Wrenassa Dobrieva - District 10 {Fin}

“You’re so beautiful, Wren. Be glad, being beautiful is a gift.” I’d heard that my whole life, my family always telling me about how my being pretty was fortuitous, and I guess they had a point. In our life, you have to use the little bit that you’ve got. And I’ve got it…

I broke the mold used on the rest of my relatives. Where they are all darker, skin richened with color from the sun, and hair like water-dampened soil…I’m some golden statue, cast in a different fire. Blonde hair, none of us can figure where it came from, but I have it – wheat gold, and bleached by the sun – with a pair of eyes as blue as the cornflowers Lark liked to pick for me. We don’t look like the cousins we in fact are. Nothing could be more dissimilar about us. With her clay-baked skin and short, chestnut hair, we contrast like salt and pepper on the same dish. If my skin could only brown like hers I’d be at least a little happier. Maybe I could go out in the afternoons when otherwise the brutal rays confine me to the stagnant air of our wagon. My own fair face can’t handle it and I burn to a crisp under such direct exposure. Plus, I freckle like the petals of a fire lily, and grandmar says that freckle faces are bad luck. She works hard to keep me free of those poison spots, scrubbing my cheeks and neck with lemon juice that supposedly dissolves the touch of evil spirits.

That doesn’t mean I’m pampered though, nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t choose to be a gypsy for it’s easy times. I’ve pulled my own weight since I could toddle on two legs. When younger siblings came along, I had to work even harder caring for the youngest. I’ve got arms and legs with a healthy cut of muscle; nothing like my father of course, he could wrestle a tree from its rooting place. But work isn’t a stranger, and I’ve got the hands to prove it. Between scrubbing with lye soap and digging roots from the earth, and running after four younger siblings, I’ve about lost any shape to my nails, they just grow in kinda uneven now, and my palms are hard as bull horn with their thick pads of callus. I don’t mind these evidences of the life I lead, like the dust that settles over everything when you travel, it’s just an accessory of the nomadic life.

Grandmar used to tell me, “Beauty is only skin deep and grows more transparent by the day. So make sure your insides are in order.” Of course, when she first said it to me, I was just a little thing, and the only interpretation of such a notion was a literal one. I spent weeks of sleepless nights worrying on whether my stomach and lungs were all in the right places and what would happen to me if they weren’t. Well, when my mother finally found out about this, she sat me down for a good hour, trying to explain that what Grandmar really meant was that I couldn’t always rely on my looks to get me by in life. Even after that, my insides were a constant source of concern for me, not just on an intestinal level, but what would people see on the day that my skin no longer hid what character was beneath it?

People called me a quiet child, pensive, thoughtful. Maybe that fact was so noticeable because I always had Lark around to compare against. My cousin was by no means a placid girl. She was all vim and vigor, with wild ideas that usually landed us both in the hot seat. One such instance occurred when Lark convinced me that we should both cut off our hair and sell it to a passing wigmaker from the Capitol. Well, we returned to our aghast mamas with scalps as clean and bald as a newborn…or a really old man. Hair grows back of course, but not before you get a wicked sunburn. We walked around for a few weeks with heads resembling a pair of ripe tomatoes.

I’d like to say that after the experience I never listened to Lark’s hair-brained schemes again, but of course I did. With all that thinking and cautiousness I do, I wish it rubbed off on my relationship to Lark, but where she’s concerned, my good sense goes out the window. I’ve always let her lead, content to follow along on whatever it is she dreams up. She’s my twin, despite the two uteruses that separated us during gestation.

Still, as we matured and grew up, things changed a little. Our family differences allowed for her to indulge that wild nature…I can’t say I had that luxury. Cultural conditioning is what I’ve heard it called, but it’s just the way things were for our folks. I learned pretty quick that men are the rulers of the house. What they want and what they say, well that’s the way it’s going to be. If you think otherwise or have differing opinions, don’t matter, keep it way down deep inside and don’t you dare talk back. People looking in probably think I’m broken, meek, and submissive… even I have to agree at times. I wish I was different, that I had courage like Lark does to just stomp my foot and refuse to be whatever they tell me to be. I don’t. Maybe I’m afraid – afraid to be different than what my father expects and my mother models. There’s a stubborn streak hidden way down deep, but it’s still there. Buried under years of folks telling me that women are possessions, meant to clean and cook, birth some babies, and do what it takes to keep their husband a content man. It’s still alive, though, it keeps me pushing on and refusing to just give up on a future and dreams like my Ma does. Oh, I have dreams…someday it’ll be different for me; the only man I marry will be one I love and who loves me. Won’t be no one can tell me otherwise.

What there is of my life you haven’t already picked up by now is pretty simple. My people date this life back to the big uprising, when Capitol keepers flooded into the Districts and bodies fell like autumn leaves from the trees. My great Grandpar gathered his family up and they fled, away deep into the woods and wilderness where no crafts could find us, and foot patrols were easy to dodge. He was old though, and never lived to see two years past the event. When Grandpar took over leading the clan, he set up a hierarchy to help govern command and keep our now growing numbers in strict control. You see, out here…we’re vulnerable, the Capitol would love to wipe us off the face of this planet, we threaten their precious borders and fences. Anonymity and invisibility are paramount, one wrong word or step when we infiltrate a District for supplies…and that’s it, the whole clan would be dragged in for execution or worse.

So, I guess that’s the way it all started, but then when Grandpar got too old for leading, my own Pa, Markus took over. Pa has some pretty decisive ideas about the differences between men and women, and it changed a lot of things for the Dobrieva clan. I wasn’t born yet, so I can only speculate on what it might have been like before, but this is what it’s like now. It’s what I was raised to believe, and maybe they are right…sometimes I just find life so confusing that I can’t always work out right and wrong from each other. It’s what Pa says, and Ma backs him up, but sometimes I see this look in her eyes when he’s not around, like she’d want to tell me otherwise. Ma’s not a Dobrieva by birth, she and her sister used to live in District twelve, then one day Pa and his brother Luka came along and convinced them to run away for a new life. They married the two brothers, and I wonder on occasion if Ma at least doesn’t regret it. But then I wouldn’t be here to wonder, so no use wasting time on speculation.

Soon enough Ma and her sister Aishe were both in the pregnant way, and on an arctic cold day in early January, they both gave birth only minutes apart. Wrenassa and Larken, and we might as well have both slid from one womb. We slept in the same crib, rode in the same wagon; we grew up closer than most twins. It looked like nothing could part us, not wind or tide or miles of earth, I’d always have one person at my side.

That was, until I found out first hand just what it looks like when men don’t hold no value to women. They left me, just abandoned me in District Ten, traded for a horse! Like I was a sack of grain or a barrel of apples. I heard the wagon roll away in the night, and I knew that my life was about to change in a big way.