adelaide talenti - / - district three

She's a girl, they could tell that when she was born. She was a girl with stark black hair and a sickly-looking face, a baby who had just been in her mother for too long. It was customary in the third district to be born with children who weren't quite perfect looking - babies grew up and tended to develop the pallor the district was known for from working in factories since childhood. It was expected that the bright red face the baby had would eventually pale, their hair would become dark and a grim look on their face would continue into adulthood, in which they would pass on the sad, corpse-trodden look of the third district. It was expected that the baby they held in their arms would eventually lose the gleam in their eye and the curious disposition her body language had as a child - but that really didn't go away. The girl, named Adelaide by her parents, grew up somehow defying the grim darkness and the depressing grayness of her district - her hair was a color closer to honey than ash, and the meager time she spent outside allowed her skin to golden, if only slightly. While her childhood consisted of books about machine parts and hours inside, she would beg her parents to let her go out into the little courtyard to study, or do anything. The sunshine was what made her different, and she attempted to reap every advantage of it.

Her facial features, were, in the mind of herself and people she knew: average. She never felt as if she had a poetry was on her face - everything was the right size and the right shape, but it didn't fit together in the fashion that made her interesting to look at. She had her Mother's thin chin, her Fathers wide mouth and big teeth, a nose that was thin and long, medium-sized brown eyes and eyebrows that arched after standing in front of a mirror plucking at them. Her cheekbones were there, but they weren't prominent, her forehead was tall, but she attempted to cover it with her hair, which she loved so much. Her facial composition was if someone kind of gave up halfway through - the basics were there, but there was no spark to continue to drive it home. Pretty, ordinary.

Her build, typical of the district - thin. She wasn't bone-thin, she wasn't starving. She always had some type of meal on the table - even if it was just canned carrots, dried catfish and a handful of bread. She never starved, but the fact that her diet consisted mostly of what her parents could find on the supermarket shelves for their wages, it was never luxurious. Thus, her body developed into a thin, chestless, more-leg-weight-than-anything-else shape. She wasn't tall, she wasn't small, either. She stood at an even five-foot-four-inches and weighed about 115 pounds.

Logic never made much sense to Adelaide - when she was young, she'd disregard science and history and liked to look at what wasn't real - books on myth, books on fantasy worlds. Despite the cold logic she was raised with, she loved the idea of something different. She'd curl up on the front step of the tenant she lived in, and she'd find something to read that wasn't true. She'd listen to the crazy man on the corner talk for hours about aliens because she was so fed up with what was logical and right. The concepts seemed so wrong and uncomfortable, that everything would be explained by a chemical formula, that feelings were determined by patterns. She thought the mysticism had been leached from life, and she wanted to find something different than the cold-hard facts.

She'd been shy, quiet, introverted. She didn't see the need to have other people invade on her time when she could be doing something on her own. She almost was mousy in the way she withdrew from people with such intense fervor - she liked to be alone, with her book, in whatever she could muster from the outside. it was a simple predicament that she had, it wasn't that she didn't like people, but she never felt connected to them or energized by them. Being around people was draining, especially in the third district, because people were always trying to be right, and to adelaide, right never existed. being correct wasn't important, focusing on the correct answer was never important to her. she couldn't stand the obsession with being correct and thus withdrew herself from other people and kind of became reclusive. not saying that she'd hide all the time and was awfully shy - she just doesn't agree and doesn't find the point behind having debate on right and wrong when all could be calm.

she's not brilliant, that's for sure, she doesn't have the spark that the majority of the district has that drives innovation - no, she's not dumb, but she doesn't find pleasure in finding things out and thus, is not rewarded for intellect, letting what intelligence she has wither away into a minimum for functioning. she can read and do simple mathematics, but in district three that qualifies her as unable to craft, innovate and create as the rest of the district and has been sentenced to remedial classes and a future life of working on an assembly line.

the need to be rebellious is strange to her - she aspires to break from the crowd and differentiate herself from the monotonous ideals of her district, but she's so apathetic towards her existence and the general perception she gives off outside of being vaguely different that she doesn't do anything to correct the lifestyle she lives of doing the same thing all the time. she wishes she had variety and spice to her life, that she was different than the generally quiet and graying population of her district, but she doesn't have the drive and motivation to make it happen. she'd rather just accept defeat and go on with whatever she's doing herself.

if there's one thing she's fantastic at, she's good at communicating. she listens, and generally has a good approach to giving people news, whether it be good or bad. her apathy is generally good for this, and while she's an emotional person, she tends to not muster the compassion to sympathize unless it's in a situation where she deeply connects. her idealism is a strange disconnect from this all, making her a very two-sided human being.

Boots stuck to the cold hospital floor as her Dad had walked into the birth of Adelaide - her Mother was laying in a bed, suffering so. A deeply emotionally stable person, she didn't allow herself to whine or complain, while her father sat quietly in the corner, offering no support to the withering woman in the cold hospital bed, a nurse with dry, cracking hands eventually delivering a baby. Her Mother held the young life in her arms, pondering a name. Her father, a man with a bald spot and bad teeth, shuffled over to his wife, and sighed. "Another 'un, huh." It'd been ten years since their last child was born, a boy named Detroit. A girl named Sarah had been born a year before Detroit, a boy named Brown the year before that. They were too old to be having kids, they thought. They were in their early forties, and had been worn down by parenting, work and their oldest approaching the age for reaping. They were tired of parenting, it was plain and simple. So they took the young baby, wrapped in a thin cotton blanket, and named her Adelaide. It wasn't an informed choice, it was a choice they made because it was a name in a book and they thought it'd be fine. So the baby was named Adelaide Talenti, and life went on.

She grew up in an apartment building a block away from the plant that constructed toasters, the plant her parents worked at. Her Mom put chips into them, her Dad welded the edges together. They came home with burns on their hands, and Adelaide, for the majority of her early childhood, was watched by her older siblings. They went in shifts, taking care of a two, then three, then four year old. Once she turned one, Adelaide's mother had no choice but to go back to the toaster plant, and she was happy with it. She had been a colicky baby, and giving the responsibility to her other children was a relief to her. Her meals growing up consisted primarily of canned food, heated up to a lukewarm temperature and whatever type of dried fruit her siblings could get a hold of. Sure, her parents brought home the grocery supply they could afford every week - two loaves of dark, flat, bread; five cans of applesauce; a package of dried catfish; a few cans of salted corn, tomato soup, green beans; a small bag of dried navy beans and a selection of dried pasta. For a family of six, it was enough, if only barely so. Her parents refused to take the grain rations given out by the government, believing it to be a hoax and a conspiracy that made little sense. Instead, they gave their family only just-enough to keep them able to function.

Her school years were sufferable, being a five-year-old who didn't care to learn numbers or the alphabet got her stuck into classes that tracked her for remedial functions - she may be able to answer phones someday, or end up like her parents, placing chips into toasters. Mechanical skills were taught to her, opposed to the occasionally colorful curriculum that those who were tracked for engineering or teaching were given - school was tied with resentment and eventually, she stopped going. It wasn't worth it to her, and instead, she'd go outside and read whatever non-factual thing she could get her hands on - a clip of a fantasy tale from a newspaper, a few pages out of a religious book, whatever she could get her hands on. And so it continues to this day - meager school attendance, a strange self-pleasing disposition and a life where her parents are too tired to talk to their daughter. Not neglectful, but apathetic. She must have inherited it.