PART I "THE TRIBUTES" Pt9

For a few moments, Taeyeon and I take in the scene of our mentor trying to rise out of the slippery vile stuff from his stomach. The reek of vomit and raw spirits almost brings my dinner up. We exchange a glance.

Obviously Soonkyu isn’t much, but Im YoonA is right about one thing, once we’re in the arena he’s all we’ve got. As if by some unspoken agreement, Taeyeon and I each take one of Soonkyu’s arms and help him to his feet.

“I tripped?” Soonkyu asks. “Smells bad.” He wipes his hand on his nose, smearing his face with vomit.

“Let’s get you back to your room,” says Taeyeon.

“Clean you up a bit.”

We half-lead half-carry Soonkyu back to his compartment. Since we can’t exactly set him down on the embroidered bedspread, we haul him into the bathtub and turn the shower on him. He hardly notices.

“It’s okay,” Taeyeon says to me.

“I’ll take it from here.”

I can’t help feeling a little grateful since the last thing I want to do is strip down Soonkyu, wash the vomit out of his chest hair, and tuck him into bed. Possibly Taeyeon is trying to make a good impression on him, to be his favorite once the Games begin. But judging by the state he’s in, Soonkyu will have no memory of this tomorrow.

“All right,” I say.

“I can send one of the Capitol people to help you.” There’s any number on the train.

Cooking lor us. Waiting on us. Guarding us. Taking care of us is their job.

“No. I don’t want them,” says Taeyeon.

I nod and head to my own room. I understand how Taeyeon feels. I can’t stand the sight of the Capitol people myself. But making them deal with Soonkyu might be a small form of revenge. So I’m pondering the reason why he insists on taking care of Soonkyu and all of a sudden I think, It’s because he’s being kind. Just as he was kind to give me the bread. The idea pulls me up short. A kind Kim Taeyeon is far more dangerous to me than an unkind one. Kind people have a way of working their way inside me and rooting there. And I can’t let Taeyeon do this. Not where we’re going. So I decide, from this moment on, to have as little as possible to do with the baker’s son.

When I get back to my room, the train is pausing at a platform to refuel. I quickly open the window, toss the cookies Taeyeon’s father gave me out of the train, and slam the glass shut. No more. No more of either of them. Unfortunately, the packet of cookies hits the ground and bursts open in a patch of dandelions by the track. I only see the image for a moment, because the train is off again, but it’s enough.

Enough to remind me of that other dandelion in the school yard years ago... I had just turned away from Kim Taeyeon’s bruised face when I saw the dandelion and I knew hope wasn’t lost. I plucked it carefully and hurried home. I grabbed a bucket and Seohyun’s hand and headed to the Meadow and yes, it was dotted with the golden-headed weeds. After we’d harvested those, we scrounged along inside the fence for probably a mile until we’d filled the bucket with the dandelion greens, stems, and flowers.

That night, we gorged ourselves on dandelion salad and the rest of the bakery bread.

“What else?” Seohyun asked me.

“What other food can we find?”

“All kinds of things,” I promised her.

“I just have to remember them.” My mother had a book she’d brought with her from the apothecary shop. The pages were made of old parchment and covered in ink drawings of plants. Neat handwritten blocks told their names, where to gather them, when they came in bloom, their medical uses. But my father added other entries to the book. Plants for eating, not healing.

Dandelions, pokeweed, wild onions, pines. Seohyun and I spent the rest of the night poring over those pages. The next day, we were off school. For a while I hung around the edges of the Meadow, but finally I worked up the courage to go under the fence. It was the first time I’d been there alone, without my father’s weapons to protect me. But I retrieved the small bow and arrows he’d made me from a hollow tree. I probably didn’t go more than twenty yards into the woods that day. Most of the time, I perched up in the branches of an old oak, hoping for game to come by. After several hours, I had the good luck to kill a rabbit. I’d shot a few rabbits before, with my father’s guidance. But this I’d done on my own. We hadn’t had meat in months.

