Binx Gabardine { District 8 }

Name: Binx Gabardine
Age: 14 as of the 92nd Hunger Games
Gender: Female
District/Area: Eight
Appearance:

Very little about Binx stands out in District Eight. She’s skinny, like everyone, and pale, too, though her shoulders have yet to take on the characteristic bow of someone who’s spent decades hunched over looms and sewing machines. Her dark hair and thick brows are a near duplicate of her mother’s; her nose -long, thin, almost too big for her face -comes straight from her father. Under charitable lighting her eyes could be called green, but most of the time they’re plain hazel, more brown than anything.

Binx keeps her hair up. Keeps her eyes down. But she doesn’t hunch. Her height is her favorite thing about herself. It’s the one trait that doesn’t echo through her family: no one else passed 5’6” at twelve, not even Garret. Two years later she’s pushing 5’10.” Five years younger and only an inch shorter. She’ll pass him if it’s the last thing she does.

Personality:

There’s a point where people start hating the games. Twelve, usually. When the threat of the reaping crystalizes, moves from am abstract event to the sweaty-palmed reality of an afternoon spent penned up in the town square. It happens sooner for some. A relative ripped away and returned in a box. A horror caught in the corner of an eye, maybe. Blood splashing across a screen. A particular sort of scream.

But Binx -Binx loves the games. She watches them, rapt, every year without fail. Start to finish. Never flinching, never turning away from the gore and the terror and the all-consuming wonderfulness of watching someone go from boring and regular and nothing to the best single thing anyone could ever hope to be: a Victor.

She’s smart. Fast, too, with quick fingers born from swapping bobbins and twisting petals out of felt. And no one’s paid better attention to the broadcasts than she has. None of her classmates can recite the arenas from memory. Not that they’d want to. They’re just like everyone else in the district, half-dead with the routines of school, work, bed. That’s Binx’s real advantage. She’s the only one who’s alive.

So she spends her time alone. Her shoes hit the cobblestones for three laps around the neighborhood every morning, then five more every night. She lifts boxes in the back room of her parents’ shop as the small, flickering television airs her only window to reality. On the best days, the finales and the bloodbaths, she crowds into the bar and sits beside the bookies till odds mingle with injuries.

Three reapings gone. Four to go. One day, the odds will finally be in her favor.

History:

The Gabardine family takes their name from the fabric their ancestors labored over at the break of the dark days. Through small maneuvers over the generations they’ve crept up the district’s ranks. A weaver’s son took up a sewing machine. The machinist’s daughter learned to cut patterns. Utilitarian coats gave way to Peacemaker’s uniforms until slowly, bit by bit, they saved up enough money to open their own shop.

Hats. Not beautiful ones with impossible brims or twisting replicas of old arenas; those ones, the ones meant for the Capitol, came out of District One. No, Cole and Marel Gabardine contented themselves with a much smaller market. Other merchants, mostly, with the odd politician from a neighboring district thrown in whenever import prices dipped. They were pretty enough to pay the rent, both for the shop and the four-room apartment above it.

Most importantly, the hats kept the family out of the factories. They would have to grab shifts here and there, sure, when quotas were high and deadlines looming, but for the most part they were free from the machinery that threatened to whisk off fingers and the thick, choking dust that could clog airways faster and more permanently than smoke.

Garret, Binx’s older brother, has been running the business alongside Cole and Marel since he turned nineteen. The three of them move in a unit, a triangle of gratitude that Binx just can’t understand. They have food. Money. A place to live. She knows that this is good -better than the alternative, obviously -but she can’t understand why none of them want to reach any farther. Their hats are almost good enough for the Capitol. They’re almost wealthy enough to move to a nicer part of town.

They’re almost alive. They’re almost real. Binx can’t wait to get away.

Other: Thanks for your consideration. I’m excited to get started!