Willow Oatstraw-District 12

Willow is a skinny girl for her age, having been born premature she was a small baby and never really developed into an appropriately sized seventeen year old. She's a few inches shorter than normal and has always been underweight. Her skin color is that of coffee with tons of milk in it-or so her father always says. Her hair is long, well past her shoulders but not down to her tailbone and is wild and curly but somehow has a contained craziness to it. When the sun hits it just right, there are hints of blond, red and even purple in her hair. Her eyes are the only things about her that aren't brown. They are the same mossy green as her mother's.

Although she has an even complexion she has scars on her knees and shins from childhood trips and falls. And every once in a while a new mole pops up on her somewhere. If she were a heavier child she would have a very desirable body-shape. Her hips are wide and her waist is narrow and if after a few weeks of luck and her father managing to get some decent food, her baggy clothes hint as subtle curves. Her eyelashes are incredibly thick and long, a bonus to keep out the coal dust that is constantly swirling in the wind. Her father says that she is the very picture of beauty but she just sees herself as a brown smudge in an otherwise grey world.

Willow is a very bright child. Her father has taught her everything he knows about plants and animals-which is a surprising amount of knowledge. Being raised by someone who had their own apothecary shop she learned when to handle people with "kid gloves" and when not to. Although she hates biting her tongue she will do it if her father is around as he is quick to chastise her. She has been known to be very sarcastic at times and even cruel when the situation didn't call for it. She also has a lot of unresolved anger over the death of her mother. She has never taken it out on her father but it has colored the way she sees the world in something much less than rose.

Willow doesn't really notice when someone is being funny or serious. She is easily confused and tends to fear social situations that include more than three people. She hates being alone but would almost prefer it to being in a group. She has never had a boyfriend and boys make her incredibly nervous. Willow has nothing but disdain for people who feel the need to whine about every little thing from a paper cut to a small bruise. She herself suffers from a barely contained chronic pain syndrome that her father treats with herbs and essential oils.

Willow was born three moths early to two apothecaries in the better part of District twelve. Her mother was never the same after Willow was born. She lost a lot of blood and over the next few months battled a severe blood infection. Willow was fed on goats milk until she was old enough to eat solid food. Like her mother she too took ill soon after her birth. She suffered fever after fever, one so bad that it diminished the hearing in her left ear by about five percent. By the time she was a year old she had been sick more times than either of her parents could count.

As she grew, which was a slow process-her mother had never had a very large part in the physical actions of raising her. She was bathed, changed and fed by her father. On her first day of school though, her mother managed to energize herself enough to walk a tiny Willow to the school building. By the end of it she was exhausted but Willow had been so happy that at the time she hadn't realized it. And that was all that mattered to either of her parents. But that was where her mother's life took an extremely sour turn. After that, she hardly ever left the bed.

When Willow was twelve, she missed her first day of school. Her knees and ankles and hips were so swollen and purple that they looked broken and when she moved them they made the most ungodly cracking and grinding sound accompanied by the most agonizing pain that she had ever experienced. It was a shock to her parents, and for the longest time neither of them knew how to help her. She missed months of school and had to borrow books from friends to keep up with the work. It was shortly after this that her mother died.

Neither Willow nor her father knew exactly what had killed her. They just woke up and when her father went to check on her, she was gone. Her face was ashen and her eyes were rimmed in black as if they were the side effect of a broken nose. Willow was devastated and rushed to the room, despite falling from her now useless legs, and grabbed onto her mother's stone stiff body. She refused for hours to leave her and only after she had cried herself to sleep and her iron grip slackened, was her father able to peel her away and have her mother's body removed. Willow vowed to never forgive him but an hour later was sobbing in his lap, he forgiven and her physical pain forgotten in favor of a far more destructive feeling. It took months for her to heal, both physically and mentally and it was a large setback in her healing from her mysterious ailment. She turned into a smaller version of her mother, hardly ever leaving the bed.

Her father began testing her illness with herbs and oils, finally striking upon a combination of three herbs and four oils that almost completely got rid of the swelling. The bruising vanished after three weeks and the pain diminished to almost nearly tolerable levels. Willow was able to go back to school, as long as she made sure to stay on her new "medication". Her father pays top dollar when people bring him herbs and has a bit of a reputation of being a softy but most people try to not take advantage of him. At the age of seventeen she has learned how to handle it very well but rarely ever tells anyone aside from her father how much pain she in really in. Although when she was home from school she learned how to make poisons, what plants were safe and even how to make small traps.

I hope I did this right

Fixed