Chapter Four Visual and Audio Glossary
14 Friday Oct 2011
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in14 Friday Oct 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in14 Friday Oct 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
JamesMadison
On Reaping night, even the Gray Levels are encouraged to look like human beings and not drone-workers. So I wash my face until it hurts and try to comb the knots from my windblown, brown hair before hiding the scraggly ends in an inside-out twist.
I don’t think I’ve worn it like this since training; my mother used to put it up when I was in training school, when she was alive. It reminds me of rising early before school, being so tired in the shower that I would rest my head against the chipped tile. Reveling in the warm water against my muscles, which were always already sore from the previous day’s exercise. Practicing knife drills under the table at breakfast to cram for the latest quiz. (I purposefully juxtaposed the mundanity of cramming for a quiz with the utter alieness of that quiz being related to violence.))
I guess I’ll have to remember knife drills again. Trying to suppress panic at the thought, I run through different wrestling holds and pressure points in my head. I rifle through the cardboard box containing all of my private possessions. There’s not much: a small photograph of Mom, Dad and me as a child before Ben was born; a few pairs of holey, dirty socks; and the dress.
The dress was my mother’s, blue with thousands of tiny, white polka dots. She wore it the night of her birthday, the night before she was killed. It’s wrinkly, the white collar folded awkwardly, and I’m surprised that it fits me as it comes over my head. A little tight and too short— I got my father’s genes when it comes to height — but not bad. From its collar hang two blue ribbons. I don’t remember how my mother tied them; the only knots I know are ones to bring ropes together, or to moor the kayak, or for nooses and traps. I settle for tying them in a double fisherman’s knot, the kind used to bring two ropes together. (I think this symbolism both shows how far bella has come, and how far she has yet too go. It’s not a violent knot she’s tying, but she still doesn’t know the excesses of beauty. And Plato says that Love is to desire good and beautiful things. Bella doesn’t quite know what those are yet.)
The door creaks behind me.
“Knock first!” I shout.
Charlie peeks out quietly from behind the door with wide eyes, like a small animal staring out from hiding. He mumbles something, low and under his breath.
I almost faint. Charlie, speaking? “Sorry, what?”
“You tied it wrong,” he grunts louder. He points to the fisherman’s knot.
“Oh, how does it go?” I try to give an encouraging smile, but my face feels paralyzed.
He takes a step closer, his big hand nimbly unpicking my knot. Then he ties it into loose loops, flopping like wings of a butterfly.
“What do you call this?”
“Bow,” he mumbles.
“Did Mom wear it like this?”
I know I’ve made a mistake, mentioning Mom. His jaw clicks as he grits his teeth. It’s not until my foot has found purchase against the cold, naked concrete floor that I realize that my first reaction upon making a mistake is to take a defensive stance. (I have a hard time reconciling the Charlie of Bella’s memories, who espoused violence, to this timid Charlie. To be honest I know Renee’s death changed him, but I’m not sure of the specifics. Hopefully, this will be something I discover as I go along.)
He bows his head and shuffles backward. From the other room, I hear the front door slam; I glance beyond the door way, and see Ben. He doesn’t meet my gaze. When I turn back, Charlie’s gone. (I like giving Charlie little supernatural touches like this, as if he isn’t only like a ghost, but also sort of is one.)
I look down at the elegant bow tied on my chest and finger it delicately. It makes me want to cry. I shake my head and think of knife drills. Upper cut, block, stab, upper cut—
“I need the room.” It’s Ben— thin, roaming, glassy eye, messy hair. He’s not bad looking, despite the eye; he’s got a strong jaw like Charlie. (I was really not happy with this description, but I really couldn’t think of anything better.)
“What, why?”
He holds up a hand, and in it I see a piece of cloth, corduroy, maybe. “Got to change into my reaping clothes.” He unfolds the clothing to reveal a brown jacket and a pair of raggedy black slacks with a single patch of yellow fabric right over the kneecap. (Little detail here showing how even the rich like Prim aren’t able to afford tuxedos or anything.)
“How did you afford those?” I ask.
“Prim gave them to me.”
“Prim?” I didn’t know that my brother was seeing anyone, but I’m not surprised that he is; he’s charming. But still, who could he be seeing that would be rich enough to buy those kind of clothes for him? Unless . . . “You don’t mean the nurse at the Blood Bank you were flirting with?”
He scowls. “Can I change now?”
“She’s older than me.” I try to keep the scorn out of my voice, but I can’t help it. Just because you decide not to hurt someone, doesn’t mean you automatically love them and agree with their every morally-suspect decision.
“Fuck you.” He tosses his head, bringing his overgrown brown hair to cover his eye. A defense mechanism.
I glance at the clothes he clutches tightly and his uneasy expression. “Hey,” I say gently, “if you wanted clothes, you only had to ask. It could have been an early birthday present. You didn’t have to do things.” (Bella really really doesn’t get how to associate with other people. She also see Prim through her own eyes, that of an older woman. Bella really doesn’t know much about boys. I’d bet she just read in a textbook somewhere about evolutionary psychology about men wanting the youngest most fertile mater. BTW more on MATES in later chapters.)
“I’m not prostituting myself. That’s what you do when you go out in the sewers and meet up with the breeder boy.” He thrusts his hips forward, imitating the act. (I think Ben honestly believes this. He has hard time beleiving Bella is capable of love. And he’s sort of right, she’s not physically in love with Jacob Black, and to some extent she does humor Jacob physically to get what she wants. The thing is what she wants isn’t money is friendship.
I clench my fists so hard my nails probably draw blood from my palms. “Don’t provoke me.”
“Why not? Want to finish up the other eye like you did the first?”
“That was an acci—”
“You don’t blind someone by accident.”
I turn around and viciously kick the cardboard box so I don’t roundhouse my brother in the kneecaps. “I’m trying to change.”
“I don’t care if you bring me cookies or try to make sure that my blood levels stay right or check that I’m not driven to sell my body like you do yours. It doesn’t matter if you change, Bella, because this,” he points at the eye, “will still be the same.”
“I made one mistake.” I kick the cardboard box again, harder, and my toe makes contact with something inside of it. Crack.
Something breaks. (Allusion to the Steven Sondheim song, something just broke. Unfortunately the song is in present tense so I had to change it up a bit.)
I get on my knees to find the thing I kicked. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Don’t lie, not about this,” he says as evenly as he can, watching me sift through the contents of the cardboard box.
Even though I can’t see him, I feel his eyes on me, accusing and sad.
“You’re right,” I murmur, my hands closing around the object my toe bruised itself against — the photo, the only photo I had of my family. Damnit.
“You were the only person I . . . ” he stammers, before stopping himself, but I can hear in his voice he wants to say more, he wants to tell me.
Sometimes, I forget that my brother probably misses the way things used to be between us just as much as I do. At the bottom of the anger and accusations, the wound that probably really festers is loneliness, longing. (Bella actually can be very insightful I think. This is the tragedy of her character, she is very smart, but doesn’t know how to apply it. It’s not that she’s a misanthrope, but that parts of her just don’t fit into the “right way” to act around people.)
But he stoppers up the truth and says instead, “You can’t just say it was a mistake.”
“I know,” I say softly.
He shuffles around me and toward the window, looking out. “Just get out and let me get dressed, alright?”
I leave without another word, clutching the broken picture frame. I will never get forgiveness from my brother. Even if I do die for him in the games, he’ll believe it’s a malicious coincidence until the day he dies.
The edges of the shards are sharp, and I handle them carefully as I separate the picture from the broken frame. From beneath slivers of glass, my mother stares out at me, the warmth of her eyes not quite a comfort.
It’s funny— sometimes when I look out the window of my room at twilight, looking at the all the beautiful colors of the sky, or feel the cool sand beneath my feet with Jacob, or even smile at a joke, it hurts. I experience every good thing with the secret assumption that I’ll lose it.
The gentleness of my mom’s smile across her face in the photograph is the hardest beauty to bear, because it’s already gone. And the real secret I hold inside of me, the truth that drove me to beat my own brother until he bled, is that I lost my mother long before she died.