The sight of the rabbit seemed to stir something in my mother. She roused herself, skinned the carcass, and made a stew with the meat and some more greens Seohyun had gathered. Then she acted confused and went back to bed, but when the stew was done, we made her eat a bowl. The woods became our savior, and each day I went a bit farther into its arms.

It was slow-going at first, but I was determined to feed us. I stole eggs from nests, caught fish in nets, sometimes managed to shoot a squirrel or rabbit for stew, and gathered the various plants that sprung up beneath my feet. Plants are tricky. Many are edible, but one false mouthful and you’re dead. I checked and double-checked the plants I harvested with my father’s pictures.

I kept us alive. Any sign of danger, a distant howl, the inexplicable break of a branch, sent me flying back to the fence at first. Then I began to risk climbing trees to escape the wild dogs that quickly got bored and moved on. Bears and cats lived deeper in, perhaps disliking the sooty reek of our district.

On May 8th, I went to the Justice Building, signed up for my tesserae, and pulled home my first batch of grain and oil in Seohyun’s toy wagon. On the eighth of every month, I was entitled to do the same. I couldn’t stop hunting and gathering, of course. The grain was not enough to live on, and there were other things to buy, soap and milk and thread. What we didn’t absolutely have to eat, I began to trade at the Hob. It was frightening to enter that place without my father at my side, but people had respected him, and they accepted me.

Game was game after all, no matter who’d shot it. I also sold at the back doors of the wealthier clients in town, trying to remember what my father had told me and learning a few new tricks as well.

The butcher would buy my rabbits but not squirrels.

The baker enjoyed squirrel but would only trade for one if his wife wasn’t around.

The Head Peacekeeper loved wild turkey.

The mayor had a passion for strawberries.

In late summer, I was washing up in a pond when I noticed the plants growing around me. Tall with leaves like arrowheads. Blossoms with three white petals. I knelt down in the water, my fingers digging into the soft mud, and I pulled up handfuls of the roots. Small, bluish tubers that don’t look like much but boiled or baked are as good as any potato.

“Tiffany,” I said aloud.

It’s the plant I was named for. And I heard my father’s voice joking, “As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.”

I spent hours stirring up the pond bed with my toes and a stick, gathering the tubers that floated to the top. That night, we feasted on fish and Tiffany roots until we were all, for the first time in months, full. Slowly, my mother returned to us. She began to clean and cook and preserve some of the food I brought in for winter. People traded us or paid money for her medical remedies.

One day, I heard her singing. Seohyun was thrilled to have her back, but I kept watching, waiting for her to disappear on us again. I didn’t trust her. And some small gnarled place inside me hated her for her weakness, for her neglect, for the months she had put us through. Seohyun forgave her, but I had taken a step back from my mother, put up a wall to protect myself from needing her, and nothing was ever the same between us again. Now I was going to die without that ever being set right. I thought of how I had yelled at her today in the Justice Building. I had told her I loved her, too, though. So maybe it would all balance out. For a while I stand staring out the train window, wishing I could open it again, but unsure of what would happen at such high speed.

In the distance, I see the lights of another district. 7? 10? I don’t know. I think about the people in their houses, settling in for bed. I imagine my home, with its shutters drawn tight. What are they doing now, my mother and Seohyun? Were they able to eat supper? The fish stew and the strawberries? Or did it lay untouched on their plates? Did they watch the recap of the day’s events on the battered old TV that sits on the table against the wall? Surely, there were more tears. Is my mother holding up, being strong for Seohyun? Or has she already started to slip away, leaving the weight of the world on my sister’s fragile shoulders? Seohyun will undoubtedly sleep with my mother tonight.

The thought of that scruffy old Dubu posting himself on the bed to watch over Seohyun comforts me. If she cries, he will nose his way into her arms and curl up there until she calms down and falls asleep. I’m so glad I didn’t drown him.