Orian Messina District Eleven

I think it's pretty obvious why I've never had a girlfriend. I think it's my face. There is something about my small mouth, icy grey eyes, and thin eyebrows that make me look…I’ll say evil, but that’s not really the right word. I look like someone who doesn’t care. My eyes are always moving. I haven't ever needed to concentrate on anything to remember it, so I'm constantly taking in as much information as I can. My eyebrows stay slanted almost always to make me look like I'm always scheming something. When I asked to be a server, my boss told me I couldn’t do anything where I deal directly with guests because they would think I went to the kitchen to poison their food. I'm generally a pretty happy person, but since I've got those thin lips covering a small mouth full of pointy teeth, my genuine smile looks somewhat menacing. I swear I'm a nice guy, but I just don’t look like it.

From behind though, I'm completely forgettable. I'm on the shorter side of average at about five and a half feet tall and I'm neither chubby nor as scrawny as many of the other kids in my district. That second part is especially true as I have put on a nice amount of weight after leaving the wheat fields for the pub. My whole family has gained some weight and that’s how I can live my life with no regrets. I slouch a little pretty much all the time and I have brown, unkempt hair just like a majority of teenage boys around here. Add in my all black uniform in the low lights of the District Eleven pub and I am invisible.

I'm so much better suited for work in the pub than on the farm. My hands are small and my fingers stubby. When I'm working with the big heavy farm equipment, my fingers stumble around and slow me down, but they are absolutely no hindrance in carrying plates. My short stature and solid calves and ankles give me a low center of balance so that I can hold large stacks of bowls, cups, and plates. They may wobble a little, but I am yet to break a dish at the pub.

Like I said, I'm a good guy. I love my parents and my siblings. Almost all of my decisions lately have been to help them out. My boss knows that I am the hardest worker in the pub which gives me job security. We both know that he would be hard pressed to find even two people who not only would be willing to work the hours that I do but be able to do them well. So whenever I want to, I can mouth off to the owner, servers, bartender. Whoever. But it isn't because I'm mean or snarky. But after putting in sixty hour weeks at work and going to school every day, sometimes I snap and it's nice to know that when I call my boss the lazy lardass that he is, he won't fire me.

It's only people I know who I'm ever short with. If a customer asks me for something, I'm happy to oblige with my well-meaning evil smirk. After a particularly profitable day, I will even donate some of my hard earned money to local orphanages or churches. It isn't because I actively believe in a god, but rather because I think what goes around comes around and it would maybe be a little bit harder for a maybe existent god to damn me to hell if I've been a good person. I think that I'm so nice to strangers because I'm naïve. I prefer to think the best of people until they give me a reason not to. That said, once that reason is given, I am ruthless. Mercy isn't really my thing. I hold grudges for long times and I support a form of eye for an eye justice. Sometimes, I even personally ensure that such justice is served.

After a long day of busing tables, doing dishes, and cleaning up after inebriated patrons throw up all over the floor, the last thing I want to do outside work is clean. My room is a dark, windowless vortex of dirty laundry crumpled paper, books, and useless knickknacks that I've acquired from who knows where that I've kept because they look cool. This drives my mom and my aunt Zelda who lives with us absolutely bonkers, but I figure since I bring home more money in a month than they do together in a year, they will have to deal with it. After all, if they want it to be clean so badly, it just makes since that they should be the ones that clean it up.

From the time I was a little kid, I've thrown caution to the wind. I’m a risk taker and I am almost always willing to take a risk. I know that most of my gambles are like the Hunger Games and the odds aren’t ever in my favor. But that doesn’t stop me. I love the excitement of not knowing if my stupid wagers will pay out. Since discovering that my restraint job is more profitable than one could possibly imagine, my risks are becoming less little gambles and more high stakes decisions that could ruin me and my family or get us living on easy street for the rest of our lives. I guess we’ll all have to wait and see.

My favorite thing about myself is my memory. It's pretty much infallible once I hear something, it is engrained in my mind forever. I also don’t even have to be paying close attention to something to remember it. I can tell you all about every interesting conversation in the pub on any given day. If you want, you can even name a date. Try me. Now what a lot of people think when they hear me rattle off an entire chapter of a book I read or draw a picture of something once I can't see it any more is that I am smart. Unfortunately, this assessment of my abilities could not be further from the truth. I guarantee you that if I was even the least bit intelligent, I would find a way to get out of this dump. The only reason that I just bus tables all day is because I'm stupid. I'm terrible at using the information I hear, so I only excel in school in subjects that are purely rote memory like spelling. So if you hear about a job making bank in good ol’ District Eleven as a professional speller, let me know. But seriously, I think that the part of my brain that should let me think logically was replaced by more room for remembering things.

Like almost everyone in District Eleven, I come from humble beginnings. My parents worked their asses off in the fields with next to nothing to show for it. There were four of us kids, my parents, and Aunt Zelda in a two room house. We all started farming when we were six or seven. It was backbreaking work in the fields and quite honestly, I got sick of it. I went into the district square one day and noticed a big help wanted sign on the window of a greasy spoon pub, so I went in to check it out and came out with a job as a busser. Compared to working on the farm, it was nothing. I never had to deal with the hot sun or intense heavy lifting. It was great.

My family was angry about me taking the job at first. They were worried that I would be wasting my time for even less money and they knew they couldn’t grow as many crops without me. My dad flipped when I told him how much money I would be making. As it turns out, the guy who busses your table has a barely better paying job than the average slave. But I promised him that it would work out. That I was just taking a little chance on a premonition I had about the pub. Everything would be ok. And sure enough, it was.

I’d been working for only a couple days when Lester McMahon, a farmer who works with my father, and a few of his friends took a seat at one of our off to the side booths. They asked for a seat away from the bar and were talking to each other in hushed tones in their dark little booth, so naturally I was curious. I decided to test my social invisibility at work, so I began bussing the table next to theirs. Sure enough, it was as though I wasn’t even there. Lester might as well been bragging to me about the women he’s cheated on his wife with rather than to his trusted comrades. Just while I was standing there, he gave me the names of four different women and even mentioned that one was his wife’s sister. I was shocked.

I'm not sure if what I did next was an action out of vengeance for Mrs. McMahon, greed, or desperation for my family, but I simply wrote on a napkin “If you don’t want your wife to know what you’ve been up to, leave some money beneath your plate.” I let him decide how much he wanted me to keep his dirty little secret. I know it was cruel, but not nearly as cruel as what he did to his wife, so I figured it was ok.

That night was the night I knew I made the right choice. Despite the fact that my hourly wage was practically nothing, Mr. McMahon gave me more money than I had ever held at one time. I never told a soul about how I got the money and I kept Lester’s secret for him. But some people were not so lucky. By now, I typically overhear a blackmail worthy conversation once a week and I've only revealed two of the scumbags I've blackmailed. The best part is that I'm so invisible in the pub, that nobody notices who is blackmailing them. And they're all too afraid of being revealed to warn anyone but their closest friends. There are even a few people, who I make come back every month just to pad my pocket. I've got a girl who doesn’t want her parents to know she sells drugs, a gentleman who wants his boss to never find out who’s been embezzling money from the business, and a woman who would rather her family know that she’s not sure who her kid’s fathers are.

My greatest risk was to work in a pub. And every day I risk threatening the wrong person. But when I come home each night, there is a peace in my family’s face. They know that they don’t have to worry about here their next meal will come from. They know they won't be decimated if the weather is bad for the plants. They know that they will be ok. And that makes the risk worth it. One hundred times over.

After work today, I just had to make this character. I swear I become invisible as soon as I walk through the doors to work.