It all began the year I got second rank and became best friends with Rosalie Hale. I was getting better and better in school and was beginning to seriously consider entering the Morphing Games. My father was proud of the way I could disarm a man almost twice my size in a knife fight, mix poisons from berries, and most of all — take a beating. It didn’t matter how many bruises I came home with, I never cried. (Bella not crying is a huge part of the story. She only cries twice in the whole story. Once in this chapter and once in the last chapter.)
My mother never said she was proud; in fact, the higher up I advanced in the rankings, the less she talked to me. I’ll never know if it was because she couldn’t stand to see me black and blue from school everyday, or if it was that she was disgusted with the thought of her daughter becoming a murderer. Or maybe there was just something about me she couldn’t stand. (Note how Bella really only mentions having one friend in training school days. Thats on purpose.)
It wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t lavish more and more attention on my brother. My brother, who couldn’t throw a dagger or paint a convincing camouflage, who didn’t know the ins and outs of winning the affections of vampire sponsors, and on top all of those deficiencies, didn’t even know the most important skill of all: how to back down.
That night after the party, she waved me away citing exhaustion, but when he knocked on her door, she answered. The walls of our house were thin enough that if I pressed my ear against the headboard of my bed, I could hear him sniffling a anrying as he no doubt toddled into her room. What a pathetic little snot, I thought. Dad said Swans weren’t supposed to cry.
But my mom wasn’t my dad, and when my brother cried, she suddenly magically shed her exhaustion and took him into her arms. I’m not sure, because she was whispering, but I swear I could hear her singing.
“I’ll love you forever.”
I held my pillow so tight the stuffing started to pop out of the end. I bit my lip, taking deep shuddering breaths. I would not cry. As I buried myself in the womb of sheets, curled up fetally against the wall listening to the whispers, I won the battle. I didn’t cry. Maybe I should’ve.
After Mom left and we had to move, he got along with everyone. It seemed like he had finally found his place, where friendships were won with charisma, not fists.
For that first year, I was alone in a world I didn’t understand, without anybody who cared about me, having to come home everyday and see the last person my mother told she loved, the person she loved more than me. And the one certainty of my life, violence, had been taken away from me. It’s not an excuse, just an explanation.
There was no one to tell me not to hit him. In school, all fighting was regulated to minimize injuries, not prevent them. We were supposed to help each other become tougher future Prospectives; that was the foundation of all of our peer to peer relationships.
The problem was, my brother didn’t want to be helped. He wanted someone to laugh at his horrible jokes, help him figure out how fix the radiator, or assemble the manufacturing homework. I didn’t know how to do that; all I knew was how to fight. That was all I could teach him.
At first he wanted to learn, but after a couple bruises, he whined about not wanting to deal with the training school anymore and quit. I didn’t understand how you could do that, quit. Fighting was what the Swans were built for, that’s what my dad always said. And so, even though I knew he’d say no, after a particularly trying day of being snickered at by girls in Home Ec for being unable to fold a sheet properly, I asked my brother to spar.
“I have to finish my homework.”
“Just five minutes. I’ll go easy on you.”
“I said I don’t want to train anymore.”
“We’ll just do blocks. That won’t even hurt.”
“No.”
“You can hit me. Hit me as hard as you want. ”
“Will you get over yourself, Bella. We’re not in training school anymore.”
I grabbed the chair he was sitting in, yanked it out from underneath him. I didn’t understand why he got to wear his deficiencies like a badge of honor. I didn’t understand why people liked him for his weaknesses, his inability to fight.
“Come on, you’ve got to toughen up.” My hands snaked around his stomach. I knew if I squeezed hard enough I could of broken a rib.
He tried to wiggle out of my hold, but his muscles weren’t as developed as mine. “Stop it,” he whined.
I had knowledge of fighting-physics on my side. People who fight fair fight to lose. Still, I loosened my grip. “Fight back.”
“I feel bad for you, Bella.” He gave me a sad look.
I laughed, as if this was all an exercise, as if the stakes weren’t so high that neither of us could even see them anymore. “Just try and get out of my grip, Ben.”
His eyes were all twinkling and tender, like I was a wounded animal he had found underneath a porch. He was so sincere it hurt to look at him. Was I ever that sincere, that stupid? “I’m sorry you don’t have any friends.”
“Stop talking, dumbass, and fight me.”
“I could be your friend.” Every word of his was just steeped in pity. Not sympathy, though, because he didn’t understand— he couldn’t. “All he had was pity, which he felt from his far-away, shining city, where he was appreciated by his friends and could remember that his mother loved him. And yet he was so much less than me in every way I had been taught was valuable.
I grabbed his hair and pulled his neck back. That wasn’t training; that was anger. Out of control. If my brother had an ounce of fighting ability, he should have been able to throw me off balance. I was lunging around wildly and without plan.
He screamed as I pulled his head back farther, a little boy’s scream, high and breathy.
“Mom!” he keened.
He looked so young then. Twelve-year-olds shouldn’t have to call out for dead mothers that will never come. I pulled back, disgusted with myself.
What was I doing? He was my brother; he was just a kid. I could already see the bruises blossoming on his arms. If I missed my mother so much, than why was I hurting the one person she cared about?
I was just about to loosen my hold when the door opened.
Charlie.
He looked at us, entwined together in a way that clearly could not have been pleasant. My hand pulling back my brother’s head—hard. Pain was embossed across my brother’s irises like burning letters.
I was sure that he was finally going to speak, going to tear us apart, going to reprimand me for hurting my brother so bad, going to reprimand my brother for provoking it (even though he hadn’t; my dad always took my side). (Bella is very much a daddy’s girl and Ben a momma’s boy. But now her dad is even apathetic. I think this does her in a little.)
He blinked, once.
I almost dropped Ben, to explain, to apologize. To say that I just couldn’t take the way my whole world had become inverted. I was older; I was supposed to be in control.
But before I could, Charlie shuffled (re-reading it there’s a lot of shuffling going on in the story. I really should pick another verb. Or, make it into a dance. I feel less bad about it though, because one of my fav fanfic writers– KL Morgan– uses the word adroitly like it’s going out of business.) around us, walked through the door on the other side, and shut the door.
And that’s when he wasn’t my father anymore.
I turned to Ben. “I’m sorry.”
He looked me up and down once, that damn magnanimous expression on his face. My brother was always so generous, but he always seemed to give people- well me at least, things- I didn’t want.
“It’s okay,” he said, as if he had won.
“I’m leaving, going on a walk. Don’t follow me.” I didn’t mean for it to come out so harsh, but it did.
“Wait—”
I could feel the words he was about to say before he said them. I should have covered my ears; I should have steeled myself somehow. I had been taught to withstand taunting; discipline was a central principal of training school.
But the people at training school never knew the weak-spots in your emotional armor. Or if they did, they didn’t use them; there were rules of combat even in training school. You beat people up, sure, you spread gossip, rumors lies, sure, but you never, ever brought the two together. (FORSHADOWING!)
Ben wasn’t good at training school, not any part of it, but I thought he would of at least learned this one most crucial rule.
I’m sorry too,” he said, although there was a gleam in his eyes that shown like he was going to say something unforgivable, and he knew it.
“For what?” I asked, trembling from the aftershocks of anger.
He bit his lip, trying to contain something— a cry, a smile? I wasn’t sure which. “I’m sorry that Mom loved me more.”
It didn’t matter that he was a kid, that there was a good chance he was wrong, that he was saying it as a shield against my violence, that he didn’t understand the consequences.
Because he meant every last word.
I went insane from it.
I don’t fully remember what happened after that, but suddenly there was blood, too much blood. He held his face, just screaming, “I can’t see. Why can’t I see?”
I carried the twitching body of my brother to the hospital, paid the high fees on credit that I didn’t have. But it didn’t matter; they couldn’t save the eye. Some part of me knew they wouldn’t be able to from the moment I charged.
Looking at him in the haphazard examination room, I knew something else. They couldn’t save me either. I had blinded my own brother out of hurt, out of rage. It was no wonder my mother didn’t love me. I was the monster— not the vampires, not society, not the rules. Me.
I went out to an old abandoned warehouse the next day. They taught us how to tie a noose in year four, so I knew the how to.
