hide and seek // open

The morning sun trickled in softly through the window above my mattress, casting yellow shapes on the wall across from my bed. Little speckles of dust floated in the beam of light like dandelion seeds in the fall (fairies, Nana called them, but I wasn’t too sure if she was telling the truth now that I had gotten bigger). Daisy sneezed at them, so I “ewwed” at her and gave her a little push off the messy covers of my mattress. It wasn’t too far of a fall since that was all it was; a mattress, not a full bed or anything. But I liked it like that, ‘cause then if you wanted to just roll out of bed, you could do it. And then you could roll all over the floor if you wanted to. I mean, you could do whatever you wanted. I did that, I rolled out of bed and reached my hand out to pet Daisy on the head so she would know I wasn’t really sore at her, because you know, a cat can’t help it when she needs to sneeze. She meowed back at me and started sorta batting at the corner of my quilt with one of her paws.

I pulled my socks off with my toes and started to climb down the ladder to the main floor. Our house used to be a barn, so Nana sleeps down there on the main level, on our dusty old couch, and I sleep up in the little platform that used to be a hayloft. It’s not a very big house and we’ve only got two real rooms—a main room and a bathroom—but that’s all we need, really, since only two people live here anyways. Three, if you count Daisy, but she doesn’t sleep inside all the time, and when she does, she doesn’t take up much space.

Nana was laying on her back on the sofa with her pointy nose reaching for the sky, snoring loud as a bear. I kissed her on a speckled, wrinkly cheek and smoothed her hair out of her face so she didn’t get any drool in it. That sounded pretty gross, but she was about a gajillion years old, so I guess she could be as gross as she wanted to while she was sleeping. It was Sunday, which meant she wouldn’t be waking up until about eleven, so I could sneak out for a little while. As long as I was back in time for lunch, I knew she wouldn’t mind. I ran on my tiptoes over to the counter near the sink and broke off a heel of the bread Nana had baked the night before, to tide me over. Then slipping it into the pocket of my sweater, I crept out the front door, careful not to wake her when I shut it. She’d be grumpy all day if I woke her up early on a Sunday.

”Dorreee, doreee, Doreee.” The birds called my name, inviting me to play their game of hide-and-seek in the apple trees. Happy to oblige, I yanked a pair of cutoff shorts off the clothesline and pulled them onto my legs and over my butt. The sun was shining, but it wasn’t done rising, and it was windy, so it was chilly. I hugged my over-sized sweater in closer to me and wrapped my fists in the ends of the sleeves. My bare feet were cold in the grass—it had rained last night and the ground was still wet and mushy—but I flexed my toes and reminded myself they’d be fine once I started walking.

The tree I was headed for wasn’t too far away; just a half a mile or so from the house, a big apple tree on the side of a country road that traversed a collection of little houses. You weren’t allowed to pick the Capitol’s apples, so I wouldn’t be able to eat anything—that is, if there was even anything good enough to pick yet. Even so, it was a nice tree to climb, tall and wide, with lots of people to watch from above. The leaves were so thick they couldn’t even see you if they weren’t looking real hard. And there was one perfect little nook where three branches formed a little seat with a good foothold, almost like nature had made a chair just for me. It was so comfy that I’d fallen right asleep in it last Sunday, and I never even fell out. I was an hour late for lunch, though, and Nana was sore with me all day.

Well, it took me about five minutes to get there, and another minute to get up to my tree chair. The bark was still a little wet on the eastern side, where the wind hadn’t been able to dry it off, so it dug into my hands and left dirty marks on my legs, but I didn’t mind (A little dirt never hurt, Nana always said.). I kept having to shake the hair out of my eyes on accounta the wind kept blowing it all around my face, but I eventually got to the top. There was a birds’ nest right across from my seat, but I didn’t see any birds in it.

I wondered who I would see today, and if anyone would notice I was sitting here. Nana said I looked almost invisible in trees since my clothes were never very bright in color, and since my skin was almost brown. And sometimes people were just so busy that they never bothered to look up anyhow. That was alright with me most of the time, since I was usually so busy watching the people on the ground that I didn’t feel like I needed no company. And sometimes there were birds up here to watch too, and I’d give them a few bread crumbs to eat if I had them.

My stomach rumbled, and I remembered the bread in my pocket. The farmer’s wife next door had given me some money to clean her house for her, so I’d been able to buy the grain without getting tesserae this year. I’d been real worried about getting reaped this time around, what with the quell twist making so that only little kids could get picked, but I’d come through just fine, just like Nana had said I would. ”Lady luck is on our side, little Dori. Just you wait and see. It runs in the family.” I wasn’t related to the woman by blood, so I didn’t know how all that luck stuff applied to me, but I guess it had worked somehow.

Anyways, when I reached into my pocket to break off some of the bread, I had to shift my weight to my legs. And when I did that, it jostled a branch, and that jostled another branch, and that jostled an apple, and the apple fell with a thud. My breath caught in my throat as I bent over the branch and stuck my head through the cover of leaves to peer down at the ground, hoping it hadn’t startled someone, or hit someone on the head.

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