ghosts call me | {raven/bo}

Gavin's grave was never going to become a site I was used to seeing.

It had been two years, and grass now blanketed the area that had once been red with freshly dug clay. His grave was adorned with flowers and pictures and a single wooden figurine I had made myself in the form of a wolf, like the one he wore around his neck in the games. It was almost worse seeing it like this, all pretty and grown up, because it was just a reminder of how long it had been since his death. Two years. Two years, and nothing had gotten better except my odds of being reaped into the same competition that caused his demise.

Well, that and my abilities with a hatchet.

The memory of my first day of training was still fresh in my mind, despite it having occurred years prior. I had woken up in the night. Sweat drenched my brow and my pillow and still, I was frozen to the core. I shivered with each quick, shallow breath, and despite my best efforts, I couldn't drift back off to sleep. (Though, truthfully, I hadn't even really tried before bolting up from my bed.) I tried reading one of the plant books I had migrated from his room to my own, but I couldn't. I tried drinking a glass of milk but yet again, it didn't help in the slightest. Eventually, I found myself wrapped up in the blankets of his bed.

No one had touched it since his passing and I swore that I could still find traces of his scent and

I

shattered

to

pieces.

My tears refused to go away. I shook, but it was no longer from the cold. I found it difficult to even breathe and so I did what Gavin was always so good at doing: I ran.

So many times, I had heard the front door slam shut. At first, I would peak out of my bedroom window and watch as he disappeared into the trees, but eventually I just knew it was him without looking. Now, it was me that had disappeared. I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and it didn't help my breathing but I couldn't stop, I couldn't, I wouldn't, and then I found his hiding place.

It was a small clearing among the trees, twenty or thirty minutes away from our home. Though, really it wasn't a clearing. It mostly resembled an area where a deer or a bear had lain. The grass was all dead or missing, and laid over on its side until the wind blew. Dead saplings littered the outskirts of the small circle. Tree circles where nailed to the large pines that encased it, and some had huge, jagged holes, while other had axes and hatchets still sticking from them and suddenly it all made sense. Suddenly, I knew why he had chosen to volunteer, and I knew that if I was ever, ever going to make my pain go away, I was going to have to seek my vengeance for him. How would I do that, though?

I was going to pick up where my dead brother left off.

I had kept it secret for a long time, and often times forgot about my secret life completely until moments like these, when I stared at the gravestone in front of me. Gavin had ways of making me talk when he was alive, and it seemed he found ways to do it even when he was dead. "I love you," I said simply, and I patted the smooth marble a few times before exiting. It was a monthly ritual of mine to visit Gavin's grave. I tried to stay as long as possible, but I couldn't ever be too long for fear of my plastic mother finding out.

Once, I had made the mistake of telling her where I had been. Once. and what had she said? "We mustn't dwell on the past, Raven, What is done is done, and now it is time for us to move on." and it had taken everything for me to not bury my fist in her teeth.

It was warm for a winter month. In the past, snow had been so harsh that school had been cancelled, but this winter in all actuality had been one of the best I could remember. It was still early in the evening: I guessed three or so hours until the sun would set. I wished I was, but I was not the only person who had decided to take advantage of the warmth that day. More often than not, I was passing someone: an old friend of my parents', a peer from school, and each one would get the same smile, the same mask I wore to hide how fucked up I really was inside, but one person I passed was different from the others. One person knew my situation all too well, and this was the girl who had almost been reaped this time around, the girl Margaret DuBois had saved. I quickened my pace until I was walking parallel to the girl.

"My brother saved someone like you once."

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