The Why was a little bit more complicated. It was a force telling me that I was an awful person burned strong in my chest. Strong and bright. So bright I couldn’t bear to look at it, or think about it. I just knew I hurt and that I deserved to hurt even more. They always told us at school that District 2 was about justice, about peace.
There was only one way I knew to get both of them.
(justice against herself, peace for herself.)
I climbed up onto the piping on the ceiling via tottering tower of half-broken bookshelves and was just finished tying when someone said-
“Stop.”
Jacob Black didn’t look anything like my brother as he called out from the doorway, but the way his eyes glanced up at me reminded me of the way my brother used to look when he’d catch me cheating at cards under the blankets.
For the first time, I felt guilt for my brother, not just shame, not just horror, but guilt, because I remembered what he had been.
After the guilt came the rush, the feeling of falling, the understanding of the loss. For my father, for my mother, even for my brother, who would never be the same.
I fell from the rafters into Jacob’s arms, and for the first time in conscious memory, I wept. I sobbed. I screamed.
Because, the truth was, I didn’t hate my brother. I never did. I hated that I believed that he saw me as I really was. I hated myself.
I alienated and hurt the one person who wanted to like me, wanted to help me, because I was proud, because I was afraid.
And that day in the rafters? I was still afraid. Afraid of facing the consequences. So afraid, I was thinking of doing the one thing Swans never did: quit.
I was going to kill myself as a cop-out to dodge the consequences of what I’d done. And as Jacob Black, although I didn’t know his name then, held me, this strange wild girl he found up in the rafters, I realized that if I left, I would just be doing myself a favor by running away.
So when Jacob Black asked why I was trying to kill myself, I told him a lie that happened to be true. I said that my brother had just had surgery to try and save his eye, and even though it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of the hospital. He told me he had a secret place, a place outside the city walls where he fished and found things to sell on the black market.
It was the secret place that saved my life. It was the thought that I wasn’t alone, that someone could trust me, even at my most pathetic, degenerate point. I thought trust was dead, thought I should be dead too. but it wasn’t. I wasn’t. After all I had done, some random boy still trusted me. I wasn’t forgiven, but there was still a little grace left for me in the world.
After that day, I never hit my brother again. I vowed that I would do whatever it took to look out for him. Not make to things right, because making things right would never be possible. I thought a couple of times about offering him the chance to punch me in the eye. An eye for an eye. But he likes seeing the pain of the guilt in my eyes too much to blind them.
What he never understood was that thing, I feel most guilty about isn’t the eye or the bruises, it’s that after the eye he decided he wanted to enter the Morphing Games. That was when he decided he wanted to hurt people too.
14 Friday Oct 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in[4]
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
James Madison
On Reaping night, even the Gray Levels are encouraged to look like human beings and not drone-workers. So I wash my face until it hurts and try to comb the knots from my windblown, brown hair before hiding the scraggly ends in an inside-out twist.
I don’t think I’ve worn it like this since training; my mother used to put it up when I was in training school, when she was alive. It reminds me of rising early before school, being so tired in the shower that I would rest my head against the chipped tile. Reveling in the warm water against my muscles, which were always already sore from the previous day’s exercise. Practicing knife drills under the table at breakfast to cram for the latest quiz.
I guess I’ll have to remember knife drills again. Trying to suppress panic at the thought, I run through different wrestling holds and pressure points in my head. I rifle through the cardboard box containing all of my private possessions. There’s not much: a small photograph of Mom, Dad and me as a child before Ben was born; a few pairs of holey, dirty socks; and the dress.
The dress was my mother’s, blue with thousands of tiny, white polka dots. She wore it the night of her birthday, the night before she was killed. It’s wrinkly, the white collar folded awkwardly, and I’m surprised that it fits me as it comes over my head. A little tight and too short— I got my father’s genes when it comes to height — but not bad. From its collar hang two blue ribbons. I don’t remember how my mother tied them; the only knots I know are ones to bring ropes together, or to moor the kayak, or for nooses and traps. I settle for tying them in a double fisherman’s knot, the kind used to bring two ropes together.
The door creaks behind me.
“Knock first!” I shout.
Charlie peeks out quietly from behind the door with wide eyes, like a small animal staring out from hiding. He mumbles something, low and under his breath.
I almost faint. Charlie, speaking? “Sorry, what?”
“You tied it wrong,” he grunts louder. He points to the fisherman’s knot.
“Oh, how does it go?” I try to give an encouraging smile, but my face feels paralyzed.
He takes a step closer, his big hand nimbly unpicking my knot. Then he ties it into loose loops, flopping like wings of a butterfly.
“What do you call this?”
“Bow,” he mumbles.
“Did Mom wear it like this?”
I know I’ve made a mistake, mentioning Mom. His jaw clicks as he grits his teeth. It’s not until my foot has found purchase against the cold, naked concrete floor that I realize that my first reaction upon making a mistake is to take a defensive stance.
He bows his head and shuffles backward. From the other room, I hear the front door slam; I glance beyond the door way, and see Ben. He doesn’t meet my gaze. When I turn back, Charlie’s gone.
I look down at the elegant bow tied on my chest and finger it delicately. It makes me want to cry. I shake my head and think of knife drills. Upper cut, block, stab, upper cut—
“I need the room.” It’s Ben— thin, roaming, glassy eye, messy hair. He’s not bad looking, despite the eye; he’s got a strong jaw like Charlie.
“What, why?”
He holds up a hand, and in it I see a piece of cloth, corduroy, maybe. “Got to change into my reaping clothes.” He unfolds the clothing to reveal a brown jacket and a pair of raggedy black slacks with a single patch of yellow fabric right over the kneecap.
“How did you afford those?” I ask.
“Prim gave them to me.”
“Prim?” I didn’t know that my brother was seeing anyone, but I’m not surprised that he is; he’s charming. But still, who could he be seeing that would be rich enough to buy those kind of clothes for him? Unless . . . “You don’t mean the nurse at the Blood Bank you were flirting with?”
He scowls. “Can I change now?”
“She’s older than me.” I try to keep the scorn out of my voice, but I can’t help it. Just because you decide not to hurt someone, doesn’t mean you automatically love them and agree with their every morally-suspect decision.
“Fuck you.” He tosses his head, bringing his overgrown brown hair to cover his eye. A defense mechanism.
I glance at the clothes he clutches tightly and his uneasy expression. “Hey,” I say gently, “if you wanted clothes, you only had to ask. It could have been an early birthday present. You didn’t have to do things.”
“I’m not prostituting myself. That’s what you do when you go out in the sewers and meet up with the breeder boy.” He thrusts his hips forward, imitating the act.
I clench my fists so hard my nails probably draw blood from my palms. “Don’t provoke me.”
“Why not? Want to finish up the other eye like you did the first?”
“That was an acci—”
“You don’t blind someone by accident.”
I turn around and viciously kick the cardboard box so I don’t roundhouse my brother in the kneecaps. “I’m trying to change.”
“I don’t care if you bring me cookies or try to make sure that my blood levels stay right or check that I’m not driven to sell my body like you do yours. It doesn’t matter if you change, Bella, because this,” he points at the eye, “will still be the same.”
“I made one mistake.” I kick the cardboard box again, harder, and my toe makes contact with something inside of it. Crack.
Something breaks.
I get on my knees to find the thing I kicked. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Don’t lie, not about this,” he says as evenly as he can, watching me sift through the contents of the cardboard box.
Even though I can’t see him, I feel his eyes on me, accusing and sad.
“You’re right,” I murmur, my hands closing around the object my toe bruised itself against — the photo, the only photo I had of my family. Damnit.
“You were the only person I . . . ” he stammers, before stopping himself, but I can hear in his voice he wants to say more, he wants to tell me.
Sometimes, I forget that my brother probably misses the way things used to be between us just as much as I do. At the bottom of the anger and accusations, the wound that probably really festers is loneliness, longing.
But he stoppers up the truth and says instead, “You can’t just say it was a mistake.”
“I know,” I say softly.
He shuffles around me and toward the window, looking out. “Just get out and let me get dressed, alright?”
