any actual interest in its management." I shake my head, swallow, roll my eyes as I shove my hands under my thighs. I study the tree in the courtyard outside Doc's window closely, spot a small bird perched in its branches. I can't hear it's chirping, but I wonder if it feels as trapped in this place as I do. "She's shows up for a yearly photo-op with the workers, and checks the quarterly earnings reports. She has other 'passions' to fill her time."

I raise my eyebrows at the work passions, quick and rude, the kind of subtle expression that my mother likes to tell me is unbecoming. I pry my eyes away from the window to look back at Doc.

"It sounds like you disapprove of her work ethic."

"Oh, she's got plenty of work ethic, she just doesn't channel it into her work. She'd have no time to play with her little dolls if she paid attention to the books."

"Her little dolls?"

The question in Doc's voice is clear. I want to look away again, but that feels weak, so I bite my tongue for a second instead. It doesn't work though, the words tumble out of me anyway.

"Her book club friends, my little sisters, her husband. All those cunt women from the society pages two decades ago who are afraid to realize the world moved on and left them behind."I shrug. "Me, once upon a time. Ren Tanaka dolls, the lot of us."

“Did you ever spend time with your mother? Outside the home, I mean.”

“I tagged along once to my mothers book club.” I try not to bristle at the word home. It makes me uncomfortable, like my skin starts to itch. “She said she thought it would be good for me, spending time around 'civilized' ladies.”

“And what happened when you went with her?”

“I stared daggers at the screen for twenty two minutes while all the mothers around me curled up on their plush couch and sobbed ridiculous, ugly tears. Capitol Boy Bitch of the moment was crying over his dead girlfriend in a movie about two kids in the games.” I roll my eyes. We spend half our lives talking about the games, and the other half spinning fake stories about them. “You ask me, Panem has got to get some new hobbies.”

“Does it bother you to seeing people upset about the games?”

“It bothers me that they made the damn movie in the first place.”

“So, you were angry with the women in that room before they’d ever gotten upset.”

“The women in that room are always upset. They drink their expensive white wine, sob into their handkerchiefs about fake dying kids after they condemn real children to die, and then weep about their pathetic excuses for lives as stay at home socialites, all while their nannies sit at home raising a brood of kids those women had with men they hate.”

“Sounds like you think they were miserable, conflicted about their choices.”

“Yeah, well, being conflicted just means you get to be shallow without bearing any of the consequences, and there’s nothing worse in the world than fake fuckin’ bitches. So I swiped one of their precious bottles and went in the bathroom, drank it with the vengeance of a teenage girl thinking she’s doing something to get back at her mother.”

“Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Getting back at her?”

There’s a long, slow second that feels a little bit like being set on fire.

“I certainly thought so.”

“Work is shit,” starts the session, and I sort of spiral from there.

This morning I interviewed a woman whose daughter was murdered by her boyfriend, the sort of crime no one gets upset about anymore except for the girls mom. Doc seemed like maybe she wanted to unpack something about that when I said it, but I didn't want to give her the chance to ask the pointless questions today. I'm not in the mood to beat around the bush; I'm in the mood to pick up a fresh bottle of bourbon from the shop and drink it until I forget I'm writing a story about a vapid girl, and her vapid mother, and the ways in which the Capitol fucked both of them. I’d sort of felt for the mother at first, pretended not to notice the crooked grin or the jagged haircut when she showed me a picture of her little ‘princess.’ The girl in the picture looked a whole lot like she would've let her boyfriend rip my teeth out with a pair of pliers while she stood over my body, laughing. Mother's always seem to have a way of warping their own memories of their girls though and I learned a long time ago that a mother's selective memory is nothing to screw around with.

I make sure to air quotes the princess when talking to Doc. She gives me a disparaging look that I know I deserve, but I still don’t calm down or let it go.

“You should have heard the fucking line she fed me at the end of it all, showing me a picture of them both." I scoff, judgemental, thoughts red and ugly. "It was right out of a drama script.”

That’s when the mom had lost my sympathy. I hate realizing they're in it for their own image.

It’s the limp dick sort of evil that tends to rile me up the most. I’ll stare at my screen, that stupid line blink, blink, blinking until I feel like I’m going to blow my brains out. It makes me want to hook my pointer finger behind my eye and just rip them out, the way the flashing cursor drives up the pressure in my brain. It’s why I started writing in my notebook again, but I’ve got chicken scratch that would make doctors jealous for handwriting so reviewing my own notes is hell on burnt toast. It tends to just grind my gears even more when the story I'm writing is a dead girls last stand, told like some scripted plot line designed for Capitol TV screens.

I started thinking about my life in terms of how it would look on a book sleeve when I was a child, so I get where the lady is coming from. It's a product of being here, living in this place, where screens have taken over everything, violence fed to us through feeding tubes called television screens. Our names are designed to be read by others. Her daughter died, and it's not like I was the first reporter that she sat down in her kitchen and gave a cup of bitter coffee. She had a juicy story, and that's what the Capitol is all about: setting the human dumpster dive of an experience on fire, and calling it prime time.

"It often bothers you when people's emotions seem faked to you," Doc says, smart woman. I hate her for that every time. Every time. "Everyone grieves differently, Chanel. You know that. So this woman told you the story about her daughter dying a bit dramatically," she pushes. Always pushes. "Her daughter died. That is dramatic. Maybe she borrowed words from a show because she had struggled to find the ones to describe her own feelings and she identified something in those that gave her comfort."

I think back to Tallulah Crane, the sharp bursts of rouge on her cheeks, the cigarette she'd been puffing on while I interviewed her, rotting teeth soaked in tobacco spit. Reflexively, I wrap my arms around my midsection. There's gooseflesh creeping up my skin, unsettling.

I don't want to say anything, so I don't.

Doc doesn't let the quiet last for long.

"For god's sake, you're a writer, Chanel." Playing dirty today then, I see. It makes me bite the tip of my tongue in my mouth. "Of fiction and non-fiction. What on earth made you want to become a writer if not to see other people be affected by written words?"

She gets the same answer I've been using for years. Unfortunately, if she looks at it closely, she's going to realize what I'm really saying is that she's right, and I have a heart that just looks like a shadow with fangs. She'd realize all this anger really should be turned inward.

"Words touch people where hands can't."