in my head i do everything right | birdie etc

april.

In her head, she crafts a letter. Pierre, I need help. Pierre, can you do something for me? Pierre, you need to promise to look the other way. She thinks any of the options make her sound pathetic, a teenage girl whining at the half-open door of her older brother because she needs cash, she needs someone beat up, she needs something she isn’t good enough to get herself.

The raw skin around her fingernails continues to bleed. She brings them to her mouth and gnaws on the already flayed flesh. The walk home from the doctor’s office feels agonizing, feels twenty years long. She wonders if she’ll ever make it home. She wonders if it would be easier to just keel over in the gutter and die.

Winter is still struggling to turn into spring— the snow is gone but the air is cold, and fresh grass is beginning to peek out between slabs of sidewalk. The lockdown has been over for almost a month, and while people have since returned to their everyday lives, there’s an undeniable air of caution anywhere you go. The collapsed factory remains where it once stood, a pile of concrete and wood. Sometimes, she thinks she can still see it smoldering.

Pierre, look, I think I need an abortion. I know they’re illegal but I also know you can help me find somewhere that does them. I don’t have any money. Can you pay for it? I’m sorry for asking, you know I don’t want to. I thought the doctor was joking. I thought I was too old. I can’t be a mother again, you know I can’t. I need you to help me. Please.

She steps over a crack in the payment and scraps the letter. She can’t tell her brother about this, not now, not when their relationship is so strenuous and he’s teetering at the possible end of his mayoral career. It would be a disaster. Even if the conversation did go well, she figured there would be a scandal if word got out. Her family scrutinizes her enough for every decision she makes, she doesn’t need the entire district doing it. It would be the perfect situation to send her flying right over the edge.

She passes by rows of rotting houses, by wilted gardens and rusted bikes, by brick buildings where they pretend children don’t weave yarn, by dress shops and bakeries, by folks on their porches who are older than the games, by disgusting grey structures that keep the economy afloat. It’s her home, the only one she’s ever known. The home that chewed her up and spit her out, too sad and bitter to digest. The home that twisted her daughter’s sadness into something violent and took her away before she could see her eighteenth birthday.

Despite all that, it’s still home. It has to be. There’s nowhere else for her to go.

Pistachio weaves around her ankles as soon as she gets inside the house. She kneels down and scratches him behind the ears, the way he likes. He gives her a few satisfactory purrs before scurrying off to resume a nap on the couch. Standing alone in the hallway, she thinks about what to do. She has to tell Leland. She doesn’t want to, but she has to. He grew out of being a father long before their daughter was gone. This isn’t something he’s going to want any part of.

She balls her hand into a fist and puts it over the swell of her belly. It would be so easy, she thinks, to hit herself, to feign an accident, to drink too much alcohol or fall down the stairs again. Maybe it would finally kill her, rupture an organ beyond repair and make her bleed out from the inside. She wants to laugh at how badly she wants it. All it would take is one more moment of pain— she can handle it, like she always has— and then the suffering would be over.

Her hand flattens against her stomach, knit sweater rough under her palm. She takes a deep breath and savors the way it fills her chest.

When she exhales, she wants to scream.

She hasn’t been in her daughter’s room in a while. The last time was, well, it had to have been years ago. Leland had come by to help her put things into boxes but neither one of them had been able to finish. When she opens the door, she notes the thick layer of dust, the stacked boxes exactly where they’d left them, the artwork still on the walls, the quilts piled on the bed. She’d made the bed after coming home from the Reaping, thinking that if she tidied up a bit, her daughter would come home like she was supposed to.

She sits on the edge of the bed and closes her eyes. “Tell me what to do,” she says, out loud, to whatever ghost might be lurking in her daughter’s room. “I need you to tell me what to do.”

The room stays silent.

“Damaris,” she says, forcing her daughter’s name out of her throat. It’s been 4 years since she last spoke it and it doesn’t feel any lighter. “Tell me what to do.”

Her daughter’s name hangs heavy in the air but brings no response.

“Fuck!” She leans towards, digs her nails into her scalp, heaves as heavy as she can to keep from sobbing but the tears start to boil over anyway. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! I know you’re here! Fucking talk to me! I’m your mother, I’m your— why can’t you hear me?”

She hugs her knees and cries, a child, a grown woman, someone who’s lost, someone who knows the way out but can’t bring herself to do it. She is tired of seeing her own blood in the bathroom sink. She is tired of thinking that, if things had been different, just slightly different, she would still have her daughter. She is tired, so tired.

