Jan Ethel-Agnes Jones [District 2] -fini-

January Ethel-Agnes Jones was born in the cruelest of months: April. Ah, April, when the flowers peek through the cracks of the mountains, only to be stripped away by acid rain. A month for liars and artists. (The Jones's considered there to be little difference between the two.)

Yet, even though she was born in April, her parents chose the name January. They wanted her to be pure like winter.

Perhaps this is why she is ugly. Beauty is the ultimate liar, a flower blooming only to fade. Whoever heard of an ugly seducer, an ugly Lucifer?

January Jones comes from an honest, brutish family, with honest, brutish genes. The stodginess of her chromosomes are expressed explicitly through her heavy brow and buck teeth. Her chin had aspirations of femininity, perhaps, but it was a little too enthusiastic, and ended up slightly misshapen. The girls at school joke that her face is a broken-hearted valentine gone wrong. The boys don't joke about Jan Jones.

They say, "Jan who?"

If the Jones were animals they would be work-horses, eyes easily blinded by their Capitol, mouths filled with bits or grainy, dry food-- not small talk.

But Jan is more colt than Clysdale. All bones and no beef. Even though her family always has plenty to eat, sometimes even too much. At least that is what her father is always bothering her mother about.

In the last few years, Jan has managed to grow the infamous pendulous Jones's breasts. (Perhaps the only reason her father married her mother, otherwise a shrew.) In her objective opinion that is the only thing worthwhile about her appearance.

Her hands are the only other parts of her body besides her face and chest that betray her origins. Huge, twice the size of most girl's her age, they are perfect for tying knots and holding spears.

Or, perhaps, for playing the piano.

Jan Jones is ugly and mean.

So says everyone except for her parents. (Jan is an only child.)

Jan agrees with one of those adjectives, although she's never quite sure which.

She doesn't mind being ugly, or at least people thinking that she is. And if she's mean-- so be it.

This is what she tells herself.

Sometimes at night Jan dreams she has friends, and when she wakes up, she's just so sad she pries open the floorboard with her fingernails and pulls out one of her forbidden books, and reads until she forgets about reality. Until she can hear in her head symphonies played on instruments she can only imagine.

People hate Jan not because she's ugly. But because she's unashamed. Sure, she wishes occasionally, that she lived in the Capitol and could have all of her bones shaved to homogenous perfection, but Jan has bigger wishes than being pretty and having friends.

It's not that Jan doesn't like people, but that she doesn't need them. At least not her peers. For her loneliness means not having people pointing at her nose and asking when it's going to grow warts.

Yes. that was in third-grade. Yes, people are nicer now (somewhat). But Jan isn't one of those people who forgets.

Where her family is blunt, and even occasionally warm, January is sharp, just like the knives she trains with. Her observations of people she doesn't like don't just cut, they lacerate.

The people most in danger of her scorn though are the ones she does. It's hard for her to make friends. Because the moment any one befriends her, their worth in her eyes immediately falls.

But despite how dour this may sound. Her isolation really isn't the burned out torch she carries. Her real wish is simpler.

She wishes she could play the piano for her mother. She wishes she could go to school and learn things other than the simple linear algebra.

(If she has to hear one more rendition of the boring Panem Anthem she thinks she may kill herself. Or even worse a Rock-and-Roll ballad singing praises to our Lord President Snow.)

She wishes she could be taught to sing.

Her musicality is her missing limb. Not rock diddys or folk ballads, but layers and thought and pathos (she read this word in a book she's not exactly sure what it means).

Because, yes she has the winter-craftsmanship of her father Tom Jones, the mechanic. She uses that due-diligence to become probably the fifth best knife-fighter in the district. She is a professional with a knife.

But in her heart she wants to be a liar, an artist.

What she wants isn't to have something beautiful like a boyfriend or friends, even less she wants to be beautiful.

Her road to beauty is one not less traveled, but perhaps not traveled at all. At least not for a long time, not since the time of the books.

She wants to travel to it.
She wants to cartograph out new lands.
She doesn't want to be beauty--
she doesn't even want to make it,
she wants to reinvent it.

Jan knows you've heard of Beethoven, maybe even Mozart. But you don't know others, Stravinsky, John Adams, Berg, Dvorak. She knows these names may be nonsense magic spells for all the sense they make to other people. She knows these are forbidden names not on the list of "acceptable" tuneful music.

These names are her most prized possessions and her most dangerous secrets.

These are the passwords that unlock the complex latches guarding her soul. (She is as familiar with it as you are with Beethoven.)

She found the books under the floor-boards. The Jones's house, the thirteenth biggest house in the capitol of District 2, is the last place the Capitol would think to look for something as superfluously taboo as music from before.

In fact, the Jones's had tried time and time again to invite visiting emissaries from the Capitol to their house for weak tea and slightly fibrous cookies.

But for all their patriotism the Jones aren't bad people. Last year after the girl from District 2 "fell short", Jan's mother (Ethel, hence the middle name) brought over an especially soggy casserole to make up for it.

Not once did her mother encourage Jan to enter the games. Glory was not the goal of the Jones's. They would rather live in the dark then dare fly too close to the sun.

But in spite of their ignorance, maybe even because of it (there is something to be said for simplicity). Her parents loved her. More than anything, even the Capitol.

It broke their hearts when she decided she wanted to train for the games. But Jan knew she'd never be liked, and she figured being feared was a close second.

Even after she found the book, dusty tomes on counter-point and set-class theory. Even after she started reading them, enthralled by the complex mathematical worlds (so much more fascinating than simple algebra.) She didn't stop fighting.

Because it doesn't matter that in a normal world she could have been a real scholar, a real academic. Here academia is the road to hell paved with un-patriotic intentions.

January Jone's may not be her parents child but she loves them. Soggy casseroles and all.

She loves the way her mother folds her laundry. Her fathers big hands as he fixes a carberater.

She loves the feeling of her mother's arms around her.

And the way her father calls her beautiful.

No one else calls her beautiful. No one else probably ever will.

And they love her.

So she reads her books, but never once has she touched the keyboard. Never once has she tried to implement the strange scales and antique languages (sorella sappiamo un vostri desideri!) into her humming while performing kali knife drills. Never.

Because the only thing that would break her parent's hearts more than her being a murderer is if she were an artist.

A creator of beauty, music. An inventor of lies.

A lost, changling-child of that cruelest month.

April.