girls [chase] boys [chase] //latisha

~Yucca Ephedra

Silver. Silver. Silver.

Yucca was playing hopscotch with her name. At seventeen, she could still feel rhythms in her body, could still hop and leap, spell out of the word, the name. Silver. Silver. Silver.

S-I-L-V-E-R
She leapt, landing on the R in her head, imagined on the ground, and then spun on her heel. Her shoes (she was wearing them for once) scraped against the dirt, making dust rise in the air. The sun was already high in the sky which meant she should probably get down to the docks. Eighteen years old, towards the end of her Reaping days, her father had given her the job of bringing him and his workers lunch when they came in for noon as well as repairing the cages and nets they’d damaged since they left at dawn.

Grabbing the cooler where she’d left it under the tree prior to stopping on the road for her game, she suddenly felt her cheeks burn, recognizing the bark.

Just yesterday, she’d, shyly drawing into ten year old attitudes, carved their initials on a tree using a pocket knife. S.E. + Y. E. The bark shavings rained down onto her bare feet, prickly in between her toes and the shaved tree underneath her carvings gleamed smooth back at her. Silver hadn’t been around to see her, something that calmed Yucca’s nerves only slightly. What would Silver think if she knew her name had been carved permanently into Yucca’s skull? That in these past few weeks, she’d been unable to get it off her tongue, the lyrics that played over and over in her head. Suddenly, Yucca began to notice the tiniest freckles on the underside of Silver’s arms and the way her taste buds were arranged when she licked her lips. In the two years they’d been together, since that dark kiss in the sewer, in those two years of meeting under the docks, late at night in the fields or the sand, Yucca had never quite felt something like this.

Before this, she’d fallen asleep to the thought of Silver and awoken comforted by it, but now she fell asleep to the thought of Silver’s arms, awoken comforted from her legs tangled around her.

Trotting down the road a little quicker now, as Yucca could hear the horns of incoming ships at the docks, she paused only to wipe the sweat from her forehead. Summer was approaching hotter and more rapid than ever. Before she knew it, her white-blond hair was soaked in sweat, sticky against her neck and her thighs chafed where they rubbed together under her skirt.

“Yucca! Hurry up!” her father called from the dock, waving his hands. His crew was busy unloading their catch, slapping lobsters and dead fish down on the decks. A stack of broken nets and cages awaited her behind them.

Despite being a wealthier District, their equipment could sometimes be subpar. Her father had deduced that by coming into the docks at noon, eating lunch, unloading and leaving his broken equipment for Yucca, he could increase his profit more than staying out at sea with broken equipment, filling the carry capacity of his ship. Some of his crew worked part-time that way, bringing the catches to the Peacekeepers for a price to be deduced before loading them onto the trains for the Capitol.

“I’m here,” Yucca called as her father snatched the cooler away from her and threw her his water container to drink from. “Thanks,” she gasped for breath and wiped the water away from her chin as her father motioned over at the nets and cages.

"All yours.” Then he called to his crew. “Let’s go!"

When they’d pushed off again, Yucca let the breath out of her mouth and turned away from the calm green water to quell the churning in her stomach. Facing her father nowadays had become nearly unbearable. Meeting a girl in the middle of the night…that she could handle with a straight face…but thinking about her day and night? As far as her parents knew, she and Silver were close friends. Around them, they humored them by discussing the cute boys in their year at school and who they imagine will command a boat and who will just become a crew member. Her father meanwhile had been pushing his first mate, a lean, yet pompous boy named Jason, onto Yucca for years. He was nineteen and Yucca imagined that once she aged up and was free of the yolk of the Reaping, her father’s efforts would be upped.

Kneeling on the warm deck, Yucca reached for a net and began tying it rhythmically, imagining the lanyard she’d been making for Silver later to wrap around her ankle. Her ankle was sacred part of her, the heel that Yucca liked to wrap her hand around and kiss.

She was so lost in it, the thought of her lips soft against the sand-softened skin Silver, spelling out her name on her lips, across her nets, that when a shadow fell across her work, the shape of a person, Yucca heard herself gasp and throw the net away from like it was burned.

She’d accidently been making a lanyard pattern out of it, accidently had allowed Silver to seep into her and there she sat, staring at the shadow of another, praying they couldn’t see the sin on those treasonous hands that longed to stroke a girl.