When she wakes up hours later, curled up on the floral quilts, moonlight peeking through the window and Pistachio sleeping by her feet, she wonders if she’s ever going to be okay again. She wonders why she gets another chance and her daughter doesn’t. There is no world where this makes sense, where she is the one alive and her daughter is not. Her life means nothing. Damaris’s meant everything.

Looking up at the ceiling, she sighs, wipes the dried tears from her face, and thinks, your daughter would want you to be kinder to yourself.

“Leland,” she says. “Do you ever think about dying?”

The room is dark, save for the silver moonlight trying to inch its way in through the gap between the curtains. Birdie is sitting up in bed, knotted hair cascading down her shoulders, her breathing irregular and shallow. It’s like she’s jolted awake from a nightmare, but she hasn’t slept, has barely slept in days, and the bruise-like purple around her eyes is proof of it.

There’s an ache in her chest, one that’s slowly creeping up her throat, threatening to suffocate her. It’s been there for weeks, lingering. She can’t define it. Fear, maybe. Whatever it is, it sits heavy like a tumor, either deadly or unconvincingly benign. She tries to choke it down, tries to grow up, be an adult, but it rises back up, like a drowned body coming to the water’s surface.

It’s getting harder to recognize herself in the mirror. She knows that it’s supposed to be her, supposed to be her body, but it isn’t, not really. There’s a stranger inside of it, technically part of her, but it feels alien— it isn’t supposed to be there, and they both know it. She avoids looking at her stomach when she can. It doesn’t even seem real, like it’s a prop belly that can be taken on and off as the scene calls for it. It’s still small, easily hidden under sweaters or cardigans, but the District Eight summer is sweltering, so she just doesn’t go outside. The farthest she goes is her back porch, to spray water over her various potted plants. They’re still alive, miraculously, but she knows it isn’t going to last.

“W-what? No. What are you talking about?”

“I just… I feel like it’s always following me around. And I don’t know how to make it stop.” She pauses. “It’s nothing. Go back to bed.”

“Hey.” His voice goes soft, and it makes her want to be sick. “We got a good thing going right? Something good to think about.”

“I guess.” She turns and lays back down, her back to him, and she’s glad it’s dark, so he can’t see the way her spine is starting to poke out from under her skin. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Under the blankets, she traces her fingertips over her stomach. She tries to think about the tiny person inside her, her child, but all she can think about is the possibility of them being torn away from her, again. Of clutching them in the justice building and reassuring them over and over that it isn’t their fault, it isn’t their fault. Of watching them scream and cry and laugh and kill and suffer until the suffering is finally over.

She clutches her hand over her mouth and tries to quiet her sobs. Behind her, Leland shifts, putting his arms around her and pulling her closer. She wants to accept the comfort but she knows she doesn’t deserve it, knows that she’s bad, dirty, that Leland won’t be able to handle it and will leave her, just like he always has.

The sun rises, eventually, like it always does. She watches the dim morning light begin to fill the room and crawls out of bed. There’s no use in pretending to be asleep anymore. She goes downstairs and makes herself tea, then pukes it out in the sink. Her grip on the counter is white-knuckled, painful, and she thinks that she can’t be here anymore.

She pulls a jacket on over the t-shirt and sweatpants she slept in. It’s too warm outside for the sun barely being up, but she pushes past it. She doesn’t need a family member seeing her stomach and making a scene out of it. Every few streets, she has to stop, lean against a fence or wall, catch her breath and wipe the sweat from her brow. Twenty-one years later and she’s forgotten how pregnancy turns your body into a fucking shell of what it used to be. It’s still too early for a lot of people to be out, at least. She turns a corner and the justice building looms overhead. She figures, if she closes her eyes, she could remember where she stood when her world came crumbling down.

When she enters the building, she follows the signs to the Hunger Games museum. There had been a pit in her stomach the day it was announced, the newscaster portraying it as some wonderful gift for the citizens of Panem. She didn’t want to think of people being able to pull up a vision of her daughter, as if she were some cheap plaything and not a person who had deserved to live, so she’d turned the television off and tried not to think about it.

And here she is.