I leave without another word, clutching the broken picture frame. I will never get forgiveness from my brother. Even if I do die for him in the games, he’ll believe it’s a malicious coincidence until the day he dies.
The edges of the shards are sharp, and I handle them carefully as I separate the picture from the broken frame. From beneath slivers of glass, my mother stares out at me, the warmth of her eyes not quite a comfort.
It’s funny— sometimes when I look out the window of my room at twilight, looking at the all the beautiful colors of the sky, or feel the cool sand beneath my feet with Jacob, or even smile at a joke, it hurts. I experience every good thing with the secret assumption that I’ll lose it.
The gentleness of my mom’s smile across her face in the photograph is the hardest beauty to bear, because it’s already gone. And the real secret I hold inside of me, the truth that drove me to beat my own brother until he bled, is that I lost my mother long before she died.
It all began the year I got second rank and became best friends with Rosalie Hale. I was getting better and better in school and was beginning to seriously consider entering the Morphing Games. My father was proud of the way I could disarm a man almost twice my size in a knife fight, mix poisons from berries, and most of all — take a beating. It didn’t matter how many bruises I came home with, I never cried.
My mother never said she was proud; in fact, the higher up I advanced in the rankings, the less she talked to me. I’ll never know if it was because she couldn’t stand to see me black and blue from school everyday, or if it was that she was disgusted with the thought of her daughter becoming a murderer. Or maybe there was just something about me she couldn’t stand.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t lavish more and more attention on my brother. My brother, who couldn’t throw a dagger or paint a convincing camouflage, who didn’t know the ins and outs of winning the affections of vampire sponsors, and on top all of those deficiencies, didn’t even know the most important skill of all: how to back down.
That night after the party, she waved me away citing exhaustion, but when he knocked on her door, she answered. The walls of our house were thin enough that if I pressed my ear against the headboard of my bed, I could hear him sniffling a anrying as he no doubt toddled into her room. What a pathetic little snot, I thought. Dad said Swans weren’t supposed to cry.
But my mom wasn’t my dad, and when my brother cried, she suddenly magically shed her exhaustion and took him into her arms. I’m not sure, because she was whispering, but I swear I could hear her singing.
“I’ll love you forever.”
I held my pillow so tight the stuffing started to pop out of the end. I bit my lip, taking deep shuddering breaths. I would not cry. As I buried myself in the womb of sheets, curled up fetally against the wall listening to the whispers, I won the battle. I didn’t cry. Maybe I should’ve.
After Mom left and we had to move, he got along with everyone. It seemed like he had finally found his place, where friendships were won with charisma, not fists.
For that first year, I was alone in a world I didn’t understand, without anybody who cared about me, having to come home everyday and see the last person my mother told she loved, the person she loved more than me. And the one certainty of my life, violence, had been taken away from me. It’s not an excuse, just an explanation.
There was no one to tell me not to hit him. In school, all fighting was regulated to minimize injuries, not prevent them. We were supposed to help each other become tougher future Prospectives; that was the foundation of all of our peer to peer relationships.
The problem was, my brother didn’t want to be helped. He wanted someone to laugh at his horrible jokes, help him figure out how fix the radiator, or assemble the manufacturing homework. I didn’t know how to do that; all I knew was how to fight. That was all I could teach him.
At first he wanted to learn, but after a couple bruises, he whined about not wanting to deal with the training school anymore and quit. I didn’t understand how you could do that, quit. Fighting was what the Swans were built for, that’s what my dad always said. And so, even though I knew he’d say no, after a particularly trying day of being snickered at by girls in Home Ec for being unable to fold a sheet properly, I asked my brother to spar.
“I have to finish my homework.”
“Just five minutes. I’ll go easy on you.”
“I said I don’t want to train anymore.”
“We’ll just do blocks. That won’t even hurt.”
“No.”
“You can hit me. Hit me as hard as you want. ”
“Will you get over yourself, Bella. We’re not in training school anymore.”
I grabbed the chair he was sitting in, yanked it out from underneath him. I didn’t understand why he got to wear his deficiencies like a badge of honor. I didn’t understand why people liked him for his weaknesses, his inability to fight.
“Come on, you’ve got to toughen up.” My hands snaked around his stomach. I knew if I squeezed hard enough I could of broken a rib.
He tried to wiggle out of my hold, but his muscles weren’t as developed as mine. “Stop it,” he whined.
I had knowledge of fighting-physics on my side. People who fight fair fight to lose. Still, I loosened my grip. “Fight back.”
“I feel bad for you, Bella.” He gave me a sad look.
I laughed, as if this was all an exercise, as if the stakes weren’t so high that neither of us could even see them anymore. “Just try and get out of my grip, Ben.”
His eyes were all twinkling and tender, like I was a wounded animal he had found underneath a porch. He was so sincere it hurt to look at him. Was I ever that sincere, that stupid? “I’m sorry you don’t have any friends.”
“Stop talking, dumbass, and fight me.”
“I could be your friend.” Every word of his was just steeped in pity. Not sympathy, though, because he didn’t understand— he couldn’t. “All he had was pity, which he felt from his far-away, shining city, where he was appreciated by his friends and could remember that his mother loved him. And yet he was so much less than me in every way I had been taught was valuable.
I grabbed his hair and pulled his neck back. That wasn’t training; that was anger. Out of control. If my brother had an ounce of fighting ability, he should have been able to throw me off balance. I was lunging around wildly and without plan.
He screamed as I pulled his head back farther, a little boy’s scream, high and breathy.
“Mom!” he keened.
He looked so young then. Twelve-year-olds shouldn’t have to call out for dead mothers that will never come. I pulled back, disgusted with myself.
What was I doing? He was my brother; he was just a kid. I could already see the bruises blossoming on his arms. If I missed my mother so much, than why was I hurting the one person she cared about?
I was just about to loosen my hold when the door opened.
Charlie.
He looked at us, entwined together in a way that clearly could not have been pleasant. My hand pulling back my brother’s head—hard. Pain was embossed across my brother’s irises like burning letters.
I was sure that he was finally going to speak, going to tear us apart, going to reprimand me for hurting my brother so bad, going to reprimand my brother for provoking it (even though he hadn’t; my dad always took my side).
He blinked, once.
I almost dropped Ben, to explain, to apologize. To say that I just couldn’t take the way my whole world had become inverted. I was older; I was supposed to be in control.
But before I could, Charlie shuffled around us, walked through the door on the other side, and shut the door.
And that’s when he wasn’t my father anymore.
I turned to Ben. “I’m sorry.”
He looked me up and down once, that damn magnanimous expression on his face. My brother was always so generous, but he always seemed to give people- well me at least, things- I didn’t want.
“It’s okay,” he said, as if he had won.
“I’m leaving, going on a walk. Don’t follow me.” I didn’t mean for it to come out so harsh, but it did.
“Wait—”
I could feel the words he was about to say before he said them. I should have covered my ears; I should have steeled myself somehow. I had been taught to withstand taunting; discipline was a central principal of training school.
But the people at training school never knew the weak-spots in your emotional armor. Or if they did, they didn’t use them; there were rules of combat even in training school. You beat people up, sure, you spread gossip, rumors lies, sure, but you never, ever brought the two together.
Ben wasn’t good at training school, not any part of it, but I thought he would of at least learned this one most crucial rule.
I’m sorry too,” he said, although there was a gleam in his eyes that shown like he was going to say something unforgivable, and he knew it.
“For what?” I asked, trembling from the aftershocks of anger.
He bit his lip, trying to contain something— a cry, a smile? I wasn’t sure which. “I’m sorry that Mom loved me more.”
It didn’t matter that he was a kid, that there was a good chance he was wrong, that he was saying it as a shield against my violence, that he didn’t understand the consequences.
Because he meant every last word.
I went insane from it.
I don’t fully remember what happened after that, but suddenly there was blood, too much blood. He held his face, just screaming, “I can’t see. Why can’t I see?”
I carried the twitching body of my brother to the hospital, paid the high fees on credit that I didn’t have. But it didn’t matter; they couldn’t save the eye. Some part of me knew they wouldn’t be able to from the moment I charged.
