ludo izar-krane. eleven.

ludo.

I wish I could tell you about my family, but I don't really have one. Just Sis. We came here one after the other according to the adults. Me first, her within the year, too young to remember any different. Kids said we might had the same Mom and that she made us sisters. I was okay with the latter, but Mom was a foreign term that none of the kids where we grew up could claim.

"Who's Mom?" I'd ask, big brown eyes and a million questions on my lips. The adults just looked at me pitifully and shooed me off. I asked that question over and over until one of the older kids shoved me over and said that I didn't have a Mom. So I shrugged and dusted off the concept, skipping back to my books and old magazines, and filled myself up with fictional parents instead.

The Izars are infamous around here. A cursed family since the dawn of the Hunger Games. Us orphan kids just hold their name, two for good measure, as if they were to make up for something else lacking in our lives. The adults told me I was named after an old board game, running out of names faster than they ran out of baby bottles. I've played it a few times, some of the pieces long gone underneath floorboards and down the old couch cracks - lost, like us.

I'm not bad at my namesake but I prefer something like chess or four-in-a-row. That requires a deeper type of thinking, mote than rolling dice and picking a colour. Thank Ripred those are still in-tact, albeit faded and aging, else I might go mad from boredom. The adults always said I was too smart for my own good, that it was a shame I wasn't nurtured like a kid with parents. I say who needs 'em, they just laugh and pat my head.

"No importa mija" - but that's the thing. No thoughts of mine are ever important. Nothing's important enough for them, it seems. Not when you're seven or eight or ten, eleven, twelve. Except for coming home after the reaping, getting enough dinner, staying warm through the snowy months. Y'know, the stuff that matters, like staying alive. But what's the point of being alive if you can't get answers out of life?

The adults tell me I need not worry about grown-up things, but one of the older kids started whispering about me and Sis and it sparked my curiosity. They stopped shoving me after that, said I was an actual Izar. I didn't get it at first - weren't we all Izar-Kranes, save for the likes of Kassandra? And then they dared me to go and check my file myself.

I didn't want to, so I sat on the idea for a while. But then Kass won the games and the town square exploded and even though I was growing taller by the week life was getting too short to not take chances. Things needed understanding. Grown-up things. A black marker hiding the name of my mother, Sis's name scribbled next to mine, a boy's name - Wilson - circled next to a question-mark.

Father: Wilson Izar-Krane ?

Whoever the heck that was, I didn't dare ask. His name was on Sissy' file too, a blank space next to the word Mother - but then footsteps crept through the walls in the night and my flashlight hid from sight, scrambling to shove files back into their places in the dark and close the cupboards carefully, re-lock the office doors, pretend I was never there. Blinking my brown eyes when asked how I slept, grin goofy with missing teeth. Like I had slept soundly through the eve. Like I hadn't seen anything.

And that's how I continued about in life - pretending that I knew no better. Those files are my secrets, secrets not even my sister knows of. I quite like knowing but not knowing. Having a twitch on my pink lips when I smile and dream of people only I can dream of. I daredn't look again nor tell any of the kids here that I actually followed through with their taunts - but I'm okay with being a pretend-orphan. It's good practice for being a full-time secret-keeper.

So when I say I'd like to tell you about my family, but I don't really have one, that's what I mean. Mr. Wilson, whoever he is, certainly isn't around. And I think I'm okay with that.

Or maybe I'm just pretending.