Melissa Redwood D.12

Lacking in size but not in looks, Mel's face is easy to see in a crowd. Beautiful hair flows down her back to her knees, colored Black and fading to white at the end. Her eyes are deep, shining blue that make you think you're drowning in smooth water when you stare into them. With hardly any happy memories with-in her mind, she seems as if she has a permanent scowl plastered upon her face.

Mel’s body is slim enough for her to fit into small spaces. Her small body also helps her to be more flexible than most people; she is also compared to a cat because of this. Flexibility and small shape help her to be excellent at claiming threw windows into people's houses.

Mel's a very quiet young woman. She keeps to herself, hardly talking to people unless spoken to. Some call her a freak for being such an anti-social person but no one knows of the terrible things that have happened in her past. With a straight face, she endures it all.

When Mel is at home she's a very different person. She's kind, sweet, almost as if she was a mother, even if she still barely says a word. Her younger sister and Grandmother could not understand her clearly even if she did speak. Living with a deaf elderly women and a little girl with a busted ear drum, she's learned to communicate without the use of words.

Looking calm on the outside is a special talent of hers. Hearable long ago memories catching up to her in nightmares and random flashbacks drive her crazy inside. With no one to talk to about these retched senses, when the pain of them become too much, she runs from her Grandmother's home to her old one and screams. However hard she tries she cannot stop it.

As a child, Mel could be as free as the wind but now, in her teenage years, she must take up the position of parent to her younger sister and care taker to her Grandmother. Thanks to her mother’s messed up mind, Mel’s child hood is no more.

a few years ago, three years to be exact, Mel's mother, enraged by the fact that her oldest daughter would have to be put in the Reaping this year, had locked herself with-in the confines of her and her husband’s room. Mel's father had explained many times that her name must be put in or the family would suffer greatly. Her mother did not listen.

When the day of the Reaping approached, Mel’s mother had attacked the lady calling the names of the Hunger Game's tributes. "How dare you try to take my daughter from me!" was the scream of her mother as she jumped onto the stage and is forever burned into Mel's subconscious mind.

As Mel's father pulled her mother from the stage her mom grabbed a rock from the ground, bashing it against her husband’s head. Peacekeepers came to arrest her but she refused to go, fighting back as hard as she could with anything she could get her hands on at the time. After breaking free of their hands, she picked up a large stick pointing a sharpened end at Mel’s younger sister say “If I can’t save one I’ll save the other!” Mel quickly pushed her sister out of the away of the attack, getting the stick jabbed in her shoulder.

Finely getting her hands bound, the Peacekeepers executed Mel’s mother right on the spot. Mel’s shoulder was healed but her father had been hit in a sensitive spot on his head. He died with-in a week, leaving her to take care of her deaf grandmother and half deaf little sister.

She doesnt mind the nearly quiet house and the maturing to a motherly position as much as most people, but she longs for more human contact then she has. Living on a far side of the district with only a few others around she's not sure if she'll ever find a friend, which she is in desperate need of. She can't even remember the last time she used her voice, she's not even sure if it exists any more.

Rainy nights she fears. With the rain and wind her minds tricks her into hearing her mothers screams as she tried to "save" her daughters from the Games. If her past was almost as normal as the others would she still be this way? Trapped with horrors in her mind but nothing but love in her heart for her grandmother and sister?

Yet there are those few days were she's happy her life turned out how it did. Each time her sister learns to do a new thing or she bring a smile to her lonely grandmothers face, she feels lucky to see these things. She could've lost her whole family to her mother's craziness and yet she still has the two most important people in her life. Even if she over looks them most days.