abel. four.

Living with a narcissist ain't so bad. It taught me a lot. How to fend for myself. How I can only count on me. How not to treat my future kid someday. I don't blame Mom for what happened to her, my dead-beat father leaving her hung up to dry. She had to learn how to be selfish, or die. But I do blame her for putting herself over me, even after things got easier. I get it - she struggled. It was hard. But she stopped being the victim a long time ago and started looking for any excuse to be one ever since.

Silver linings. It's my job to look for silver and gold and anything beautiful in murky waters and I'm damn good at it - I guess it's a habit drilled into me since birth. I know how to hide from her. I know how to hide that I know she hides from me. I'm sneaky and a good liar - it's how I got popular at school. Nobody cares if you're poor if you're beautiful - even less so if you pretend. If my Dad gave me one single good thing in this miserable life, it was his face. My Mom, her masks.

They say I could walk right up to President Snow's dead body and pluck all the jewels right off of his fingers and nobody in the Capitol would think to call the Keepers. I sat underneath tables whilst Mom dealt them poker cards and fished into their pockets for coins and chains. I was seven. When I grew too tall to hunch underneath the furniture she scolded me, scolded my father, said I looked just like him and blamed me for it, as if I had any say in the way my bones molded in her womb or grew in her care.

She didn't need to blame me for existing. I beat myself up for it enough. Kids at school think if you're beautiful you don't have problems - I get it, I could have it worse off. Silver linings and all that. But it's hard when everyone else looks like marble and you're just clutching fool's gold in your hands. I want to be great. I want to be better than a thief, than a lost-and-found boy, and I think I might have half a shot at it were I given the chance. But kids like me don't get given chances. We have to get our hands a little dirty first.

They say eighty years ago, maybe more, folks would have called me a pirate. I like that concept a lot more than I dare let on. The thieving part is here nor there, but the idea of being free, truly free, is what I romanticize the most. Sailing out into the ocean with no plan or instruction, roaming the seas and discovering things once lost. Pirates are no more, all rounded up by the Keepers or long-gone from our little shore in the north of Four, but the idea of them lives on in my heart. Being called a pirate, a thief, a scallywag, is almost a compliment when you're called every other terrible name under the sun by one person or the other.

And I've got a terrible temper, a case of the poor-me's and the rage that ripples underneath self-pity. Mom always says I could have it worse, could be a skeleton in Twelve begging for scraps or buried alive in the mines. But that's the thing that makes me angry - she's allowed to live her life selfishly, and I am to be grateful for mine. The posters on the brick walls as I walk to school tell me too. That I should be proud to be from Four, that our great country works because we do. Four and One are the golden girls and boys and everything in-between, but the only gold here is the colour of the sand in summertime.

I still love her, y'know? She's my Mom. Narcissism and all, maybe I've got stockholm syndrome. Maybe we all do. We love Four, even though it's all pretend. We cried when Bell fell and we screamed with joy when Beck came home and we don't feel any more whole at the end of the day. They spoon feed us Victors and we get on our knees and thank them, as if we're privileged to be gifted back broken children. And even though my Mom pulls me back into the current that is she, I still make excuses for her. Still look after her. Still love her.

I love her just enough not to leave her - or maybe I just don't want to be anything like the man who turned her into this. I've got a sailor's soul, desperate to float away like he did, and she knows it. I know it. Four green eyes and we stare at each-other in silence, she's begging me to stay and I'm begging her to let me go. Neither of us will admit defeat - we're too stubborn, I get that from her. So we are adrift, together, waiting for the other to sink so we can start to swim.

It ain't so bad, not when you're used to living in limbo.