delaney youngblood : d2 : fin

I have three siblings. My sister Harlow is nineteen, the oldest. She doesn’t live with us anymore. Then there are my two brothers, Kelly and Rory, the same age as me. Please don’t ask me why our parents named all three of us with names that end in “y”. I guess they really wanted people to know we were triplets. Being a triplet is cool sometimes, but it mostly sucks. Sure, you always have somebody around to be your friend, but you’re also never allowed to form your own individual identity. We’re KellyDelaneyRory, not Kelly and Delaney and Rory.

My name gets smushed in the middle because I was born second. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse. I’ve been predisposed since the womb to be a walking sob story. I think that’s why my eyes look perpetually sad. They’re blue, a bit farther apart, and framed by heavy eyelids. My eyebrows are the same dark brown color as my hair, and they’re usually hidden behind my bangs. My face, like the rest of my body, is pale. Even my lips are paler than most people’s. They’re always chapped thanks to the amount of dark lipstick I wear. The lipstick ends up smeared across my front teeth the minute after I put it on, no matter what I do, since my front teeth are large and pronounced.

I stand just a few inches shorter than my brothers at five foot ten. Thanks to my career training, I’ve built up a good amount of muscle. Go ahead, try and punch my stomach. It’s rock hard steel. When I’m training, I wear tight-fitting clothes only, like leggings and tank tops. It’s a matter of safety. Outside of the training center, where I can wear whatever my heart desires, my clothing style is a mess. My closet has heavy jackets and fishnet leggings, oversized shirts and skirts that barely cover my ass.

My brothers and I are close. Our souls are bonded or some shit like that. My mother, however, wants to think that my brothers are closer with each other than they are with me. I pointed this out to my mother, once, when I was younger. Her response was, “Well, they’re boys and you’re a girl. It only makes sense.” I thought that was a bullshit answer. Why does it matter if I’m a girl? I can do everything boys can do, and better. Anybody who underestimates me is going to have hell to pay.

Having your first friends decided for you before you’re even born is more harmful than people think. Because my brothers and I spent our early years stuck together like glue, we weren’t able to make friends when we began to grow older. We’ve made acquaintances, sure, but we aren’t sure how to maintain friendships when you aren’t together 24/7. I feel so isolated from everybody else my age. To my peers, I’m 1/3 of a whole being with shitty social skills and a codependency issue.

I’m very good at keeping secrets. I only share mine with Kelly and Rory, and they only share theirs with me. There’s so much our parents don’t know about us. We want to keep it that way. Our parents are the traditional type. You need to bring glory to your family, they say. You’re either going to go into the Games, or grow up and marry somebody of the opposite gender and have many children who you will train to also be careers. Isn't it fun, having your whole life planned out for you?

I was born ten minutes after Kelly and eight and a half minutes before Rory. Our parents were rich. They had been careers when they were younger, and since they’d never gotten their chance in the Games, they took up the task of training new careers. Our childhood was average, minus the whole no friends thing and knowledge we’d inevitably have to go into training. None of us wanted to. None of us told our parents we didn’t want to. They started with Harlow, since she was two years older. She was perfect. She was strong, smart, agile. It was everything my parents wanted. My brothers and I thought that maybe she’d be so perfect, our parents wouldn’t make us train. They’d already have their star career.

It didn’t work. We still had to train. We ended up liking it, though. We weren’t as good as Harlow, not even close, but getting to run around and spar with foam swords was fun. The more insidious aspects of what we were doing, training to possibly volunteer ourselves for an event where you murder other teenagers, didn’t cross our minds. One night, when we were 15, we heard Harlow and our mother arguing. We snuck downstairs to see what was going on. Our mother was angry that Harlow was approaching 18 and still hadn’t been reaped. She told her that she needed to volunteer by the next reaping. In response, Harlow told our mother she didn’t want to, because she wanted to stay in District 2 to be with her girlfriend. She was thrown out the next morning. Murder is fine by my parents. Being gay isn’t. To this day, our parents still don’t know we heard that argument.

In response to losing Harlow’s talent, our parents made us train ten times harder. I gained muscle, lost weight, learned how to better focus on what I needed to do. I began outperforming all the other guys at my parent’s training center. That was when I realized I didn’t care about men’s opinions of me. I didn’t care about men at all. It was a terrifying thing to realize, after what happened to Harlow, but it also felt powerful. It’s the one secret I haven’t told Kelly and Rory. It’s a secret just for me, something I can hold close to my heart and think about it whenever I get down.

There’s only one more year, one more reaping, until we’re out of our parent’s grip. I love my brothers dearly, but I’m quite looking forward to unsticking myself from their sides and becoming my own person. I know they are too. We’ve talked about it sometimes, late at night, when we’re so tired we hope we’ll forget the conversation in the morning. We don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’re going to try. We don’t want to be KellyDelaneyRory anymore. We want to be Kelly, and Delaney, and Rory.