I feel your pain. (mylee)

Boom. The sound of a cannon was one I had become familiar with in the past few days of watching the games, but luckily, it had not been Cassie’s. But this time, as I watched the group of eight slicing at each other, the body that fell had a head of familiar flame-red hair. No, that can’t have been Cassie. She’s still there, isn’t she? There has to be another kid with red hair, she can’t be the only one. My eyes darted back and forth on the screen, searching desperately for my sister’s face, as now, it was my only hope. “Cassie? Cassie!” My voice was a frantic yell at the television, and whoever heard me must have thought I was slightly crazy. That didn’t matter now, no, the only thing that mattered was finding my sister and making sure he was okay. I mean, that cannon couldn’t have possibly been hers. Now that, that was crazy.

Minutes began to tick by, each one seeming longer and longer as there was no sight of Cassie. “Come on Cassie, you can’t—.” My words trailed off as one of the boys moved aside and what they were standing over became clear. The red hair I had become so accustomed to pulling as kids was dulling laying against my sister’s sweat-plastered face. Her eyes were quiet, not bright and outgoing as I was used to seeing at home. Why wasn’t she getting up? She had to realize the urgency of the situation, right?

That’s when realization hit me. It threw a punch into my stomach and made me kneel over with pain. Tears began to flow down my face freely, and I began to cry even harder when I realized my parents weren’t even paying attention. I knew they didn’t care how I felt, but shouldn’t they care, at least a little, that their daughter had just died? I spun around to face them, looking into the blank, content stares on their faces in disgust. “Cassie just died, and you can’t even spare a second to think about it? She’s not coming home, she’s gone. She’s gone and dead and you don’t even care.” I couldn’t control my voice, the volume rising louder and louder until my throat began to hurt from screaming. The void looks on their faces hadn’t changed at all, and I didn’t think they even noticed as I ran out of the house.

I’m not going to say I know the district well, but I knew the places Cassie and I used to go, where we used to play and talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Maybe I would get that chance, to grow up and be what I wanted. Be what I told her I would be. I would do that for her now, because she would never have the chance. She would never have the chance to grow up and have kids and be the best mother I could only imagine her to be. That was all ended in the flash of an eye, the shot of a cannon. I told her I would carry her through it all. I promised. It was only grief and terror that flowed through my veins, it was anger. It was an intense hatred of all the kids that still stood, and it would only grow until I had a specific one to channel the bitterness into.

The house that I wandered into seemed to be vacant according to its outside appearance. The door and shutters were worn and cracked, showing years of neglect. I think I sympathized with it a bit, which was the reason I wandered inside, looking through some passage that would separate me from the rest of the world. After blindly feeling my way through the house, I found an upstairs room with one window, the left-behind markings where a bed once was, and a closet. It would do, at least until I could go home.

I sat down in the middle of the room, the fibers of the carpet stretching out around me in endless rows. I’m not going to cry. I can’t do that, there’s no point. Not anymore. Nothing I do or try will bring her back. But as it goes, I cried. My sobs wrecked my body, hiccups coming in between the breaks as I attempted to pull air into my body. I was so consumed in my mess that I didn’t even realize the door had been opened and a boy peered in. “Hey, are you okay?” His words were soft, not threatening, and certainly not sarcastic.

“Honestly? No, not at all. My sister—she’s, she’s gone.” It had been hard enough to think the words that sputtered out of my mouth, let alone speak them. I wasn’t sure if he had even understood what I said, but at this point, repeating myself for clarification wasn’t much of an option.