Bridey Arcangeli ❀ District 1 FIN

[/color][/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify] [/size]
[/center]

❀❀❀

It’s not like I got kicked out, per se, just that…they thought it would be better for everyone if I left and never ever came back. Lily white hands fold up and around themselves over and over, twisting up like origami as she stands awkwardly in the door jamb. Because I suck. Super bad…like… The silence is over powering, not even the rustle of ribbons, stems or scissors to break it as her father stops his arrangement and simply stares at her, head tipped to the side like an owl scanning the horizon for a mouse rootling around in the darkness, unsuspecting and about to become lunch. Bridey feels like the mouse, can’t take the silence and just keeps on going, a disaster, really…the trainer said I was as useless as the tits on a boar, they need me in the class like a hole in the head, the lights are on but no one’s home and the—I get it, Bridey, a low dangerous growl. It can’t come as too much of a surprise, he can’t be too shocked or angry but Bridey can’t help but keep nervously chewing on the flesh of her thin lips. What did he expect? No one looks at Bridey Arcangeli and sees a career- not even her father when he’s at his most deluded. She’s had scoliosis since she was seven- they called her Tin Man at the academy for the heavy unnatural metallic collar she’d worn around her neck; a cumbersome brace stretching from it and down the small of her back and her belly button, worn at a band around her hips making her movements stiff and awkward. Before she got the damn thing taken off a few short months ago the only way that Bridey was ever gonna make it in the Hunger Games- they used to joke- was by unscrewing her back brace and beating everyone to death with it before anyone could figure out she couldn’t even run properly. Now she doesn’t even have that. They still call her Tin Man though. Not even Tin Girl, which would have been a slight improvement.

Watching him nervously, she sees her father as a mass of contradiction; the scariest florist anyone has ever seen. He’s short and squat but built like a brick outhouse or a bomb shelter with a nose broken from the fights he likes to gleefully remind Bridey that he was always getting into and always winning. Growing thicker and less fit with age, the man still carries a fearsome set of biceps and not even his little half-moon glasses attached on a chain around his neck, which he peers at her over now, or the hand he has stuck into a garland of roses can detract from the effect. That’s what an ex-career is supposed to look like. To describe him I’d pick out the long stemmed Amaryllis with clusters of blooming flowers a little like Lilies- in the language of the flowers they mean pride. Tossed in with a few laurel leaves- for ambition. Better to let the leaves wilt a little though since he’s wasted it all on me. Not Bridey though; when all that metal came off they found a stick insect or a bundle of dry brittle twigs lurking underneath, weak from carrying around that extra metal exoskeleton, bands and straps digging into her abdomen so she never gained weight or even figured out how to breathe properly. Like wisps of dandelion fluff, you get the impression that a light breeze might carry Bridey away.

She’s unremarkable, to put it kindly, pretty enough with a sweet face, clear skin, pale blue eyes and long very straight dark hair but there’s something insubstantial about the way she looks, like a puff of smoke there and gone again. Just some lily white slip of a girl with buck teeth that she’s a little self-conscious of but that no one else will probably ever care enough to notice. The back brace used to bulge through her clothes, giving the impression of a strange bulky frame and to be honest, once it was taken off, Bridey couldn’t say she noticed a marked improvement. She didn’t bloom into woman hood overnight, grow hips and breasts and the boys at school didn’t suddenly realise that underneath all that tin she’d been a goddess the entire time. She’s still as awkward as ever really, her awkward jutting angles just a little straighter than they would have been before. Yellow carnations- disappointment.

