Isabella Rose, District Four

In the summer time Bella can be seen in summer dresses, shorts, skirts, and tank tops, matching flipflops will accompany many of her outfits. She would rather be wearing dresses and skirts then shorts. Her mother has always called her a girly girl because of the fact that she would rather be running around with her friends in dresses then in jeans or shorts. She also pays attention to her hair and appearance, and her mother wasn't sure how to handle that when she started to actually care about how she looked. During the summer her skin has a sun-kissed look to it and her hair is beach blonde. Most people, in the summer at least, accuse her of being a bottle blonde, but she spends a lot of time outside in the summer so her hair becomes more blonde with everyday that passes by in the summer. She doesn't wear a lot of make up in general and summer is no exception; she might wear some eyeliner and mascara-water proof of course-but other then that she doesn't spend a lot of time on her makeup. Her least favorite time of the year is the fall. She doesn't like the fact that winter is approaching and it is becoming colder. She has to start to bundle up more and wear jackets, her mother is always nagging her that she has to be warm and that she shouldn't be running around in her 'skimpy, little' dresses and skirts in the fall. The lowest points for her in both her wardrobe and home life are in the fall. Mostly she ends up wearing longer dresses with tights or leggings in the fall along with flats instead of flip flops. Her hair starts to darken for the winter so she keeps it tied back in a braid or ponytail most of the time, so that she doesn't have to deal with people calling her a bottle blonde and telling her to go and dye her hair. She knows she isn't and so does her family; that is the important thing.

Winter is the time of the year that gets her mood the lowest, but she feels like she has more clothes to wear and she looks more normal for a district four. No longer is her skin sun kissed or her hair beach blonde, but she is pale and has dark blonde hair that offsets her skin perfectly. She loves the winter because of the fact that she is able to do this. She is normally in the darker colors in winter including purple and dark blue. Winter is the only time that her eyes are not the blue-green color of the ocean. Her eyes are a dark blue that reflect her mood a lot. She likes them when they are blue-green, but she feels as if they look better when they are dark blue. In the spring her hair starts to lighten and she is able to go around in her normal clothes, she can even start swimming more.

• [natural positive] Kind- Bella is a kind person despite what she hides from the world, she was raised to be nice to everyone and that is what she is. She was always told that maybe with just a simple hello she could make someone's day and that person would forever remember her for that simple reason. Because she is kind many people also see her as loving and sweet. She doesn't like to hurt people and if anything likes to make people feel better about themselves simply because it is the right thing to do, not because she is expected to but because of how she feels about it. Being around people who are mean to other people will sometimes put her down and make her think about life in a different way. She doesn't know how to deal with people that do that to other people, the one thing that keeps her from being mean to people like that is that somewhere deep down they probably don't like themselves and do that because they don't know how to deal with it. Or they might be having problems with someone being mean to them at home or wherever and they don't know how to handle it so they lash out at others. She can understand how that can happen, so she can't just be mean to people like that.
  
  
• [produced positive] Optimistic- Optimism is something that she does have trouble with having all the time. She looks on the brighter side of things and believes the best in everyone but it is something she has conditioned herself over time to do. She grew up around a man who would give people tabs at the store simply because he saw the best in them and figured they would pay him back and if they didn't it wasn't a big deal to him. Bella isn't that good with Optimism though, she grew up around it sure, but it was something she learned. She learned that when you are kind to people 10 times out of 10 they would be nice to you because you were nice to them. Seeing the best in everyone makes it possible for her to be nice to everyone. The reason why she struggles so much with it though is because she has seen a person that she could assume is completely bad because of what he did to her, she could chalk him up to be one of the hundreds of people out there that are out to get her. Every time she thinks this though she has to stop herself and say that he probably didn't know what he was doing or something was wrong and he is actually a good person at heart. Seeing the optimism in people is the hardest thing and since she has taught herself to do that she sees the good in everything, from the snow and the cold to the heat pouring down in the summer time. From the slums of the district to the high end part of town.
  