Looking at him in the haphazard examination room, I knew something else. They couldn’t save me either. I had blinded my own brother out of hurt, out of rage. It was no wonder my mother didn’t love me. I was the monster— not the vampires, not society, not the rules. Me.
I went out to an old abandoned warehouse the next day. They taught us how to tie a noose in year four, so I knew the how to.
The Why was a little bit more complicated. It force telling me that I was an awful person burned strong in my chest. Strong and bright. So bright I couldn’t bear to look at it, or think about it. I just knew I hurt and that I deserved to hurt even more. They always told us at school that District 2 was about justice, about peace.
There was only one way I knew to get both of them.
I climbed up onto the piping on the ceiling via tottering tower of half-broken bookshelves and was just finished tying when someone said-
“Stop.”
Jacob Black didn’t look anything like my brother as he called out from the doorway, but the way his eyes glanced up at me reminded me of the way my brother used to look when he’d catch me cheating at cards under the blankets.
For the first time, I felt guilt for my brother, not just shame, not just horror, but guilt, because I remembered what he had been.
After the guilt came the rush, the feeling of falling, the understanding of the loss. For my father, for my mother, even for my brother, who would never be the same.
I fell from the rafters into Jacob’s arms, and for the first time in conscious memory, I wept. I sobbed. I screamed.
Because, the truth was, I didn’t hate my brother. I never did. I hated that I believed that he saw me as I really was. I hated myself.
I alienated and hurt the one person who wanted to like me, wanted to help me, because I was proud, because I was afraid.
And that day in the rafters? I was still afraid. Afraid of facing the consequences. So afraid, I was thinking of doing the one thing Swans never did: quit.
I was going to kill myself as a cop-out to dodge the consequences of what I’d done. And as Jacob Black, although I didn’t know his name then, held me, this strange wild girl he found up in the rafters, I realized that if I left, I would just be doing myself a favor by running away.
So when Jacob Black asked why I was trying to kill myself, I told him a lie that happened to be true. I said that my brother had just had surgery to try and save his eye, and even though it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of the hospital. He told me he had a secret place, a place outside the city walls where he fished and found things to sell on the black market.
It was the secret place that saved my life. It was the thought that I wasn’t alone, that someone could trust me, even at my most pathetic, degenerate point. I thought trust was dead, thought I should be dead too. but it wasn’t. I wasn’t. After all I had done, some random boy still trusted me. I wasn’t forgiven, but there was still a little grace left for me in the world.
After that day, I never hit my brother again. I vowed that I would do whatever it took to look out for him. Not make to things right, because making things right would never be possible. I thought a couple of times about offering him the chance to punch me in the eye. An eye for an eye. But he likes seeing the pain of the guilt in my eyes too much to blind them.
What he never understood was that thing, I feel most guilty about isn’t the eye or the bruises, it’s that after the eye he decided he wanted to enter the Morphing Games. That was when he decided he wanted to hurt people too.
13 Thursday Oct 2011
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inHey guys! So funny thing! I’ve never made a video before, but to procrastinate for mid-terms I made one! Yay. Hope you like it. I’m rather proud!
New chapter should be coming soon. On the second beta-reader now.
🙂
12 Wednesday Oct 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inHere are some of my favorite fan-made trailers for the Hunger Games.
They apply pretty well to the Morphing Games too.
If anyone wants to make me a trailer for the Morphing Games, I will reward handsomely with banner making in return! But until that point!
This one works really well because they used twilight actors! Check this one out!
06 Thursday Oct 2011
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inHere is songs that I think fit the mood of The Morphing Games. Each of the coming chapters will feature one (or two) in some way in the glossary, so if you are really clever you might be able to extrapolate spoilers. But I doubt it.
Here it is folks!
06 Thursday Oct 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inCharacter Glossary
Two new characters in this chapter. Jacob and Emily:
Jacob
So Jacob is Taylor Lautner, because I can’t find anyone else I prefer. Not out of any bounding love I have for the guy. But this is Jacob. Young, not with super short hair. I loved the holy shirt, perfect for Dystopia!Jacob.
Emily
Here’s emily! Her hair is probably shorter in the Fic and by probably I mean is, but I think that expression on her face is dead on.!
Places
This is one of my favorite beaches in Chicago, I took this picture a couple of summers ago. Obviously it doesn’t look like this anymore., in the story, in real life it’s still exactly like this But I’d just thought I’d share.
Here was the insperation for the sewers!:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2010/dec/02/london-sewers-thames-water
Check it out!
For the graveyard I had a very specific graveyard in mind, one near LakeShore Drive. Now if I was in Chicago I’d just bike there and take a picture, but I’m not and I can’t find a picture of it via google. So here’s my guesstiamte for the graveyard:
Songs for this Chapter featured from the Playlist!:
06 Thursday Oct 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in
[3]
“Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.”
-Leigh Hunt(Confession! I have no idea who this woman is I just found the quote online and liked it. Does anyone know. Is she a Nazi or something else terrible. I hope not!)
Next to the dark, run-down training center with all the windows, either punched out or boarded up, is the manhole I need. (In my original conception of the Story Bella worked in the Sewers/Subway, and there was trains. This was inspired by my love of the Berlin subway. I don’t know how this idea got discarded. But I’m a little sad it got lost.) When I find it, I pull out the metal plate from the pavement and slip down into the darkness below.
My feet know every rung of the slimy, metal ladder leading down into the sewers, but it’s always shocking after the last one, when they hit air and I’m left hanging. The bigger shock comes when I let go and drop into the water below. The drop isn’t far and the water only a half-foot deep, but the dark makes everything feel more dangerous.
I can’t use my flashlight for the descent because I need my hands to climb, but the moment I stop spluttering, I fish it from my pack and twist its nozzle. Light floods in front of me, illuminating the curved wall covered with stalactites of toilet paper and other miscellanea people flush.(This is actually true. There’s a guy who goes around the London sewers trying to find blockages of shit people accidentally flush. See the visaul appendix for more info!)
The tunnels smell, but not much worse than my backyard, so I don’t mind the journey; or maybe it’s just nice not to be confronted with Rosalie’s name everywhere I look.
After I’ve taken six right turns and seven left, I stop and locate the exit point with my flashlight before snuffing out the light and throwing it into my bag. The calluses on my hands tingle as I mange to grasp the rusty ladder on my first jump. I may not be able to wield an ax like our honorable winner, Rosalie, but I can jump and climb. Which is better than being a murdering bitch, ( I don’t think Bella has sworn at anyone until this point in the story, and I think this is a hint to the intensity of hatred she harbors for Rosalie. FORSHADOWING!) anyway.
I would never say anything bad about the Blood Games, Volterra, or even Rosalie Hale aloud, no matter how much I want to. Inside the walls of the city, everything and everyone is in an informant, and the price of being ratted out is higher than the skyscrapers.
Because my mom sang a song at her birthday party calling President Aro an albino rat, she was changed to Chattel status. (Oooh the song! So many factoids about “the song”. First off, this is a true story. Will psuedish. A friend I met in Berlin’s grandmother was taken by the Stassi police forces because she sang a song calling Lenin not so nice names. She wasn’t killed, but was put in prison for twenty years, when she got out her husband had remarried. She had really totally lost her life. Sad!) There was no trial. No one asked her if she really meant it. No one came by and knocked on our door and pulled her away from us as we said our tearful goodbyes. She just disappeared.
The letter we received, embossed with the blood-red seal of the Volturi, said her death was an honor to our family, wiping away the blemish of her treason. It said that we should be glad that all our money, house, possessions were transferred to the people who informed on us. Even the punished should revel in justice, the letter said.
I revel in justice in my mind in the city, but not for the punished. Unfortunately, it’s a justice I will never be able to dole out. I don’t even entertain the thought of it in any concrete way; that’s how impossible rebellion against the informants, let alone the government, would be.
The only time I can escape the feeling of impotence is outside the walls of the city, the lake. Technically, it’s illegal to leave the city, and I’m old enough that I’m risking Chattel status by doing so, but I have to. The fresh fish, and more importantly, flotsam, that land on the lake shore, are the only things keeping Charlie, Ben and me well fed. (This is a direct nod to the Hunger Games, but instead of the worry about food the worry is about meeting Blood Quotas.)
