FIN // FOUR // ORVIN PETTIGREW

orvin pettigrew

seventeen

district four

You came into this world laughing. A splutter, a gasp, and then the burbling noises of joy. Joy to smell, to see, to hear, joy to sense and joy to simply be. Your mother laughed, too - she still knew how back then. Now, seventeen years later, she may try to conjur those same noises but all that emerges is a choked groan. You were the first child, to be the only one, with your giggles and coos, and the huge blue eyes crowded into your flat, pale face.

You spent the first years of your life reaching. So slender, all your family worried you were sick. But you used your skeleton fingers to your advantage, poking them into tree trunks (and cupping the insects that you found there for hours before releasing them again) or dipping them in your father's drinks and delighting in that burning, sour taste, and the empty feeling it summoned in your head. You could walk by the time you turned one, so long had you spent wide-eyed, watching your parents and cousins do it. You were resourceful, and determined. You understood how the world worked, and soon wanted to know why.

As you grew, you found it difficult to find yourself the way your peers did. They all sought out talents - be it fighting, fishing, flirting, and then concentrated all their hard work on that one skill. You, however, wanted something much broader. You loved to collect things - you wanted to know and have as much as possible. There was so much in this glorious world to choose from. How could you make your mind up before knowing absolutely everything there was to know?

Your father, Lowery, was also an only child, and treated you the way he wish he'd been treated. He took you fishing with him, letting you sit at the prow of his little engine boat with your thin, white arms spread out and fine, brown hair shifting in the headwind and your tongue poking out between your pink lips to catch the salty air. He never spoiled you, let you shape your own path, but was always there to catch you when you stumbled. You trusted him completely.

On the other hand, your mother was the eldest of six - a no-nonsense, more brawns-than-brain sort of woman who had been brought up on oyster stew and sacrifice and intended to bring you up the same. She's where you got your square face from, with its pear-shaped ears and wide, smooth neck. You, like she, were never called beautiful. But your mother taught you to love yourself nonetheless.

One feature you always prided yourself on was your mouth. It's an even, Baker-Miller ellipsis when closed, uncreased aside from the one cleft below your wide, round cupid's bow, and when open, your shining, ivory teeth stand straight to attention. You loved to smile - at strangers, or acquaintances, or family, and even at yourself in the mirror. And you loved to speak, too. You treated language so surgically, making sure every syllable slipped and wrapped itself around your tongue and through your gums absolutely flawlessly.

It was this fascination with speech which finally shaped you, so long after all the other children had moved on with their interests, turning them into careers. Language would never earn you money, but what it would do was turn your immense ability to love into something more concrete - an ability to pursue, determined, for something you truly desired.

It started with collecting, as all obsessions do. Dictionaries, grammar sheets, old exercise books crammed in the corners of library shelves, anything that contained an unfamiliar word, in the language you had grown up practicing or a more exotic tongue. In a District where the Catch of the Day always had a nickname used amongst the fishermen, you loved to track down the origins of the slang words and find out more about them. The whole of Panem had a uniform language, and so you dreamed of getting out and finding other places, where perhaps those unfamiliar words existed as more than a source of etymology.

In this unique calling, you had not only found something to know - something to be the best at, which is what you had secretly always wanted - but something to be responsible for. To you, words were just as precious as any other collectible antique, language just as valuable as any other talent - and perhaps even more so, because they weren't things you kept safe by locking them in a cabinet and leaving them untouched and admired. To protect a word you had to use it, throw it around, wear it down until it had passed by everyone and became ordinary. Words like these, they weren't being used, and as you repeatedly turned them over in your mind and your mouth you had grown to love them. Without you, they'd be forgotten, and you couldn't let that happen.

Then your aunt, your mother's youngest sister, got sick, three days before your fourteenth birthday. No one knew what it was, or how to help her, and over the next half a year the condition grew from bad to worse. You had a natural aversion to anything connected with death, having suffered from intense nightmares as a young child of being the only person left in the world, and facing her was one of the hardest things you'd ever done. Seeing her there, shaking and paper-skinned, you realised that you couldn't afford to waste any more money on crates of foreign books to feed your ever deepening hunger for this rich knowledge. For a time, you felt hollowed out, pitying yourself and sparing not a thought for your aunt or even for your mother - whose strength had finally faltered and was always silent, reserved.

The Authorities couldn't help, Peacekeepers turned a blind eye to your father's begging, and none of your parents' friends had enough money themselves to loan to you. You all learnt the hard way that death was just something that was. There wasn't an escape, and there was no point fearing it, either. When she was gone, you hated yourself for being so selfish, for letting your own desires come before your family's. Still, you loved the formation of words just as much - perhaps more - but you always studied them with a slight aftertaste, remembering your family, and the importance of keeping them close.