tallie mahdavi >> d7 >> fin

When mama told me I was old enough to get into the family business, I didn't think this is what she meant.

I've always been... weak. I can see it in their large brown eyes - they're just mine but filled with disappointment. How similar we can look, and how different we can be, I've learned family is just like that. Mine, especially. I've always been timid, and shy, and naive, and I don't know how to change it, so I don't. I'm an only child with two living parents, and my cousins would always blame them for why I'm so soft. That they spoil me and that I have it so easy, and I don't argue with them. I don't agree, I just sit there silently, feigning a fake laugh to their quips and yet mentally defending myself every step of the way. They don't get it, they don't know me like they think they do. 

Just because I'm not like them doesn't mean my parents failed me. I grew up dirt poor, living in a caravan with hand-me-down shirts and stolen skirts. One of my pairs of shoes were used for school, and the other was used for running in the dirt, and pinkie toes are deformed from wearing too small shoes for too long. My backpack had a broken strap and my hair was choppily cut at home, and that's about all I had. The only toys I had were shipped from out of the district, and they were beautiful, beautiful dolls we couldn't afford if they weren't gifts from family. From district one, of all places. I couldn't imagine it even as my uncle told me of the palaces they had - he would travel there on occasion. If I had anything nice, it was from the higher Mahdavis. 

It gave me a complex in a way, both superior and inferior, having family in high places. In my early schooling, I would pack a doll to bring with me so it felt like I wasn't so alone, and I'd never let the other poverty line kids play with her. I knew what it was like to want, and I feared they would break what they couldn't have. The other children, though, with their designer clothes and legacy last names, they would grimace at the idea of being around me. I was between two worlds, and in some ways I feel the same. No matter where I go, it seems everyone has a side to belong to and I'm always caught on the outside, waiting to find where I'm good enough. 

I have my talents though, it's been a learning process to accept that.

In ways, I've always been a writer. Being from 7, paper came as easy as taking packs of it from school home with me, and when no one was looking I'd take the prettiest pens I found lingering around. Free game, my cousins taught me that. How to steal - I have nimble hands and an unassuming face, though I lack the charm to back it up. I don't take anything with a price tag, but I have learned to make do to fulfill my own needs. Scrappy, savvy; I keep a candle lit at night and write my own stories to read. For my eyes only, I have for years and oddly the characters become closer to me than the few friends I do have. 

My mother has tattoos. I've always thought them to be beautiful, and lining the left of her ribs she has signatures of everyone she's loved. It's how I came to love calligraphy, innocently at first. She would lay asleep on the front bed and I would sit next to her, copying the names over and over again on the sheet of paper in my lap until I could match it exactly. Down to the accented flicks of the final letter; in some, down to the shakiness of the tattooists troubled marks. When mama made letters to send to her sister in the higher district, I would wait for her to leave them unattended so I could copy them word for word. The narrative of them were always strange, broken in ways I couldn't make sense of, and the return letters wouldn't be any different. 

I always thought they spoke in some kind of riddle. 

I couldn't have been more right! 

Calligraphy turned into forgery as we grew up, my cousins and I. It was nearly the only way I could be useful to them. They'd bring me along when they stole from the convenience store, stuffing their pockets with sour candy and bitter chocolate while I would pipe up questions to the cashier. It was easy, particularly so because they would pay me in halwa chebakia. The guilt would come in waves until I tasted sesame and honey, and it certainly made playing accomplice easier to swallow. They would always steal extra to bribe me with later, and truthfully it became a game to me in ways. I would show them the strange letters mama would write, and they would focus on how well my penmanship was, how it looked exactly like my mother's. I already knew this, but I beamed with pride at the comments. 

In exchange for writing off their mediocre report cards, they would pay me in - guess? Halwa chebakia. 

Two years ago, my uncle invited me to come with him to district one. It caught me by surprised, impossibly so. Me? Why? And even more importantly, how? It was difficult to travel, and that is to sell it short. I never imagined I would leave district seven, so much so that I didn't even think of it. The first time he brought it up, I refused to pay it any mind, to get my hopes up by listening to him. To understand my uncle better, he has always been one to say the impossible, and to believe him was to willingly play the fool. It wasn't until mama brought it up to me herself that I allowed myself to believe it was possible. 

She explained a few things to me in that moment, for every question I gave her, I received a satisfying answer back. About the letters, and about our higher family. Things I've wondered my whole life and never had the courage to ask, and that is when she told me it was time to become a true Mahdavi. The family business - I would commit my first crime at the age of fourteen. Forgery, two travel permits, round trip from 7 to 1 to 7 again. In the moment, I felt nothing but fear. What would come of me if we were caught, but nothing ever did. We made it to district one, and my uncle and I weren't treated as outsiders, but as family. I loved it there, and believe it when I say I doubled my hand-me-down wardrobe when I returned.

Coming back home, I felt pride where fear once lived. My uncle paid me for the job well done, and mama let me keep it all. I had become a bonafide forger; I had a purpose to my family. And I learned halwa chebakia tastes the same whether you steal or pay. 

Tell you what, I'll never pay again! 

table by: c e l e s t i a l s