Larissa Mayfield // District 10 // DONE

♦ L A R I S S A ♦ M A Y F I E L D ♦

My hands dip into the pond, wavering the image of the scrawny dark haired girl before me. The girl is me, and she's not anything special. Her dark brown hair is messy, untameable as always. Mud brown eyes stare back at me, each piercing the water with the intense gaze they always managed to carry. Pale, skinny arms lift to push a dark strand of hair out of the way of their gaze. My nose is too big for my face, giving me a kiddish look that admittedly matches a part of my personality.

I'm skinny. Borderline unhealthy, because there's not enough food to feed myself plus my brothers properly. It's ironic; I go to work everyday ranching and farming the food that I can't afford to have. Despite the hardness of the life before me, people say an innocence still lights my eyes. I've tried my best to maintain that innocence. It's harder than it seems around here. I'm not the tallest person around; I hardly stand up to the shoulders of my younger brothers, and they're not necessarily tall either.

A wide splash of freckles covers my nose, but stops there. My hair is easily tangled, and sometimes matted. I just don't have the time to brush it some mornings, and it's really not much of a priority to me. Smudges of dirt usually splatter my body, there from working for ridiculous hours.

I'm not one to dress up, mainly because I really don't have many clothes to dress up in. Jeans are practically my uniform. I'd like to look nice, but it doesn't happen often. Only on Reaping days and other important occasions, when I manage to save up enough money to buy one, which isn't often.

I'm not a stranger to being called naive. I'm beyond familiar with it, actually. You'd expect someone with my past to have grown up too fast, or developed a strong sense of when someone was lying, but it never happened with me. It's not that I'm stupid, it's that I'm easily manipulated, easily tricked. I try to see the good in the world too often, and I get stepped all over in the process.

I am not strong, but I'm not weak. I'm just... Me. I take things as their handed to me, usually without complaint, but everyone has their off days. People call me an escapist, they tell me I run from my problems. That I indulge in fantasies too much. Sometimes reality is too hard to handle, though. Sometimes running is the only way to stay sane. Maybe that's not right, but it's life.

When I get upset, I sing. That's why my mother used to call me her mockingbird. That's changed, though, like a lot of other things have. Now she just drinks. Drinks when she's happy, drinks when she's sad, drinks when she's angry... I'm not even sure that she has emotions anymore, actually. I've tried to get her to stop, but after awhile it just got exhausting, so I did what she wanted me to do; I gave up. I don't give up on things often, but it was taking more energy than it was worth, considering I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that she'd never stop. No matter what I said.

I'm usually in a good mood, because the way I look at you have to make the best of things. Some things aren't going to go perfectly, so... Don't complain when they don't. I'm not really sure why I see things the way I do. When my mother's in one of her drunken rants she sometimes screams at me about how the world is cold and I should be too. I have to agree, the world is a little cold, but that doesn't mean that I have to be. And I won't be. I won't end up like her.

I have some commitment issues, but most people with an absent, previously abusive dad probably would... I haven't really found anybody that I want to commit to, though. Nobody seems to care enough, nobody seems to really want me. And that's okay, I guess. I'm used to it. And... I'm still young. I still have time. I have time to make everything right... I will make everything right, I can promise you that.

When I was born, I was loved. An only child at the time, my mother had miscarried once before, and I was her little miracle. My dad was almost normal then, just a little bit stressed with work and the risk of losing his job. As time went by, my mom had two other children, both boys, making me not only a sister but also the oldest of the family. The problem was that my dad didn't want those two other children. He wasn't making enough money to support the family, and that led to him taking everything out on my mother. And then on my brothers. And then on me.

Eventually, he left us, which was at first a relief. It broke my mother's heart, though, and she resorted to drinking. I know, we really can't catch a break around here. By that time I was fourteen, and that was when I started working, juggling school and work in a feeble attempt to feed the family. My brothers were my priority; my mom was just wasting her life away with alcohol, anyways. I really have no idea where she got it, either. Maybe she stole it. That'll always be a mystery for me. I wanted her to stop at first, but like I said earlier, eventually it just got to be too exhausting.

I didn't want my brothers to have to work, but by the time I was sixteen I was working a lot plus doing odd jobs, so they had to step up to the plate. I'm beginning to earn more now that I've reached age eighteen, but they still have to work. Figures.

We all normally enter tessera, although none of us want to. We're all firm believers that the Hunger Games are nothing but wrong, though we'd never say so. Every year before the Reapings there's a tense feeling between all of us, because we know how high the odds are of us getting reaped. I'd imagine that this year's going to be the worst, though. I'm eighteen. My last year, but also the year where I'll have a huge amount of slips with my name on them in that glass bowl.

I've just graduated high school, though. Now I'm working my usual job on a ranch plus the occasional odd job. My mom is still going on with her drinking, although I'm surprised that her kidneys are still functioning. The worst part is that I can't really move out; I still have to care for my brothers, and make an attempt at keeping my drunken mother alive. So I'm stuck. Trapped. I usually spend the free time I have wandering in the woods. I'm not much of an outdoorsy person, but they're peaceful; a good place to escape to.

Sometimes, you need an escape.