Patience Suet | D9 | Done

Patience Suet

District 9

Female

Eighteen

Patience would be the first to admit that life is like, really hard.

Totally unfair that she had to be born in district nine where every day smells like rotten butthole and they’re best known for being the loser district that tends to die early in the games. Not that the games are even all that interesting, but that’s all that the boys in her grade want to talk about, so of course she pays attention when they’re on. She does like hearing about the victors if only because of how fucking dramatic all of their lives are. It feels much the same as her own life in high school, because they all seem to spread gossip about one another and want to be the centers of attention.

That part of life is easy because she’s figured out the surest way to being popular is to make sure that people like you. It’s really simple, if you’re kind to everyone and tell them how great they are, the other kids tend to want to be your friend, too. But like, she also knows that you can’t just sit back and think that everyone is going to want to be friends with you for no good reason. There are boys that totally wouldn’t even know her name but they know who she is because she’s learned the other lesson of being a teenager, especially a teenage girl in the world of a run down, derlict district: you have to give people something to fear.

She was about eight or nine when she realized she and Jessa wouldn’t work as a couple of friends. Jessa liked to dress in homespun clothes and tie her hair into pigtails, which had been the style for the better part of the year, but now all the girls were straightening their hair and starting to get into lipgloss. And honestly it was not her fault that the girl decided playing imaginary games was more interesting than talking about boys with the rest of the other girls. And sometimes talking about girls because they were like totally okay with that too (although none of them liked each other, right?).

So Patience found Ashleigh and Kaylen, two girls who’s mothers worked selling make-up which – isn’t that just the coolest thing? They got to play with samples their mothers would bring home from the plant like real live grown-ups. That was the sort of friendship she needed, girls who knew that it was better to act older than their age because people respected and admired people who were older.

Also like, she could totally use some of that free stuff!

Her parents were totally lame – her dad worked in a cannery and her mother was some sort of wax worker – but she lied and told them both her mom and dad worked with the ingredients that help make some of the beauty products for the capitol. And when they asked if they could sample some of it, she lied about being able to get them some because well, it was really hard to get samples since they were so good and so popular. Like – she’d have to wait and see.

They were the sorts of girls that other girls talked about, you know? The ones that when they walked into the room there was a total freeze, that people would look at them and then they’d look back and the music would slow down, and they’d want to hear what they had to say. That’s how it played out in her head every time she walked around when them, and after enough times she started to really believe it, too.

When they kept asking for a sample of the expensive creams or something that they could share when they were messing around with globs of foundation or bits of rouge, Patience decided that she needed to go all-in. They wouldn’t believe the lie if she didn’t have anything to produce. Women supported women if like, they could lift one another up or some junk.

So she took the money from underneath her mom and dad’s mattress and spent it on a whole beauty regimen for all of them. Sure, her mother and father thought that someone had robbed them, and her mom had cried for two days talking about how they’d been saving it for a special celebration for Patience and her brother, but they actually believed someone had come in the house and taken their money so Patience didn’t really feel that guilty.

After all, didn’t they want the other girls to like her?

Her having a good childhood was more important than some stack of cash anyway. They just needed to get over it and let her life her best life.

Ashleigh and Kaylen and Patience were inseparable after that. They walked arm and arm into school, did one another’s hair, scolded boys that they didn’t like and laughed at the girls who wore those homespun dresses, and god it felt so great. It was everything she ever wanted, better than whatever school could bring her (why did she need to learn math anyway)? Better than the sort of life they might wind up in afterward, in a stupid factory or some other garbage.

Then again, Ashleigh and Kaylen would help her find a boy who’s family would take care of her so like, she wasn’t going to be one of those people that worked her whole life.

Like, ew. Gross.

They got older, taller, and thinner – oh gosh at least there was a benefit to not eating well – and that’s when they grew up from all the laughing and giggling and empty-headedness.

Well, the like, part about not really paying attention to other people.

They decided that they had spent so much time being their best that they were, because they told each other all the time. Wasn’t that how it worked? Like, Kaylen would tell Ashleigh how pretty she was, and Ashleigh would tell Kaylen how pretty she was, and then they’d both say how Patience had the nicest smile, and on, and on until they weren’t even really sure who had started talking to one another.

They weren’t mean intentionally to the other kids. They just didn’t want anything to do with them. They would understand, Patience had reasoned, because the boys noticed them, and the teachers were found of how funny they were, and no one else really had their names on everyone’s lips so often.

That was just the way of the world, Patience had once told Jessa when she’d confronted her about it like a gross overgrown troll in the bathroom, when she told her that the things she’d said and done had gone too far. She said that the way the girls carried on and made everyone either in or out of their group was awful, as though they were this toxic mass that was suffocating the rest of them.

But Patience knew that Jessa was just jealous. If she cared about how they perceived her then she wanted to be like them, which seemed hypocritical to her whole argument. That and her breath was really gross, too.

It only made sense that they all started a beauty report for the rest of the district. They were going to influence the way people thought about things, at least, that’s what they told one another. Maybe they could even think about making their own products (although that definitely seemed like too much sweaty work which they were not going to do). Well, maybe they could get people to give them a bunch of free stuff and then they’d show them how to use it.

They could be salesgirls and they would be amazing, no?

Life for a girl like Patience just seemed to work out, mostly because she knew that she deserved it. It’s not like there really was anything else worth living for in this garbage dump of a district anyway.

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