Peeta Mellark!

Oh, no, I think. Not him. Because I recognize this name, although

I have never spoken directly to its owner. Peeta Mellark.

No, the odds are not in my favor today. I watch him as he

makes his way toward the stage. Medium height, stocky build,

ashy blond hair that falls in waves over his forehead. 

The shock of the moment is registering on his

face, you can see his struggle to remain emotionless, but his

blue eyes show the alarm I’ve seen so often in prey. Yet he

climbs steadily onto the stage and takes his place.

Effie Trinket asks for volunteers, but no one steps forward.

He has two older brothers, I know, I’ve seen them in the bakery,

but one is probably too old now to volunteer and the other

won’t. This is standard. Family devotion only goes so far

for most people on reaping day. What I did was the radical

thing.

The mayor begins to read the long, dull Treaty of Treason

as he does every year at this point — it’s required — but I’m

not listening to a word.

Why him? I think. Then I try to convince myself it doesn’t

matter. Peeta Mellark and I are not friends. Not even neighbors.

We don’t speak. Our only real interaction happened

years ago. He’s probably forgotten it. But I haven’t and I know

I never will. . . .

It was during the worst time. My father had been killed in

the mine accident three months earlier in the bitterest January

anyone could remember. The numbness of his loss had

passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling

me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would

cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there

was never any answer.

The district had given us a small amount of money as 

compensation for his death, enough to cover one month 

of grieving at which time my mother would be expected to get 

a job. Only she didn’t. She didn’t do anything but sit propped

up in a chair or, more often, huddled under the blankets on her 

bed, eyes fixed on some point in the distance. Once in a while, 

she’d stir, get up as if moved by some urgent purpose, only to 

then collapse back into stillness. No amount of pleading from 

Prim seemed to affect her.

I was terrified. I suppose now that my mother was locked

in some dark world of sadness, but at the time, all I knew was

that I had lost not only a father, but a mother as well. At eleven

years old, with Prim just seven, I took over as head of the

family. There was no choice. I bought our food at the market

and cooked it as best I could and tried to keep Prim and myself

looking presentable. Because if it had become known that

my mother could no longer care for us, the district would have

taken us away from her and placed us in the community

home. I’d grown up seeing those home kids at school. The

sadness, the marks of angry hands on their faces, the 

hopelessness that curled their shoulders forward. I could never 

let that happen to Prim. Sweet, tiny Prim who cried when I 

cried before she even knew the reason, who brushed and plaited 

my mother’s hair before we left for school, who still polished 

my father’s shaving mirror each night because he’d hated the

layer of coal dust that settled on everything in the Seam. The

community home would crush her like a bug. So I kept our

predicament a secret.

But the money ran out and we were slowly starving to

death. There’s no other way to put it. I kept telling myself if 

I could only hold out until May, just May 8th, I would turn

twelve and be able to sign up for the tesserae and get that

precious grain and oil to feed us. Only there were still several

weeks to go. We could well be dead by then.

Starvation’s not an uncommon fate in District 12. Who

hasn’t seen the victims? Older people who can’t work. Children

from a family with too many to feed. Those injured in the

mines. Straggling through the streets. And one day, you come

upon them sitting motionless against a wall or lying in the

Meadow, you hear the wails from a house, and the 

Peacekeepers are called in to retrieve the body. Starvation is 

never the cause of death officially. It’s always the flu, or 

exposure, or pneumonia. But that fools no one.

On the afternoon of my encounter with Peeta Mellark, the

rain was falling in relentless icy sheets. I had been in town,

trying to trade some threadbare old baby clothes of Prim’s in

the public market, but there were no takers. Although I had

been to the Hob on several occasions with my father, I was too

frightened to venture into that rough, gritty place alone.