One upside of losing the back brace though -aside from being able to sit down properly, turn my head all the way and touch my toes- is that now she gets to disappear. You don’t get to when you’re the Tin Man, carrying round what feels like an engine on your shoulders as much as you might want to; there’s always someone staring, some genius bringing in magnets to school to stick to your spine and you’re constantly followed by a hollow ominous clanking sound like bones rattling and echoing. Her world’s always been full of bright colours, carmines, teals, brightest yellow blooms and soft baby pink heart’s ease- and she has a knack, just as her father does, for them- You would hope so too, making the best bouquets in the district- though that’s not a statement of fact, more an opinion- but when it comes to her own dress sense, Bridey tends to be a little more muted. She likes gentle colours, delicate feminine shapes and floating lace that she would never have been able to get away with before.

Bridey wears her goofy looking smile fairly easy, just like every other one of her emotions. She’s never tried it but poker would never be the game for her, finding it incredibly difficult to mask what she’s feeling- it usually ends up written all over her face like an open book, not that anyone usually looks close enough.

[/size][/justify][/color]

❀❀❀

Your father isn’t angry with you, he’s just disappointed, her mother will say later, as she so often does when Bridey reads to her in bed, but it’s always funny to Bridey how disappointment makes her father’s face turn redder than red tulips, makes him start shouting and throwing things. It’s not anger though. Never ever. Maybe Bridey will buy her mother a new dictionary for her birthday. They said I could just take another class- art or something, Bridey mumbles at her shoes, slipping into that strange stiff posture, feeling – even though she hates it- naked without her brace the way she always does when she’s afraid. In its way it was a suit of armour, for as much as it was a hindrance and a giant ‘please do pick on me’ banner- keeping her enclosed and protected her. When I’m alone I like to slide under my bed and lie in the narrow gap between mattress and floorboards to feel the pressure of the wood stiff against my back. No one hits a Tin Man because they might end up breaking their own knuckles on the metal and though he never has, her father always seems to be about two seconds away from doing so. Monkshead- danger is near. That or having a massive stroke, Bridey can see the veins popping in his forehead.

Art, Math, Science, English- I don’t know why you’re even at the academy anyway. He speaks as though she’s out taking morphling behind an alley as opposed to simply taking an interest in learning. Bridey hates it at the academy with every last inch of her; there’s something about her that was never going to mesh well with the kids there, awkward as hell with no disposition whatsoever for physical activity of any kind and a strange naïve fragility about her. Buttercup- for childishness. Bridey likes reading books, arranging flowers and picking out really good gifts for people and if she was ever reaped her skill exhibited in the private training session would probably be organising a book binder with highlighter pens to perfection. No one at the academy seems to see the merit of highlighter pens the way that Bridey does. Since you’ve got nothing better to do, you won’t mind more hours here then. Not that Bridey minds really, but she’s about to say that physically there aren’t enough hours in the day for her to do any more work- my verbal filter needs a little fine tuning sometimes, my foot ends up in my mouth a lot. Bridey’s father likes to say that free time is not a right, that it has to be earned and whatever she’s doing doesn’t seem to be enough because Bridey spends every hour that she’s not at school in the shop. It’s probably out of some misguided sense of protection, maybe, that she’s kept as closely guarded as she is- a flower cut off at the stem and placed into a glass jar as opposed to growing wild- but not away from danger or derision- he’d happily throw Bridey in the Games for a chance to recapture misspent glory of his youth- more to protect her from distraction. From having fun. Bridey is her father’s property and she never gets to forget that. There’s nothing in the language of flowers for a life that isn’t your own. And I’ll train you myself if I have to.

Okay, Daddy. Around other people Bridey is incredibly shy, but that gets mixed up in between getting nervous and talking too much. In new situations with new people she has a habit of repeating herself, reiterating points, using redundant phrases and repeating herself. Give me a deep red rose for bashful shame. It’s definitley a left over from spending so much time as the Tin Man, expecting the worst, wanting the ground to swallow her up and knowing it never would- knowing my luck the brace would have gotten stuck in the hole- that she has very little in the way of low self esteem. The constant calls of, Bridey you’re not arranging that right, Bridey the flowers are wilting, Bridey you aren’t putting in enough work training, don’t help things especially since she was always simply destined to fail in her Father’s eyes.

