Antigone "Tiggy" Howe [District 7]

Name: Antigone "Tiggy" Howe
Age: 16
Gender: Female
District/Area: District 7
Appearance:

My mother was beautiful once. She was fair-skinned with the lightest of blues for eyes, hair a pale gold and long. She was and still is tall, standing taller than my father. You see, I resemble her quite a bit – or so they say. I wouldn’t really know because she has scratched out her face in every photograph, and these days my mother wears waxen skin and a nest of straw-colored hair. Her eyes are vacant, though I’ve seen them on fire before. I was just seven then, and in the bushes by our cottage I’d found berries and squished the juicy flesh against my skin; over my eyelids, against my lips. I wanted to be Capitol beautiful. Shaking, she’d forced me over the basin of water and scrubbed my skin raw and pink. For days, my skin felt tight and swollen by the force of her scrubbing, and when that began to subside, I’d scrubbed my skin again in secret to make her feel guilty. Only she didn’t. The vacantness was already back.

That is how I know I am really different from my mother. I could never let myself be that way. If I want to marry into a merchant family, if I don’t want to be underfed forever, then I must be vain. I must be critical of what I have and what I don’t have. I share my mother’s bone structure: angular in the face, narrow nose, and more limb than anything else. That used to bother me so I tried filling out my clothes with leaves, but after getting a rash that lasted for days on my torso, I gave up. I still have scars across my stomach for how much I scratched, but those don’t matter anyway. Who’s going to see them before I marry? I stand an inch shy of my father who is 5’10” when he is having a good day, but I lack substantial muscles. I’m underfed like most kids in District 7 are but the lack of weight makes me look extraordinarily malnourished, another trait I share with my mother. At least I eat – as if I would consider not eating, but I resent the tesserae I take for her sake.

People are being kind if they say she or I could be beautiful. As if anyone in the district can be, really. In the mirror I can detect the discordant proportion of rounded eyes to everything else, like my wide mouth and pointed ears. The lines of my collarbones sit uneven since I’d broken the left one from falling from a tree. Though it eventually healed, it was never the same after that. Of all the things that have broken in my life though, it’s the least of my worries. When I’m not working, which means I’m probably at school, where I can see the merchant family boys and where they can see me, I wear my mother’s old dresses and put my pale hair down so they won’t notice my ears. Even when the board is too far for my bad eyesight, I don’t squint. My natural penchant for hunching over – a bad habit picked up in my early days – is corrected for poise. If I want to be cared for, then I must be magnificent.

Personality:

*History section will help explaining how this personality developed.*

A girl who thought she was my friend told me that I am a spiteful person, but I don’t believe in spite. It’s not spite if it’s something they deserve. I didn’t bother explaining myself though; she was likely to starve soon anyway, being even poorer than I and having so many siblings. Winter always brings the worst out of all of us, but my hatred is like the lining of a coat. Hidden but it keeps me warm. I wasn’t always like this: one persona on the outside and another within. At my third reaping, it was my younger brother, just twelve and at his first, who held my hand. He led me to the public square and squeezed my shakiness away. That was who I was then, and I’ve said farewell to her and the younger brother already.

I would say farewell to everyone in District 7 if I could, except perhaps my father whose charm still lingers. Sometimes, when I’m alone by the hearth, I squeeze my eyes shut and indulge in fanciful dreams. Born a Capitol resident, I’d never have to worry about anything. The Dark Days wouldn’t haunt me every year. My brother Tristan would have never had to work and perish in the forest. Then, I would force all of those feelings and hopes into a small part of me, maybe in the spaces of my bones, to harden. I want to forget that I had thought it at all since it reminds me so much of the naivety I carried through my childhood. I’m barely surviving but I smile until my face aches. I’m silly and sweet, and I’ll be your friend. Not until the end, not through everything, but on the surface we can laugh and giggle. I’ll pretend to forget that you shoved me into the dirt once as children. I’m good at appearing to forgive, I think, because for thirteen years I truly did.

Children in our district start work at a young age because there’s always a job you can do. I didn’t mind. I love the outside more than anything. The fresh earth and pine nettles, the slight evening wind - they energize me. After the rash incident, I even started to keep track of what this or that plant is, should I ever be tempted to stuff my blouse again. My father has had decades of experience in the forest to share with me, and now there’s time for it since having a bad leg means he can’t work with the able-bodied men anymore. Everyone pretended to not notice when he shifted to a different position on the logging crew. They also never mention the fact that I’d dressed in my father’s overalls the day after the accident, with a tear-streaked face, to try and work his shift as a faller. I guess that was kind of them. Add it to the pile of things I’d like to forget one day.

Sometimes I wish I’d been born a boy – maybe then the logging crews would let me be their high climber. The job pays more than any kind of washing job the women quarrel over. Everyone around here knows how to use an axe and climb a damn tree. I’ve resolved to try again when I turn eighteen (and if I’ve not found a life with the merchants). If they see how fast I am, they might be more apt to let me. That’s why I’ve never cried, pretend or not, around the crews since the accident. If I could gain another ten or twenty pounds, that would probably help my case.

History:

In our cottage, there’s a wooden table with four chairs around it. Of those four, one is covered in dust since no one ever touches it. That was my brother’s. My other favorite thing to imagine when I’m alone is Tristan tearing into a piece of bread and then licking the crumbs that fell on the table. It’s all foolish but I think my father sees the same at times, when he’s had to take a day off due to the pain spasms through his right leg. My mother, she never really talks much but I like it that way. I can’t figure out how my parents could have possibly decided to be together when they’re both so miserable, but I heard a rumor once that the girl he loved burned out with fever. I figured it to be true since he almost cried when I had accidentally washed his trousers with a photograph of a woman I’ve never seen before. Maybe my mother never forgave him for loving someone before her.

I don’t need to understand her, but every time her blue eyes settle on my face, I can feel her reading me like no one else can. She sees my obsidian heart but I don’t ask her to forgive me. I need bread and butter and potatoes and maybe even meat, and for even the chance of that I need to be wanted by someone among the merchants. I’ll wear whatever mask they want me to. It isn’t much different from the games we play as children: pretend that you have eaten, even as your stomach protests; pretend that you are someone else, even when you cannot unwear your skin or escape your district. The Reaping is the only ticket out, but it means death. I so want to live. I just didn’t know how much I wanted to until I lost my brother.

I was fourteen when Tristan died. He shouldn’t have been in the forests but he loved that place as much as I do. He’d followed my father to observe the men at work, but a cedar had come down all wrong. Most of his life had escaped him by the time I’d run from our cottage to the healer’s home in town. “Nothing,” the man had said. Nothing will help. There was so much blood and pain that anything, even sleep syrup, would have eased Tristan into the darkness. Yet, we were and will always be poor, and nothing could be done about that. My father had escaped death but his leg would never be the same. Blood sickens me to this day. I close my eyes when the Games are particularly bloody. The healer sickens me still, and I have a third dream reserved just for him. In it, apparently I’m not afraid of blood anymore. It’s not spite. It’s medicine.

Codeword: <img src="http://i41.tinypic.com/16h2ibt.png">
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