The sewers bring me out about three or four miles from the city wall, onto a cracked and broken road overlooking a stretch of shore lined with boulders. Below the boulders, glass from the thousands of bottles thrown away by humans during the time of excess has been weathered into multicolored sand and pebbles of sea-glass, so that every time the white of a wave crashes against the crags of the rock, the spray is speckled with bits of rainbows. (This is a real place in California, for more info see the glossary!) It’s deceptively beautiful. This part of the lake is filled with toxic bacteria and not safe to swim in, but if you’re careful to avoid the water you can walk on the beach. (The idea from the bacteria was another stolen idea insperation taken from Aimmyarrows high’s fic 24 Quarter Quell canidates.)
On the other side of the road is a graveyard and the leaning against a headstone the boy who saved my life the night my brother lost his eye. (I’m originally from Chicago and there is a graveyard right on Lakeshore drive that I always pass. The boulders there line the beach too. See visual appendix for more.)
He’s tall and his skin is almost black. Dark skin is considered a blemish, as the paleness of vampires is perpetually in fashion, but Jacob pulls it off.
As I move closer, I can see his lips moving, but it doesn’t seem like he’s talking to me. At least, I can’t hear him, and Jacob has never had problems being too soft spoken.
“Hey, Jacob,” I call as I vault easily over the black, wrought-iron fence.
Finally, he turns to look me, but to my surprise, takes a step back. “Bella,” he greets me, but a little less warmly than usual. “Hey, you’re here early?”
“Actually, I’m late — I think.” I thread my way through the tombstones and statues. Much like the sewers, at first the meeting place of the graveyard was off putting, but now it feels familiar.
As I get closer I realize he’s not just leaning on the headstone, but standing in front of a small obelisk, one hand behind him. It’s amazing to see the purity of stone, tainted only by time and moss, not spray paint like everything inside the walls. The only things comparable are the statues from the Blood Bank, but the obelisk was made by human hands — not supernatural monsters.
To my surprise, the obelisk says, “Jacob! Is this Bella? The one you said you’re in — ” I would think it’s Jacob playing a trick, but the obelisk sounds not like his imitation of a ghost, but like a girl, a young one.
I lean to one side in order to peer around. There, hiding behind the obelisk, holding Jacob’s hand is a small girl. She can’t be more than twelve or thirteen, and her skin is dark like Jacob’s, her eyes wide and vulnerable. Instantly, I’m wary. (Bella is wary not only because she doesn’t trust Emily, but perhaps because she doesn’t trust herself!)
“Emily,” Jacob says with a sigh.
I freeze. This is our place; this is the place where no one can hurt us, no one can inform on us. No one else should be here. No one. This is where I’m supposed to be able say things that would get me killed inside the city walls. Where I can laugh, smile, blush, and be human. (HUMANITY! Number one theme of the story, what makes someone human, what does it mean to lose it.)
“Jacob,” I say slowly as to contain the anxiety, “who is this?”
The little girl takes this as an invitation to launch herself at me, and I react that the way I was trained, bracing myself and catching her weight, using her momentum to rebuff her. She lands with a thump on her rear in a pile of leaves. They flutter up around her like a flock of autumn birds taking off.
“Owww!’” she yells. “I was just trying to give you a hug, jeeze!”
Jacob rushes to help pick her up, brushing the stray leaves stuck to her gray jumpsuit off.
“Did she follow you?”
“Hell, Bella, she’s my sister. I bring her up when you can’t come sometimes for company. You don’t have to wrestle her.” He presses her to his side tightly, protecting her from me.
Still, it doesn’t matter that he’s mad. His safety is more important than his affection. Jacob isn’t the best at keeping things secret or vetting the people he tells those secrets to.
After my brother, Charlie and I moved to the poorer part of District 2, I had to move schools as well, exchanging my education Femme Training Elite, an academy specifically geared for toward preparing for the Morphing Games, to School #12, a coed manufacturing and ‘life skills’ institution . . . calling it an institution was being generous.
Jacob was the only boy whom I couldn’t beat to a pulp, which meant that I had to be nice to him. But it wasn’t until that night that we became friends, that he showed me the secret passage out of the city. I don’t know what else we could have become after what he did for me.
I would’ve never hurt Jacob, but there’s no way he could have known that at the time. It was foolhardy for him to take me in, and I’ll be in debt to him for his stupidity for the rest of my life.
“Which sister?” I ask.
Jacob has six sisters and five brothers. His mother and father are breeders, given the edict to have as many babies as possible because of their superlative genes and delicious blood.
The girl smiles and I can see the familial resemblance, which eases me a little “I’m Emily. You gave me a rubber ducky. Well, Jacob did, but he said you found it. So thanks for that.” She gives a warm smile, the same smile her brother has.
“You’re welcome.” I give her a pathetic mockery of one in return. “Jacob, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
He gives a little grunt sigh, and taps his fingers against the tombstone. “Bella, come on, the more hands on deck the bigger the haul. And you know my mom just had a new baby. We need the help.”
“I won’t tell anybody! Jacob made me promise.” She holds her hand up high as if she’s saying the Volterran Pledge of Allegiance. It makes me shudder.
I like this plan less and less.
“Does she know the rules?” I ask. “Not to get too close to the water.”
“Yep!” she chimes, skipping around the tombstones like they’re her playground.
I sigh. “Fine, but if she slows us down, she goes home.”
“Deal!” yells Emily brightly, so loud I think a far away crow flies away out of fright.
We comb the beaches until it gets too dark to see. Emily is useful, despite how annoying she is, sometimes walking between Jacob and me, other times pointing and giggling at us like we’re some kind of couple. But she has an eye for things on the beach that me and Jacob and I don’t, and she’s nimble, dodging easily every time a wave creeps too close to her tiny, bare, dark feet.
While I only find a plank of wood and a rusty piece of pipe and Jacob doesn’t find anything at all— he’s much better at fishing than combing— she finds a small bottle-cap pin, a scrap of net not too badly damaged and a couple of aluminum cans. Still, she slows us down.
“Look at all these colors, Jacob! It’s so pretty! You should give one to Bella as a present,” she says once, stopping at a particularly vivid collection of salmon sea-glass. “Maybe then she won’t be such a stick in the sand,” she whispers, unaware of my superlative hearing.
“Emmy-bear, we have to keep walking,” says Jacob, but instead of hurrying her on, he picks her up in his arms and carries her forward.
I roll my eyes and pick up my pace. I trust Jacob with my life. He’s my only friend, but that doesn’t mean I have to put up with his sister invading our place and calling me names. I would never bring my brother here, but then again I would never call my brother “Benny-Bear”. I think that would be the final straw for him; he’d try and strangle me in my sleep.
Behind me I hear her giggling and urging Jacob to carry her faster like a good little horsie. I hope this doesn’t become a routine. I don’t know if I can deal with her in the close quarters of the small fishing kayak we have stowed further up shore where the bacteria aren’t as strong.
Thankfully, it’s too cold to fish today. We can only fish during the summer, when we’re sure that if we capsize we won’t die of hypothermia.
By twilight (TWILIGHT REFERENCE AHOY!) we’re back at the graveyard, and Jacob and “Emmy-bear” seem to be more merry than humanly possible. I just want to go home and sleep; unfortunately, I’ll only have an hour or two before the midnight Reaping.
I’ve been avoiding thinking about it; that’s kind of my strategy for dealing with things I can’t change like the blood quotas, my brother, my mother. But in the end, my mind always rebels against me, wielding the sword of guilt and the shield of facts.
The fact is this: if my brother volunteers, he’s going to die. Whatever feel-good nonsense he tells himself about his eye, there’s no way he can win the games half-blind. Maybe if he had another skill to make up for it, but being able to lift rusty weights and insult your sister won’t help when a bulky tribute from District 4 comes at you with a trident. (FINNICK reference Ahoy!)
Theoretically, I could volunteer, beat him in hand-to-hand combat and take his place, entering the one game I want more than anything not to play.