  
• [produced negative] Loner- This is the one thing that she isn't sure how to handle. She can't stand being around people. It isn't the fact that she doesn't like people because she thinks that people are the one thing that can keep you a float when you feel like sinking. She just doesn't like being around them. She doesn't like having to deal with large amounts of people day in and day out and that is something that bothers her because she likes people, just not dealing with a lot of them or talking to them about anything too personal. She has friends, people who like her and ask her to go to the movies or out shopping, but she never does, while she likes to hang out with them at school and sometimes after school she doesn't like being around them all the time. She would rather be alone. She can only be around them for so long before she starts to feel crowded and stressed. She can't talk to them about what she might want to talk about. Whenever she is around people she feels as if she is constantly editing herself to stop herself from saying something that actually matters to her. When she is alone she can think aloud or write what she is thinking without having to worry about it being to someone she doesn't want to know about that thing specifically. Sometimes when she really thinks about it she wonders if her dislike of people was there before her rape or if it showed up after that. She had never really liked spending large amounts of time with large amounts of people but she hated it after the rape. She sometimes sits there and thinks about how she actually feels when she is around people and she has found that she feels scared, cornered, crowded and like someone is pushing her to do something. She doesn't show much but extreme emotions because she doesn't feel the need to and when she does it is never around people, she is always alone when she is really upset, crying or even really happy about something. She doesn't like people thinking she can't control her emotions just because she is a loner a lot of the time.
  
  
• [natural negative] Out-Spoken- While she is quiet sometimes and does edit what she says around everyone she spends time with she can be quite outspoken. Most people would look at her and mention how quiet she is and how she has a lot of friends who seem to like her. When she gets in conversations, though, that are no where near her personal life she will start to dominate them without even thinking about it. In class for example, if they read something she thought a lot about after reading all her thoughts about it have to be in the air as long as they don't pertain to anything close to what she feels about her own life or how she looks at it. She sometimes wonders how her teachers, friends, acquaintances and family deal with this side of her. It is always easy to deal with the sweet and quiet side of her but the outspoken hard to handle and take a lot of the time isn't something most people can take. Due to the outspokenness of herself sometimes people may think of her as selfish or vain when in honesty she is not either of those things. She just feels the need to sometimes let others know her opinions on things that make her feel like she is actually a part of something. Coming along with this trait is one that is not very good for her and that is not being able to really deal with other's extreme emotions. She can deal with people's sadness and happiness but if they start crying or is really hyper she doesn't know how to react. She doesn't know how she should read people to see what they want her reaction to be.
  
  
• ["wild-card" trait] Daddy's Girl- Bella grew up around her father. There is no doubt that every waking second of her days after she could walk and before school she didn't spend them with her father. She is definitely a daddy's girl. She grew up around him more then her own mother mostly because of the fact that he understood her. He understood how she thought and acted and how to handle her overbearingness better then her mother ever learned how to. Her and her father were the same kind of person, they had the same type of personality for the most part, which probably comes a lot from her growing up around him. She loves her father with all her heart, and of course she loves her mother too, but her and her father just get along so much better. Most girl's in their teen years when they want permission on an outfit or a dress or make up they go to their mothers; Bella was never close with her mother so she goes to her father and they are close because of it. Even as a small child she was his shadow.
  

District Four is one of the three riches districts surprisingly, most people would not expect that of a Fishing district; they would expect it to slimy, grimy and gross and everyone there in poverty. While there are probably parts of district four that are like that, for the most part it is a great place to live for its inhabitants and the Rose Family was no different. Andrew and Amelia always had the good life from children to when they grew up and started on their own. Mr. Rose opened up a small general store that carried everything that most people would need in district four at affordable prices. The favorite at the store though was the hand made fishing nets that Andrew made when he wasn't busy running the store, that was always the big seller.

