Wander Sibley [District Four]

Half of District Four, these days, seems to look at your shorts and the way you pull your tight curls into quick buns or ponytails and settle on calling you a tomboy. Your friends don't get away with that, but you usually suppose it's close enough to not bother fussing over it with strangers. You have better ways to spend your time: friends to chase through corners of the District that none of you have explored yet, an ocean to swim in, a bundle of little siblings to alternate between keeping out of trouble and getting into trouble with. All of this in the precious dwindling free time between school, helping your parents, and a—well. It's a regular job, but you like styling it an apprenticeship.

Clamming is okay work. Your parents have always done their best to ease you and your siblings into it at a comfortable pace; you used to help measure and weigh the summer catches, a job that now falls to your youngest sister, and only recently started digging for yourself. It's monotonous, but high-energy, and you're learning to find a certain satisfaction in plunging your shovel into the earth just so. You could live with it. But fishing is what you want—what you've always wanted, from your earliest memory of watching a boat ride the waves back to shore in the dimming evening light and realizing that you, landlocked legs and all, could go there.

Ma always laughs about that, not unkindly, and pulls you in for a one-armed side hug if you're in reach. "It's not all climbing the rigging and looking romantic, Derry," she'll tell you for the umpteenth time while you make a show of squirming out of the hug without actually trying too hard to get away. "Gets boring out there between hauls." She and your dad want this job to go well, you know, but in the indulgent way where they also expect you to tire of fixing pulleys and gutting fish long before you make it to the ocean.

But you know yourself. You've always known yourself, even when you didn't have all the words. What the adults in your family call apropos—Wander, for the kid with restless feet and busy hands—you've always thought of as vaguely ironic—Wander, for the kid who has always known exactly where ve stands and where ve's looking.

Your parents are kind of like that, themselves, decisive and determined, if perhaps more focused than you. They've had to be, to keep a business running and four kids fed; your lives aren't painful by any stretch of the imagination, but you're no fancy Career family, either. There's a reason you all pitch in measuring and sorting the clams whenever school is out, and why the house always has food, but your parents are never the ones home to cook it. (In theory, you and Teresa and Nate take turns. What actually happens, most days, is that you all put it off until two of you can gang up on the third, because you have work now and Teresa is throwing herself into learning to dig and Nate never wants to get his nose out of a book but it's not like anyone's going to make Cadenza do it, she's eight.)

Anyway, the point is that if it was just you, wanting to leave might make you feel guilty. But with all four of you, someone (Teresa) is bound keep up the family business (you will eat your future boat if it's not Teresa), and you know that your parents understand how important it is to go after the life you want. They're letting you take the first step, after all. Once you can back up your dreaming with a little experience, you know they'll keep supporting the rest, even if right now they don't expect you to want to.

Which—fine, yes, your room is littered with supplies from hobbies you kept up for three weeks and you have occasionally been known to be wrong about major life decisions. (You did your best with pronouns the first time around, you always tell them peevishly whenever they tease you about that. How were you supposed to know there were more than two options? "Read a book more often," Dad will say, to which you'll stick out your tongue and sigh at your past self for giving your parents ammunition to tell you to study more. Your grades aren't Nate's, but they're fine, thanks. That was an old novel, anyway, not classwork.) This is different, though. Changing your mind about sailing would be like... like walking out on your little siblings, or forgetting to breathe oxygen.

Not that nothing gets frustrating. Your parents aren't exactly wrong that you hate scrubbing metal and weaving ropes until your joints hurt and your hands are tinged red. And you mean it when you complain that Teresa and Nate should be old enough to babysit themselves while you go out with your friends. (More than, you would think, because when you were Nate's age you looked after yourself and both of them and Cadenza. Somehow that argument never holds water with your parents. Whatever.)

It's just that even for someone as impatient as you, some things—your siblings' laughter when you spin them around, ocean spray in your face, the bone-deep comfort of knowing that no matter how many strangers get you wrong the people who matter most see who you are—are worth what it takes to hold onto them.


me in the middle of research for another bio: trips halfway across Panem and coughs this out in two days
(me in the middle of coughing this out: gets distracted reading about clam species for two hours)

ve/ver/vis/vis/verself. when I outlined this in the character creation template I had down "Gender: other. alternatively: when the sulfur part of that briny sea breeze smell is just a little stronger than usual and you walk outside and kinda wrinkle your nose, not like ew but like hmm, alright, because it still feels like Home."

Nate's full name is Nathan but no one uses it. Extended family used to call Teresa "Terry" until she and Wander pitched a collective fit about having overly similar nicknames; now they use Rees sometimes, but mostly call her Teresa. This is 100% because I originally named her Terry and then remembered I'd already used Derry as a nickname and went "wait, shit."