District 11: Merida

District 11

AGE 16

NADIA ESRA

I had one choice. One choice that was always going to be the right choice. The right choice. The thing my parents were always so concerned with me making.

My parents were - are - apple farmers. Somewhat successful apple farmers. Okay, I concede. Successful apple farmers. The kind with a nice little cottage and eight sprawling acres of apple orchards. Every autumn my father hired a dozen or so workers to harvest, clean, and sort our apples into nice little boxes for selling. A fraction of our product always went to the capital, but as for the rest, there was enough to sell for quite a fair profit.

My mother was always chasing me down, pulling me from out of trees, and forcing me indoors. As the oldest child both of my parents intended me to eventually take over the family business. Not to mention, to them, I did not belong in the fields with the rest of the district's majority. We were above that. Among the few families that achieved some comfort, due largely to my grandfather's loyalty to the capital and his betrayal of rebel forces. Of course... that meant we weren't too popular inside District 11. I felt this often. Children never cared, of course, but they could hear their parents cursing my father for his low wages and stinginess towards hungry neighbours. 

I learned how to slip away - after all, the strictest parents raise the sneakiest children. In that moment between my mother setting down my tea and turning to make her own, I was up and gone. Eight years old, running between trees and looking for little friends to climb with. They always had work, and I always had mother. But the hours, or hour, that I got to spend with them made all the difference in me keeping my sanity. Every day was a struggle between my mother's iron grip and the fresh air only steps away from the dining table. Some days she kept me in, and taught me from her shelves of books on agriculture and business, and others days I made it out and got myself into any trouble I could find.

Eventually, my father could see the good in me spending time outdoors. My little brothers tagged along to watch him teach me to shoot a bow and arrow, in the company of my father's peers. Mr. Maguffin, the pear farmer, Mr. Macintosh, the lemon and lime farmer, and Mr. Dingwall, the olive farmer, were a constant presence during our shooting practices. It was a large enough presence for my father to determine a merger between our farm and one of the neighbours would be beneficial to our business. And thus, it began.

My mother insisted I would like one of them. Always over dinner, those three, their sons, trying to force a situation that was never going to happen. I was thirteen. The boys were all at least two years older than me, and I have no idea what my parents were thinking. No, marriage was not discussed, but it was certainly implied that I was going to pick one before the time came. They were everywhere. In the house, while my mother forced me to study, the dumb one would lean over the table, eyes scraping over me, and ask me some stupid question. The moment I escaped, the fat one was sitting right outside the door eating an apple. Within moments of walking towards the orchard, the cocky one was breathing down my neck for a funny. little. chat. All of them, everywhere, all the time, looking for me.

"Your hair is beautiful," he said. The cocky one. He was sixteen. "May I touch it?" He touched it, without asking. And I turned towards him, a foot taller than me, and broke his wrist. And I ran. And I told my mother to send them home, because I was thirteen, and I was scared, and I knew what their fathers were telling them. Go marry the Fowlis daughter, and we'll be rich beyond belief. Make her love you and be rewarded. And it made me sick. Because I was the prize. Because I was the ticket to a well established apple orchard. My mother would not listen. My father did not care how I felt. So with a sack of apples, my bow, and a wad of money, I fled to my grandmother's house.

My grandmother was not rich, but she did not struggle because of my parents. She was also a terrible influence on me. A conniving and bitter old woman, who in retrospect, shared many characteristics with myself. Forget our bright, screaming red hair. She cared deeply for me, and wanted only to protect me from my parents' desires. They came around often, asking me to come back. Promising to do things my way - but I knew it would never be my way. I would never be able to run around as I wanted, and eventually, even my grandmother's stuffy house became too restricting.

She died a year and a half ago, and rather than go to live with my parents, I dropped my name and went willingly to the community home. It was a restriction I could bare - there were other girls to hold their attention, and if I went missing at night, I only had to pass the checks. Plenty of girls in the home had found ways to sneak about, and I found that I fit right in. I was not The Fowlis Daughter, or the Spoiled Child, no, there, I could be Orphan Merida who sneaks out and climbs trees and never eats apples. Who had her bow taken away fifty times and stolen back fifty-one times because it's the only consistent thing she owns. Perhaps I am always hungry, but I will defend myself and my new friends, who will never know my past. I can not be contained.