Not long after they were married they had their first child, a boy. Both the parents were thrilled for the little boy and knew he would make them both proud one day, but there was always the nagging feeling in the back of their mind about the games. What if their son was chosen? What if he volunteered to be in them. They weren't sure what to think, but they knew that they had the time to stop worrying about it and just to enjoy the young years of their first child's life. Not long after their son was born they had a daughter, Bella. She had her mother's hair and her father's eyes. Both her parents were thrilled when she was born to have a second child and to know that they wouldn't have to worry about the games because their children didn't seem to show an interest in such things and there was almost no chance of them being chosen.

At a young age it was easy to notice that she was a lot like her father, and her mother was not happy that she would have to deal with what she called a 'diva' in her house. Her mother would always praise her brother and yell at her, so she would end up following her father around the store and the town like a shadow, only adopting her father's personality more. Around the time that she was three her mother got pregnant with her younger sister. Bella was excited to have another younger sibling considering she and her brother didn't get along well, and she was hoping maybe she would get along with this new baby more then her mother or brother. When her sister was born she would always spend time in the nursery instead of in the shop playing with the new baby.

As she became older she was shunned by bother her older brother and her younger sister, so she moved to following her father around like a shadow again. She stopped spending time in the apartment and began spending every second she could in the shop with her dad, learning how he worked and interacted with people. She also learned how he looked at life and his dreams. She idealized her father and tried to be just like him while she was growing up and as she got older she started to realize that it just made her mother more and more upset when she tried to be like her dad. She didn't ever-and still doesn't- understand how her mother can love her father with his personality, but not love her because of the same personality, trying to pick her mother's brain had always been a challenge she had never been able to complete so far in her lifetime.

At age 11 Bella was worrying about making friends, going to the upper school, and about the next year when she would be eligible for the Hunger Games. One thing she wasn't counting on at the age of 11 was being raped. She doesn't know if it was a wanderer or someone living in her district. All she knows is that she was walking home from school one day and she was captured and raped by a man whose face would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life. She hasn't seen him around the district again so that only leaves her with the idea that he is a wanderer and she would never have to worry about seeing him again. For a while after it happened she stayed hiding not wanting to go home and face her parents when she knew she wouldn't be able to tell them what happened. After dinner that night she finally got up the courage to go home, after she arrived she wished she had stayed in hiding. She had to sit there for an hour while her mother yelled and screamed about how selfish she was and how worried her family had been about her and how they had thought she had died. She sat there her head down, crying, not being able to tell her mother the truth about what happened and not being able to look at anyone when she was sent to her room and grounded.

Over the next few months she became with drawn and her friends abandoned her to 'deal with her drama herself'. She didn't mind not having to worry about dealing with the small girls anymore, she didn't really like having them around in the first place. Her grades started to slip which only led to more yelling and shouting in the Rose household all directed at her about things she was doing and how she shouldn't be doing them. The yelling led to more grounding and a more and more unhappy Bella. Her life continued in this way for the next few years and the only person that seemed to notice or care was her father. He tried to help her, which she had to say was more then anyone else did, but he couldn't help her if she wasn't willing to help herself. She would rather curl up and stay hidden then try to fix her problem. She wasn't able to deal with it, so she wasn't able to tell anyone.

When she was almost fourteen she finally was able to deal with it; she likes to think that she just got over it, but she knows somewhere that if she thought about it, she would just shut down again. She was more social and made friends again, her grades rose up, and her mother finally stopped yelling at her, at least for grades and schoolwork there was always something to yell at Bella about. Her father was happy to see her being normal again, acting normal and getting through the days were now her only goals at the beginning of everyday. As time continued on she mended her personality into the optimistic, sweet, kind, daddy's girl Bella everyone knows and loves. She started to work in the shop again and to help her father. She had friends and was able to act normally for the most part. By the time she was fifteen she had everyone, including herself, believing that it had just been a case of preteen syndrome, and that she was all for having friends and going shopping and being a teenager. In reality, she couldn't wait to be alone and away from people so that she was able to think and feel safe, either on the beach or in her room.

Wendy Chermak