Delilah Triumvir // District Six

My life went to shit the seventh day of the seventy-sixth hunger games.

It's funny how the worst day of your life can begin so mundanely. I woke up, did my chores and rushed off to school with my sisters. I sat in class after class, eagerly awaiting the only class I did care about - history. You see I'm a bit of a Hunger Games nerd, which hasn't won me any friends in District Six. I wouldn't call myself a fan; I am a philosopher, a student of the Games and someday, I hope, a teacher. My parents tried to dissuade my fascination when I was little. I would risk getting in trouble to watch another recap of the Hunger Games. I was too young to know how to disguise my real feelings, until a boy lifted his weapon and uttered, "victors do not come from district six."

I understood, then. I stopped talking obsessively about the Games and my parents thought I grew out of it.

I didn't.

I learned to cover up my true feelings, not to bury them, but to disguise them. I went from being well below average in school to acing all of my classes - because if I worked extra hard during History, they'd notice, right? I made friends, got into a few fights, the usual. I think for a time my sister's resented me, until we all became teenagers and it was easier to tease me for my nerdiness. It's been a lot harder to fit in during high school. I guess I didn't try very hard because I don't have a best friend and I've never dated anyone. Truth be told, the only people I've been interested in dating have been tributes... after they've been reaped.

I've seen the light at the end of the tunnel, though. Once I graduate from high school, I'll be able to pursue my study of the Games uninterrupted. As an adult, and an enthusiastic citizen, I don't even think anyone could judge me.

So here I am, daydreaming in the hallways, on the way to History class. I've got a little bounce in my step, my long dark hair sweeping across my broad shoulders. That's when the first dizzy spell hits. Whoa. Maybe I stood up too fast - but I've already been walking? Maybe I ate something strange.

I barely remember sitting in History, let alone watching the 76th Day Seventh Day recap. When the bell rang, I grabbed my bag and tried to stand up slowly - but my body already wasn't my own.

I collapsed.

The teacher took me to the office, my mother picked me up and put me to bed with some water. I drifted in and out for the next twenty-four hours. And then my temperature spiked and my heart beat galloped out of control. I don't remember the end of the Games. I lost days in the hospital, hooked up to machines. "Pneumonia," our fine doctors declared.

"Then why is she losing her hair!?"

A woman's voice, through the fog. No, not any woman's - my mother's.

Strange. I didn't know I had a mother.

The Seventy-Sixth ended. Our district had its first victor in living memory. So this woman - Mother - told me, a week after Teddy Ursa was crowned.

"Is that all I missed?" I asked, my voice a thin, fragile thing after being intubated for so long.

She looks not at my face but around me, as though inspecting the edges of my head for a halo. "Your hair." She says finally. "And sometimes, your eyes, although the lighting in here really could use some improvement. Look dear, I have to run to pick up your sisters from school. Do as the therapists ask and we'll get you out of here in no time."

I finger the frayed edges of my white blonde hair. It could use a good cleaning. All of me could. But she's said something else, something far more important: "no time?" I echo and realize it's long past dark.

Weeks later, bolstered by high calorie meals and a strict therapy regimen, I'm sent home. I can see the ghost I've become in my sister's eyes, the haunted stranger. I should tease them but I know it to be the truth. I've never counted silence as a friend so well as I do now, in this life. Because that's what I know. Whoever I was before I fell asleep, that girl is memory; she might as well be from a history textbook.

Whoever I am now is not Delilah Triumvir. I'm living a new life, a fresh tether, and the only person who seems at all familiar to me in the entire world is Victor Teddy Ursa.