Lyla Matheson, D3 {DONE!}

Hey, I'm Lyla Matheson. I'm eighteen years young. District Three is where it's at. This is my crazy, hectic, unpredictable life. Fasten your seatbelts, children, it's going to be one hell of a ride.

Don't lie. I know when you think of District Three, your first vision of me is going to be some bony bookworm with zits, braided pigtails, and glasses with tape around the middle. Yeah, we've got our share of those around here, but if you think that's me, well, you'd be sorely mistaken.

I'm anything but bony. I stand at a pretty normal height of 5'5", and I weigh in at 135 pounds, BMI of precisely 22.46. I've got curves, more so than a lot of girls I know. I've got a pretty kickin' hourglass shape going around the waist area, although my hips are a bit wider than I'd like and I'm not exactly...mammarily endowed. My legs are pretty long for my height, and fairly toned since I actually take the time to go for a run every morning. As far as arms go, my right one is perfectly normal, toned like the lower half of my body, with small hands and nimble fingers. The left, however, is bent at an odd angle. I broke it when I was little and it never quite healed the way it was supposed to. It still functions properly and everything, but it doesn't look too pretty.

Zits? Yeah, no. I take very good care of myself and have a rigorous skincare regimen, thank you. My skin is paler than I'd like it to be, but my complexion is clear of blemishes. My face is oval-shaped, with a button nose and cupid-bow lips. I've got overly-large eyes, doe eyes, some would say, that are the color of caramel. My lashes are long and thick, and I keep my eyebrows impeccably groomed. So, yeah. No zits. It's just not an option.

Braids and coke-bottle glasses are seriously not my style. I've got long hair, straight and bright white blonde, that falls to my waist. I'd never, ever braid it. It's usually always down, but I tie it back with a ribbon when I really need to think about something. I just can't focus with all that hair in my face. As for glasses, I have a few pairs, but they're purely for accessorizing. I was blessed with decent vision and have never needed real visual correction. Speaking of accessories, I love them. A lot. I have an insane passion for bright, loud colors, and I tend to wear clothes and accessories that showcase that passion. I don't dress like anyone else I know. I tend to gravitate towards skirts and knee socks in varying shades of neon, paired with boldly patterned shirts. I usually dress my outfits up with mesh arm-socks and chunky plastic glasses, occasionally wearing some jewelry if the occasion calls for it.

Not exactly your typical District Three citizen, am I right?

I have an IQ of 193. Yeah, you read that correctly. Scientifically speaking, I'm a genius. You'd never know it by talking to me, though. Why, you ask? Because I don't want you to know. I don't want anyone to know.

See, people tend to not take you seriously when you're a pretty blonde, genius IQ or not. They tend to treat you like you're a complete idiot, actually. A cute idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. I don't like letting down peoples' expectations. So if it's brainless fluffball they want, it's brainless fluffball they get. I only have a few very close friends that actually know my true level of intelligence, along with my family. I don't talk about the things we learn in school, much less show off my straight-A's to everyone. I'm a social animal, who cares about calculus?

There are a few, much darker reasons that I hide my intelligence from the general populace. Let's just say I like to play tricks. Tricks that can only be accomplished by a genius. Tricks that would probably lose me my tongue if not my life were I to be caught. No one's ever going to expect such tricks to come from such an innocent, effervescent, vapid little girl like me. It's imparitive that I keep these tricks a secret, and it's imperative that I keep playing them, even if it means acting like a moron to almost everyone I know. But we'll get into that later.

I'm a pretty bubbly person. I love talking to people, and I can never have too many friends. I tend to not actually get close to very many people, however, because that would defeat the purpose of me walking through life acting like a bimbo. It doesn't upset me in the least to sit and dish about hair and clothes for hours on end, as long as I can go home later and curl up with my beloved computer-programming projects. I'm an extroverted introvert, if you will. I'm friendly and quite the social butterfly, but I deeply value my privacy.

I do have to say that I'm a bit of a pathological liar with everyone except my closest friends. When you spend as much time as I do hiding who you really are, you tend to reinvent yourself a lot. I lie for fun. It's recreational for me. I make up wild stories when meeting new people, develop different personalities, sometimes even give them a fake name. What can I say, it's a blast. It's also necessary that I hide some truths from everyone. Remember those tricks I talked about earlier? Yeah, no one knows about those except me. And I'd like to keep it that way.

My parents are both computer programmers that write the advanced software responsible for all of the Capitol's security system. It's pretty complicated stuff, and there aren't many people out there who can do it. They met on their first day of work, two young kids, fresh out of tech school. It was love at first sight. They were married withing a year, and a few months later I came into the world.

My mom always tells me that they knew I was special from the get-go. I wasn't interested in laying back and watching the mobile above my crib as an infant. As soon as my legs could hold me up, I had it yanked out of the ceiling, taking it apart to see how it worked. I started walking and talking at a vastly accelerated rate, and I read my first Tolstoy novel right after my third birthday. By the time I hit five, I had dismantled and upgraded my first computer. Everyone was so proud of me, the little girl genius.

Everything was fine for a few years. I went to school like a normal kid, breezed through my classes, occaisionally helping my parents crack an encryption or two that they had trouble with. I never was a show-off in regards to my intellect, I didn't feel that it was necessary. I had a few close friends among the smartest children in school, and I got along well with several adults whom I found to be closer to my mental level. My best friend in the world, however, was my younger brother, Leo. Only one year my junior, Leo was every bit as intelligent as I, the only person I ever truly felt understood by. The two of us were thick as thieves, always getting into something together, be it writing a program that selected played music based on your mood according to a reading of your heart rate, core temperature, and hormone production via a small chip implanted in the arm, or sometimes simple things, like working on our disproval of the theory of relativity. We never got to finish that. Everything changed when Leo was reaped for the Games.

The poor kid was only twelve, and came from a district that wasn't known for having inhabitants of great physical might. He didn't last two minutes in the bloodbath before some monster from Two snapped his neck. I wasn't quite right for years after that. I kept thinking it was my fault, thinking that if I had done something, anything other than just stand there frozen as he walked to his doom, my little brother might still be alive. I lost all interest in anything. I would get up, go to school, come home, lay in bed until sleep claimed me, then get up the next morning and do it again. I berated myself for ages, telling myself it was my fault, my fault, my fault. Then one day, I finally woke up and realized whose fault Leo's death really was: the Capitol's.

I hacked my first system at age fifteen.

I've come so much further since then, traipsing freely through the complex networking of systems that controls life in the Capitol. Sometimes I play little tricks, messing with food delivery systems so the food recieved by some rich Capitolite arrives partially uncooked. Sometimes I will deny power to whole city blocks for days on end. Last year I was a few keystrokes away from breaching the Presidential Mansion's systems when a firewall that I helped my father create blocked my progress. Any glitch in the computers of the Capitol, from minor annoyances to full-blown emergencies can usually be traced back to little old me, nestled behind my laptop, bringing the bastards who killed my brother to justice one snippet of binary code at a time.

They'll never catch me.