My nightmares are haunted with the Morphing Games’ exercises from training school: how to test the soundness of rickety bridges, how to use a reed as a snorkel when under pursuit, how to trick someone into trusting you before snapping their neck, how to torture them if they have information you need, but mostly how to kill them if they don’t. God, hasn’t the Morphing Games tortured me enough? Will I really enter the Games so they can do it some more, so that they can laugh at me and bet on my suffering? Dance, human dance!
Yes. I will do anything to save my brother. Not because I love him— I don’t know if it’s possible to love someone that hates you as much as Ben hates me—but because I owe him.
There’s only one problem. My brother is a boy and I can only volunteer to take the place of someone who is the same gender as me. I can feel another option on the edge of my brain, like acid rain on a tin roof, tapping and burning.
“Bella,” Jacob says. “Thoughts taking you to worry-land again?” He’s alone now, standing near a single tombstone on the edge of the graveyard. ((Worry-land is for some reason key to my Jacob, he uses this again in chapter six, after the reaping.))
“Where’s Emily?” I ask. I don’t want her to know my secrets. Having her here while we combed was bad enough.
He mistakes my concern for privacy for concern for her welfare. “I told Emily to go to the sewers and wait there. She’ll be fine. Now, what’s up?”
Guilt shoots through me at forcing a twelve-year old into the sewers just so I can talk to my friend. “It’s nothing.”
It’s not fair for me to burden Jacob, happy, carefree Jacob who has a sister with a nickname and a smile that, if I’m honest, makes me want to pick her up and never let her go too.
“Bella,” he groans. “Just tell me. you know what they say— ‘the best Bloodletting is a quick one.’ (I have a small obession with making up proverbs to fit this universe.) Get it over fast.”
“Whatever, I said it’s nothing. Let’s go.”
I try and hurry past him, but he grabs my arm. “Come on, Bella; I know you. It’s about Ben, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I mumble lamely, prying his fingers from my arm.
He pivots to face me, nods and raises an eyebrow. “And?”
“He wants to volunteer, and he can; he’s sixteen now.”
Jacob’s face falls. “Volunteer?”
I roll my eyes. Why does everyone seem to have such a hard time understanding the concept? “Go fight in the Morphing Games. If he’s lucky he’ll become a murderer, and if he’s not he’ll become a corpse.”
“He’s not one of those idiot careers, so why would he ever—” He stops himself, realizing that he’s talking about me, or at least who I used to be.
I give a knowing smile. “It’s alright; I was stupid back then. But it was also all I knew. I didn’t study manufacturing or construction or cleaning like we do in trade school.”
I don’t like to talk about the time before, and Jacob knows that. He has a vague idea of what training school was like, but I had never stated it explicitly. “I studied how to win the Morphing Games, how to kill people, how to kill my friends. And my brother did too, although not for as long.”
He shakes his head. “That’s sick, Bella. To want to be in the Morphing Games, to train for it.”
I can’t help but find the whole thing a little ironic. “You know that most of the careers, the ones who train their whole lives, they all think that you poor people are the ones with it bad.”
His hand snakes into mine and pulls me closer. We’ve held hands before, but not like this. I mean, he makes the occasional innuendo, but I don’t feel those feelings that other girls talk about, and certainly not for someone like Jacob, who feels more like my brother than my real one ever had. But I don’t move away. Maybe it makes me a coward, but I can’t lose his friendship just because I don’t have a crush on him back.
“You know,” he says quietly, a twinkle in his eye. “You’re one of us poor people too now.”
I don’t say anything to this, because the truth is, as much as I love Jacob, I haven’t felt like a part of anything since my family crumbled. This, our space in the rainbow beach and preserved gravestones, it’s an escape. It’s a dream.
He touches a strand of my hair, and I can’t help but back away a little. He lets me go. “Emily likes you, in spite of you being jealous of her.” Most of the time Jacob Black is oblivious, but sometimes he surprises me with how perceptive he can be.
“I’m not jealous,” I say just a little too quickly. The thought never occurred to me, but I suppose it’s a little true. I only have one friend, and the thought that anything might happen to him, that I’d be alone like before . . .
He smirks. “Don’t worry. There’s plenty of Black for all the ladies.” He flexes a thick bicep and waggles his eyebrows as if to suggest that I could have a piece of the Jacob Black pie, right now, right here on the beach if I wanted.
I can’t help but laugh. I don’t laugh often, and Jacob’s the only one who can ever make me. “I’m just mad because she called me a stick in the sand.” I give a fake pout. As if this is the worst insult I’ve ever heard.
He tilts his head back, laughing too. “Bella, she’s twelve. All she wants to do is look at pretty sea-glass.”
I don’t remember what it was like to be twelve and want to pick up sea-glass. I remember learning how to boil water using magnifying glasses, which points of the human body are most vulnerable to pressure, how to check for signs of life on a corpse, then if they are present, learning how to eliminate them.
“Of course if you want to actually do work she’s going to call you names. She’s called me worse things than stick in the sand, but that doesn’t mean she hates me or something.”
“My brother hates me.”
“You always say that,” Jacob says carefully. “But I remember that night, Bella . . . what you were going to do, just because you were worried you had failed him. How could he hate a sister who cared about him as much as that?”
This time it’s me who laughs, but it’s distorted, bitter and quiet. “You don’t understand.”
“Bella, I was there; how could I not understand?”
Because I lied to you, I want to say. Because you weren’t there, not really. You just saw the aftermath.
Jacob’s never asked if there’s something I’m not telling him; he’s always believed he has a complete understanding of what happened. Although it leads to impasses like this, it’s the only way our friendship works. If he ever suddenly gets clever enough to realize that there are gaps in the story, if he ever asks me about what he doesn’t understand, I’d have to tell him. And that would be the end of their friendship.
We sit in silence for a moment; his hand inches toward mine, but doesn’t touch it. I know that if I move a little closer he would have me in his arms. I stay still.
“I have a plan, you know, if he volunteers.” The moment I say it I wish I hadn’t. Jacob will not understand this precariously constructed second option I have. I don’t even understand it; it’s insane.
“Going to call on Jacob Black to save the day?” He’s still laughing, his eyes finding crannies and nooks of my body to stare at. He’s been doing that more and more lately.
“I’m going to volunteer too.”
The smile doesn’t fall from his face, just evaporates so quick I’m hesitant to say it was ever there. “No.”
“I won’t kill my brother. Although, I won’t be surprised if he thinks that. I’ll protect him. I’ll kill who I have to kill and in the end, I’ll let him emerge the victor.”
“L-let him emerge-“ Jacob stutters.
My gaze drifts out to the waves crashing against the rocks. I imagine drowning in multi-colored sand and bacteria water. (HUUUUGE FORSHADOWING!!!!) There are worse ways to die than in mosaics of soft glass every color of the rainbow. I’ll probably be facing them soon.
When I tilt my head to look at him, I’m surprised by how angry his face is; he’s almost snarling.
“Fuck it, Bella. I get you want to protect Ben. But what has he ever done for you? You’ve told me the things he says, what he does. You bust your ass everyday to keep his quotas intact, and he doesn’t give a shit.”
I don’t say anything. At my silence Jacob’s face falls a little. He reaches out to touch my shoulder, but stops before his hand makes contact.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to insult your brother.”
“No.” I shrug. “It’s true. He doesn’t give a shit about me, at least not the good kind.”
“So then, why volunteer? I mean, it’s not like he’s being forced to go against his will.”
“It’s just something I have to do,” I say.
He’s not happy with this answer. Some part of me worries that he will never be happy again if I die in the Games. He’s never had to think about death. Sure, occasionally his mother lost a baby while it was still in the womb, but Jacob had never lost anyone whose face he’d seen, whose name he’d known. One of the upshots of being from a breeder family is having automatically superior blood, just by the luck of genetics. It doesn’t win money, but it does win safety from blood quotas.
I imagine that if I had been born to the rambunctious Black house, my life would have been a lot different.
But now, I’ve brought my problems, my twisted world, into his relatively perfect one. It seems Rosalie is right; the only way I can express love is by hurting the people I care about.
“You know what, Bella?” He’s calmed down slightly, but I can still see hints of real anger through his optimism. “If you volunteer, I’ll volunteer too. If I can beat you in a fight, then I sure as hell can beat your puny brother.”