Her body trembling, she takes a seat and reaches out to type in a name. The room fills with a low humming noise as the hologram beams to life. Like a flash of lightning, she’s there— her daughter, dressed in the same outfit she was reaped in. Birdie remembers how tall she stood, like she was ready to look death in the eye and tell it to go fuck itself.

“Damaris,” she breathes.

“Mom.” The hologram smiles. “I thought you forgot about me.”

Her truths had always been soft around the edges, so concerned with making sure others didn’t feel the hurt she dealt with every day.

“I would never,” Birdie says. She thinks, I’ve thought of you everyday for four years. You’d be twenty-one now, you know that? You’d be an adult. I know you never imagined you’d get that far, but, I couldn’t when I was younger either. Maybe we could have talked about that. Maybe—

“Mom?”

She shakes herself out of her thoughts. “Sorry, I— I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

More silence passes between them. The hologram rocks back on her heels, holds her hands behind her back. It’s like they’re both searching for what to say, because what can you say? They had struggled to speak to each other when Damaris was made of flesh and bone.

“Mom?” The hologram asks again. Her voice, a marvel of technology, manages to sound confused and curious and almost broken. “Are you…?”

Birdie looks down at herself. She’d forgotten the reason she came here in the first place. “Oh. Oh, yeah. I came here because I wanted to tell you that I’m… that you’re going to be an older sister.”

The hologram beams. “Really?”

Birdie swears, she never saw her daughter that happy when she was alive.

She opens her mouth to answer her, and then remembers. She remembers this isn’t real, this isn’t her daughter, this is a Capitol creation designed to further their reach into the Districts. This isn’t her daughter. Her daughter will never know that she’s pregnant, that she should have been an older sister. She’ll never know this because she’s dead, she’s fucking dead, and the Capitol can dress a hologram up like her but they can’t bring her back.

“No this is—” Birdie looks around the room, at the other spaces for the holograms, at the clinically clean walls, then back to what’s in front of her. “This isn’t right. You’re not— you aren’t here.”

“What do you mean? I’m right here.”

“No, no, this isn’t, you’re not—”

“Mom? You’re starting to scare me.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not your fucking mother.”

“Mom, stop.”

“I’m not your mother!”

The hologram starts to sob. Birdie watches the face of her daughter contort into distress, her shoulders heaving and her face going red. Her and Damaris had never gotten into a fight this bad. She was a good kid, there was never anything to fight over. She was a good kid. She should still be here. She should still be alive.

Birdie grabs the dial and turns it all the way to the right, to remind herself that this isn’t real, that her daughter is six feet underground, and she’ll never be able to speak to her again. The hologram flickers, then cuts back in. Her dress is drenched in blood now, and the cavity where her left eye should be is hollow, gored out.

This is the scene that replays in Birdie’s mind, over and over again. This is how she remembers her daughter best. Not the years she spent as a strange, quiet child, not the times she hid in the corners of family reunions with her, not the times she silently dried flowers in the kitchen, not the years they both spent pretending they couldn’t hear the other crying. No, it could only be this— Damaris, bloody, dying.

The hologram looks down at herself, at all the blood, and screams. The noise is mechanical, piercing, and Birdie recoils, and stares, stares at this bastardized version of her child, pixels acting out a cheap imitation of her death, and she feels it— the fear, the sick, heavy fear— and then she can’t bear it anymore.

She hurries out of the room, and the justice building, and starts to walk as fast as she can back home. Gravel crunches under her feet, and the summer breeze blows warm, and she’s trying to breathe but her throat will barely open, so it comes out in pained gasps. She crosses her arms over her chest and clutches at herself, fingernails digging into her skin and drawing blood. She needs her legs to move faster, needs her tears to stop blurring her vision, needs her daughter to come back, because she can’t survive without her anymore.

There's still no way for her to understand a world where she’s alive and her daughter is not. Her daughter, who deserved so much better. Her daughter, who she would give her own life up for just so she could feel the warmth of the sun again.

The screen door slams shut behind her. She runs up the stairs, into her bedroom, and flings all of the drawers in her dresser open. Clothes are thrown to the ground as she rummages around as fast as her hands can move, and she can’t breathe, she’s going to pass out, and then she finds it, a thin black pocket knife, stolen sometime in her teen years and kept around in case of emergency, and she doesn’t know if this is an emergency or not, she just knows that she can’t do this anymore. She unfurls the blade, still shiny, and stares down at it, and takes a deep breath, and presses it to the soft skin of her wrist, and thinks I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—