jordan hope | d8 | fin

Sometimes I think my whole family's a bunch of attention seekers.

Four volunteers for the Hunger Games - four! You won't see me go throwing my life away for some stranger, or 'the good of the district'. Then there's Uncle Pierre. You'd think that man would've had enough of the spotlight for a lifetime.

I'd rather not go around the district like I've constantly got something to prove to folks, always counting how many people are looking at me or how many ballots are gonna say Hope on them.

There are better things to keep count of. Like the number of knits and purls in an inch of fabric, or the amount of times you've gotta tighten the screws on the machines to get the right gauge. Folks'll say they ain't got the patience to be pushing numbers around, and then their socks come out too big, or their patterns all wrong.

Thing is, all they teach us here is to memorize how to do things instead of figuring out why. Most of the district never bothers to try and get a deeper understanding of how everything works; just the other day one of my cousins said to me, anything I could design has probably been made before already. But that's impossible. Even the smallest size of punch card we have here has - sixty-five thousand or so combinations you can put on it; multiply that with itself a couple times, and you've got billions, trillions -

Then they start telling me I shouldn't go around multiplying figures bigger than my head, but I can't help it if I like numbers. My favorite are the ones with lots of factors - it's just so much nicer, how you can multiply eight by twelve, or six by sixteen, or a bunch of other ways, and they'll all lead to ninety-six. And I like how if you keep factoring, you end up with just a pile of twos and threes when you're done. It's nice and round and abundant - that's a word I learned to describe all these numbers I like. It means they've got so many other factors, if you add 'em all up you get something bigger than what you had in the first place.

That's what I want - to find out how things divide into pieces, so I can put them back together to make something more than what they used to be. Taking things apart and analyzing them means you get to learn stuff you can't see just from the surface.

I was fourteen years and seven days old, when I first figured out I was more of a boy than a girl. Most folks don't really think about what it means, to be one or the other, but then again most folks don't look at numbers and see prime factorizations either. I'm not completely either, though. Like how if you factor something abundant you get a few twos or threes or sometimes other things - you never get just a single prime over and over.

The Capitol still thinks I'm a girl. Honestly, it's better for me they go on thinking that, given what I count of the number of people around my age in the reaping boxes every year. It's not like I'm really lying or anything, and for the most part folks leave me alone about it. I get the occasional idiot, though, the kind that goes on and on with stupid questions that I don't even know how to answer sometimes.

It's annoying, having people who always want to make me explain things. The worst of it was the year of the Seventy-fifth, on account of Uncle Pierre being so popular in the elections, and there being two Hopes in the arena. I barely even knew them - they were so much older than me, and spent all their time with each other playing at princes and queens and kingdoms - but there'd be swarms of reporters getting up in our faces, asking questions about this or that till I could barely think, 'cause of all the racket they made.

That's when they'd shove their own words in our mouths, if they thought we weren't saying enough, or we weren't saying stuff they wanted to hear. Sometimes they'd just start talking at us, without even bothering to care if we pay any attention. Most of the time I just end up pretending to agree with them, or making up some bullshit stories based off my sister's books till I got them to go away.

I'm a rather private person, you see. I don't want people getting ideas that they're entitled to know things about me, not unless I decide to tell them. Once I'm old enough, I plan on finding a place on the outskirts, far enough away from downtown District Eight as to be not so busy. I'll have a quiet, cozy house off to the side, with a fireplace and a shelf full of yarn. I'll design my own patterns and make my own punch cards, and not have to go around correcting folks on who they want to think I am.

Because I don't have to prove myself to be myself.