But there’s beauty in the little things, Bridey has to go to school- it’s the law- and her father can’t keep her from experiencing stuff that is just around them; I like seeing old people who wear socks and sandals in the summer time,I like reading romance novels to my Mom in the evenings, l like it when the foxes get into the garbage outside of our shop because you can hear them yowling at each other and make up storylines for them and I like the tiny fragile bones of birds that you find in the street. Four years ago, Bridey found a dusty old book on flower language, what it meant when a ‘gentleman or lady’ sent you a bouquet of a certain kind of flower - it’s where she picked up all she knows- keeps her language secret and likes to assign certain people certain kinds of flowers.

[/size][/justify][/color]

❀❀❀

They used to be wonderful, so Bridey imagines of her parents; two careers in love, sending each other dozens and dozens of roses while learning how to cave in skulls and lance spleens with their knives. The Arcanjelis have always been florists and Bridey’s mother took a job after school with Bridey’s paternal grandmother, falling for her son in the process. Her father was supposed to go into the Games, win all the glory and leave the business behind but after his eighteenth birthday came and went without ever being selected he resigned himself to training the next generation of careers.They had troubles conceiving and Bridey’s mother lost children along the way until she, weak and squalling made it into the world. It could have been a sign of her strength, the one baby that made it- but she was pale and fragile as petals, with slow reactions, a jutting rib cage, she walked lopsided and a strangely curved spine shaped like an S.

But the back brace didn’t deter Bridey’s father no matter how many tantrums she threw and how often she cried. In her disapproval, perhaps, out of neglect from her husband or guilt that she couldn’t have provided him with more children Bridey’s mother shrank away from the world; up to her room, barely bothering to change out of her night things most days. She’d always been bulky, strength was her thing in training, but Bridey’s mother started to put on more and more weight. She’d press coins into her child’s hand before school, warm from being clenched around her puffy palms, and ask for a list of various sweet things; cakes, chocolate, loaves of bread by the dozens. Sweet things to make the world taste sweeter, she used to say and Bridey’s mother is still sweet She’s so sweet that she’s changed into a great corpulent marshmallow puff of a woman, with sausage fingers, great hammy legs, spilling out of a circus tent nightdress and peering out at the world over eight chins.

I would make my Mom a bouquet of White Camelias and Dogwood. White Camelias say you are lovely, Dogwood mean both pleasure and pain.

Her parents don’t share a bed anymore, Bridey’s mother is too big for that. He doesn’t love me anymore…thinks I’m disgusting, she says wiping the tears from her face while Bridey perches at the edge of the bed, curled up into her favourite chair. He…no he does honest…else why would he stay? Bridey tries, drumming her fingers on the newest cheesey novel- she should never play poker, Bridey finds it incredibly difficult to mask what she’s feeling- it usually ends up written all over her face like an open book. The truth is Bridey catches her father looking sometimes, at his obese bedridden wife and his strange Tin Man daughter with a gaze that seems to say‘this was never the life I wanted’. Honestly Bridey has no idea at all why he stays. Can’t help but sometimes think her life would be a lot happier if he didn’t.

Bridey has never had all that many friends- not with the people at school at any road- since being seen with the Tin Man is basically social suicide, but she likes the customers who visit the shop a lot. There’s a man trying to win back his lost love- married now and not interested though he still sends her forget-me-nots (Bridey suggested them) one bouquet a week though he’s had written warning from the peacekeepers not to do it anymore, there’s an old woman who buys lilies to place on the grave of a cat who died fifteen years ago and a woman who likes to send herself flowers with encouraging messages like ‘you can do it’ and ‘today, you will not think about killing yourself’. These are Bridey’s friends and maybe it isn’t the life she would chose for herself but it’s the life she has.

Might as well make the best of it.

A rosebud with leaves but no thorns. I fear no longer; I hope.

[/size][/justify][/color]