Grace Thestrell, District Nine

GRACE THESTRAL

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♕ DISTRICT NINE ♕

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Every smile you fake is so condescending, counting all the times you break.

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Mirrors shatter, bones break.

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I wish I could tell you who I am without mentioning the monster within me. But I cannot, for it is not simply inside of me. It is running through my blood, dormant in my bones. I spent all my life trying to convince myself that the monster was not me, it was simply a sickness that held onto my body with a grip so tight it threatened to snap my bones. But then I realised that you cannot have something there, living beneath your skin and breaking you time and time again, without it being part of you. Something you would almost miss if it were gone, because that is where it has always been and that is who you have always been.

I have always been the girl who breaks. The girl who can snap at the slightest touch. Fragile. Brittle. Always healing, yet always breaking. Always bound up tight in bandages, always being told to be careful, because if I'm not something inside of me will snap. Like I don't know that. Like I'm not the one who feels the pain.

All my life people have tried to protect me, put off every inevitable splintering of my bones. But no matter how hard they try, my eyes always end up flashing a brilliant shade of sapphire. That was the first thing my mother noticed when I was born. Two blue eyes, the eyes of a baby looking at her. Surrounded not by milky whiteness, but by more blue, the color of the sky. They don't always look like that - only when I have broken. Shattered, like glass.

At birth, already, twelve breaks and counting...

So that monster inside of me, part of me, is osteogenesis imperfecta type I. And I wish I could tell the story of me without mentioning it, but without it I would not be Grace.

In my life, I have looked in a mirror only a few times. We do not own one, and we do not need one. Why would we pay to buy a piece of metal that would only show us what we are missing? Why would we want to look into something that would reflect every piece of pain right back toward us? The first time I looked in a mirror, I was five years old. I stared at myself, and she stared back at me. Wound a golden lock around her finger. Blinked her wide-set eyes. Until that day I never knew how like my brother I looked. I never knew that we possessed the same slanting jawbone, pale lips and fair complexion until that day. I watched the girl in the mirror closely, because I'd never seen her before. And then I sneezed and the whites of my eyes flashed blue and a searing pain ripped through my body and before I knew it my brothers hands were holding me tight and rushing me away to the lady who treats me every time this had happened so far.

That's thirty-four breaks and counting...


The next time I managed to look in a mirror, I was older. Thirteen. I noticed things that a five-year-olds mind doesn't. Like the way I'm a good foot shorter than everyone else my age. And the way my legs bow slightly from all the times they have broken. They way I am so small and light that I would be perfect for climbing trees... but it's something I could never do. Snap goes the branch, snap goes me.

And the very last time I saw myself I did not see my features. Did not see my disease. I just wondered, wondered, wondered, what I would look like if I had never broken a single bone. If there were not scars on my shins from where my tibia broke so violently that it ripped right through my skin. Who would I be if I did not know the name of every bone in the body, simply through experience?

I wouldn't be me.

How can you forget what you never knew?

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I had a mother, once. But she was never really there. I mean, she died when I was only two years old, but I don't remember her face. I remember a couple of things about her, though. The softness of her hands and she bound yet another bandage around my tiny wrist. The smell of soap that always hung on her clothes, for she worked at the soap factory down the road. That is all I remember of her, and nobody, not even James, will tell me how she died. I had a mother to nurse me when I broke and to cook with me and to tell me about the world. And then I didn't.

And my father worked long, long hours to support us, and to buy all the things I needed to stay alive. Walkers, wheelchairs, bandages and casts and splints. Maybe not so expensive in the Capitol, or in the upper districts. But enough to cripple a family here in Nine. I'm sure I've spent more time at Erephin's place than anywhere else, for ever since mama passed she has been the one James rushed me too every time a bone broke, brittle as a twig discarded by an impatient child.

I am more than what I see in the mirror, of course.
Just as I am more than the god-forsaken condition that shapes me."Grace, what are you doing?" This memory is one that haunts me every day and every night, and even in those places between waking and sleeping that hold a mixture of dreams and consciousness and memory. I am flying. Smiling, seventeen and spinning around and around on the ice, just as I have always dreamed of. I do not feel the cold that laces around my fingers, the winter that has frozen the pond solid. That is, almost solid.

But it doesn't matter, because as my skates cut through the ice I fly like a bird through the air, and I am happy like I have never been before. And then my brothers voice filters through the happy vail again, urgent, demanding, sharp. I cannot ignore him any longer. He is breaking my happiness. All my life I have wanted to dance and skate and dream like the rest. Now I can. And then he is shouting, and my father is running across the concrete towards the pond. Stopping, screaming at me to stop.

"It's not safe-" cried James.
"I'm not a kid anymore! I'm seventeen! I can take care of myself." My voice, on the verge of bitter tears. Hysterical.

And my father yelling words so filled with fear that I started. He should never have done that. Maybe, if he had simply let me skate and fly, I wouldn't have broken. Or, I would have done, but it would have been worth it. But he shouldn't have cried out like that, because I jolted from my trance and went tumbling, head over heels over head over heels again. But I didn't stop falling. Here, my memory breaks, jagged as the ice that broke beneath my feet. I see the rest of the day as though I am watching from above, because James has since told me what happened.

The slosh of freezing water under thin ice. My father running out onto the pond, dragging me from the water before slipping in himself. James pulling me back onto the concrete, and my father falling under. Never to come to the surface again, never to hold me when I cried. So they you have it - I killed my father. I was reckless, stupid, filled with an out-of-control urge to simply be free of pain for once. And instead I found myself free of parents.

James loves me. I know that. He's only eighteen, but he treats me like his little sister. The one so little she needs caring for all of the time. And I guess I do need someone to watch out for me all the time, because without that someone there I'll do something else stupid, fiery, selfish. It just doesn't mean I like it, or accept it, or want it.

That's forty-two and counting...

So that's me. I'm breakable, fragile, brittle. My body is weak and as easily shattered as a piece of glass. But my spirit is not so easily broken.

Speaking
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