96th Reaping [District Two]

m a r g u e r i t e

God, I wish I would've known when I was younger
That I should have just danced when I didn't want to

Marguerite had spent the night packing.

Under the strings of soft white lights that decorated the walls of her room, Maggie sat atop her covers drafting pages of who would get to keep the prized possessions that hadn’t been meant to leave these walls (To Analise, my poster of Risky Pope. To Ethan, two packs of cigarettes. For the unnamed scavengers: anything tucked into the back of the closet is yours to sort through).

Only when she’d put her pen down and gazed at how neatly she'd piled up pieces of her life did she realize how morbid an exercise it'd been.

Death wasn’t one final act. There were a lot of little dyings throughout life, weren’t there? Everyone died a little when they had to say goodbye. For no matter how she returned to this place, it wouldn’t be as the same person.

She didn’t have to leave after their final reaping, of course. But who wanted to spend the last few weeks of summer dawdling, simmering, and ultimately drifting to ash? She’d been meant to find a job, get an apartment or a basement room, and figure out the rest of her life. She wouldn’t cry over the girl who died here and emerged the next morning to the weight of more tomorrows.

Because, she told her herself, I’m getting out of here and not looking back.

She treated such crossroads without fanfare. Another sunrise, another key plucked from her keychain, and a few half-hearted goodbyes to a place she’d spent a sliver of her life.

Not that she had any ill feelings toward Harvard House.

Between these brick walls, Marguerite had been given three years to exhale.

If there had ever been one constant in her life, it had been the frenetic movement between one space, and then another. Perhaps that’s why she’d excelled at being a career, despite being as compact and unassuming as she looked, Marguerite had learned to truly understand how to strike, she had to know her own body and mind above all else.

And that often meant, despite whatever bullshit a good number of trainers said, without facing what had been in front of what could be, you could never be strong.

Her father had died knowing this; her mother had runaway having discovered she could never.

So, when morning came, she’d tucked her hair underneath a headscarf, put on her tank beneath a comfy half-cropped sweatshirt, a pair of joggers, two freshly whitened trainers, pulled the key to her door from her key chain, and slipped out the door without a word.

Checking into the reaping had been an experience.

She had to remember to give her birth name, which was always accompanied by a heavy swallow (why did she have another given name, why had she changed it from Threatts, and why did you never bother to fill out the necessary legal documents?).

Marguerite had spent her whole life answering for why other people had made the choices that had left her parentless. Few realized her childhood had never been so much an option but a set of daydreams she returned to on bad days.

When she looked out at the faces of the others in front of and behind her, she forgave the fear (whatever tragedies they’d faced had led them here, alone) and the anger (whatever tragedies they had faced had burdened them to bitterness).

‘Marguerite Harvard.’

The universe conspired that – despite wanting the utterly normal, sensibly predictable life adulthood was supposed to bring – she’d never get to have it.

“Of course they would.”

She was, and could not put a finer point on it, fucking pissed.

But that had been the sum of her life, of so many other people’s, to start to picture a future so much brighter, with all the opportunity, only to have it snatched away in an instant.

Still, it didn’t stop her from glaring and pushing her way up through the rows while peacekeepers trailed at her sides.

Her only thought standing on that stage looking out at all those people was that she should’ve just run like her mother had.

Wasn’t she supposed to say something, give the people who were watching the first taste of who she was? Something imposing or inspiring for a woman sentenced to death?

“This is some bullshit,” Was about all she could offer through gritted teeth.

(Maggie accepts the d2a spot)

trib wall pics: x x x