Jacob is such a child, but even in his immaturity I feel affection for him. I jump off a bridge and what does he do? Follow. Sometimes, I wonder if he is my real little brother and Ben is just some imposter. This makes me hate myself even more.
“Jacob,” I say patiently, “you can’t.”
“Why not?” He’s only a few steps away from sticking out his tongue.
“Your family, Emily, what would they do without you?”
His brow furrows, and I can see he hasn’t thought of this. “They would manage,” he says, but there’s hesitation between every syllable.
“No,” I say firmly, “they wouldn’t. The breeding stipend isn’t enough to feed everybody, and they need the fish and the money from selling junk.”
“Your dad needs you,” he counters.
“My dad’s a ghost; you can’t hurt a ghost, not really.” I know this from experience. After Mom died I shouted at Charlie that I wished he was were dead, that he made me wish I were dead. He didn’t even blink.
“There’s gotta be a way to make your brother not volunteer,” he says firmly, “I’ll take some of the gang and beat him up.”
“If he rats you out for interfering with the Reaping, you’ll all be changed to Chattel. And make no mistake, he will rat you out, Jacob.”
Muffled from the manhole, I hear a high pitched voice. “Jaaacob, come on! It smells like your farts in here. Have you been eating the Mexican flavored Blood Bars again?” ((I ❤ Emily. I hope you do to. Having the audience like her is very important.))
“You should go,” I say. “I think your sister is stuck in the sewer.”
He looks like he’s going to join Emily, but then he pulls my hand closer to his. This time I let, him because know now that I’ve said my plan that if my brother volunteers, I will execute it. There is a good chance this will be our last meeting on the graveyard by the beach.
His lips whisper chastely over my cheek, giving just one peck. “If you asked me to, I would volunteer in his place. I know I haven’t been trained, but I’ve watched the Games on TV like everyone else.”
His lower lips trembles slightly, his brow furrowed. A feeling stirs in my chest, one I know well: guilt. It sharpens the blade of empathy that twists in my gut. I should have never told him my plan, never put that burden on him. But if I didn’t tell anyone, no one would know if I failed my brother.
“I’ll never ask that of you, Jacob,” I say softly.
His eyes are as wide as his sister’s. “Can I ask you something, then?” He looks down at the ground shyly, so different from the boy flexing his muscles.
“What?”
“Can I kiss you, just once? You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to.”
I nod stiffly, afraid, that if I open my mouth I’ll cry. Then slowly, he lowers his lips onto mine. They are soft, warm and real, and while I don’t want to put my hand in his hair, or rub myself up against him, or for him to put his tongue in my mouth, I also don’t want him to go either.
All to soon, his lips leave mine.
“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” he says. He’s so close, I can smell his breath. He has been eating Mexican Blood bars; the thought almost makes me laugh.
“You’re smiling,” he says in wonder. “I love it when you smile.” He cups my face gently, as if checking the freshness of a flower.
It hurts, the way he looks at me. I’m not beautiful; I’m not innocent. And he can never know, or he’d hate me as much as my real brother does. I close my eyes.
“Can I ask you something?” he asks.
“Again?”
“Wear something pretty for the Reaping,” he says lightly. (Gale-Jacob! Ahoy! Direct Hunger Games quote here.)
He gives a long sigh, and I feel terrible that I’m the cause of it. If only I were less selfish and didn’t tell him about my brother.
When I open my eyes, only a few seconds later, he’s gone. All I can see is a half open manhole cover. I wait a minute before following them, perusing the names of the gravestones.
The one on the end is my favorite, although I can’t say why. Maybe because it’s alone, keeping its secrets for eternity. Maybe because sometimes in the sunlight it sparkles a little. Maybe it’s the way the name is etched so cleanly onto the old stone.
Edward Anthony Masen 1901-1927
(HAha Edward is dead forevvvva! Obviously not. I put this here not for any-reason just to hint at the location of where District 2 is. Helooo Chicago, and also to demonstrate that Edward is clearly going to appear in the story as a vamp. 10,000 Morphing Game points to anyone who can guess what role he’ll fill!)
“You lucky bastard,” I say to the grave, “you got out of here when the going was still good.”
And then I too descend back into the manhole, and to my fate.
06 Thursday Oct 2011
Posted Uncategorized
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[3]
“Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.”
-Leigh Hunt
Next to the dark, run-down training center with all the windows, either punched out or boarded up, is the manhole I need. When I find it, I pull out the metal plate from the pavement and slip down into the darkness below.
My feet know every rung of the slimy, metal ladder leading down into the sewers, but it’s always shocking after the last one, when they hit air and I’m left hanging. The bigger shock comes when I let go and drop into the water below. The drop isn’t far and the water only a half-foot deep, but the dark makes everything feel more dangerous.
I can’t use my flashlight for the descent because I need my hands to climb, but the moment I stop spluttering, I fish it from my pack and twist its nozzle. Light floods in front of me, illuminating the curved wall covered with stalactites of toilet paper and other miscellanea people flush.
The tunnels smell, but not much worse than my backyard, so I don’t mind the journey; or maybe it’s just nice not to be confronted with Rosalie’s name everywhere I look.
After I’ve taken six right turns and seven left, I stop and locate the exit point with my flashlight before snuffing out the light and throwing it into my bag. The calluses on my hands tingle as I mange to grasp the rusty ladder on my first jump. I may not be able to wield an ax like our honorable winner, Rosalie, but I can jump and climb. Which is better than being a murdering bitch, anyway.
I would never say anything bad about the Blood Games, Volterra, or even Rosalie Hale aloud, no matter how much I want to. Inside the walls of the city, everything and everyone is in an informant, and the price of being ratted out is higher than the skyscrapers.
Because my mom sang a song at her birthday party calling President Aro an albino rat, she was changed to Chattel status. There was no trial. No one asked her if she really meant it. No one came by and knocked on our door and pulled her away from us as we said our tearful goodbyes. She just disappeared.
The letter we received, embossed with the blood-red seal of the Volturi, said her death was an honor to our family, wiping away the blemish of her treason. It said that we should be glad that all our money, house, possessions were transferred to the people who informed on us. Even the punished should revel in justice, the letter said.
I revel in justice in my mind in the city, but not for the punished. Unfortunately, it’s a justice I will never be able to dole out. I don’t even entertain the thought of it in any concrete way; that’s how impossible rebellion against the informants, let alone the government, would be.
The only time I can escape the feeling of impotence is outside the walls of the city, the lake. Technically, it’s illegal to leave the city, and I’m old enough that I’m risking Chattel status by doing so, but I have to. The fresh fish, and more importantly, flotsam, that land on the lake shore, are the only things keeping Charlie, Ben and me well fed.
The sewers bring me out about three or four miles from the city wall, onto a cracked and broken road overlooking a stretch of shore lined with boulders. Below the boulders, glass from the thousands of bottles thrown away by humans during the time of excess has been weathered into multicolored sand and pebbles of sea-glass, so that every time the white of a wave crashes against the crags of the rock, the spray is speckled with bits of rainbows. It’s deceptively beautiful. This part of the lake is filled with toxic bacteria and not safe to swim in, but if you’re careful to avoid the water you can walk on the beach.
On the other side of the road is a graveyard and the leaning against a headstone the boy who saved my life the night my brother lost his eye.
He’s tall and his skin is almost black. Dark skin is considered a blemish, as the paleness of vampires is perpetually in fashion, but Jacob pulls it off.
As I move closer, I can see his lips moving, but it doesn’t seem like he’s talking to me. At least, I can’t hear him, and Jacob has never had problems being too soft spoken.
“Hey, Jacob,” I call as I vault easily over the black, wrought-iron fence.
Finally, he turns to look me, but to my surprise, takes a step back. “Bella,” he greets me, but a little less warmly than usual. “Hey, you’re here early?”
“Actually, I’m late — I think.” I thread my way through the tombstones and statues. Much like the sewers, at first the meeting place of the graveyard was off putting, but now it feels familiar.
As I get closer I realize he’s not just leaning on the headstone, but standing in front of a small obelisk, one hand behind him. It’s amazing to see the purity of stone, tainted only by time and moss, not spray paint like everything inside the walls. The only things comparable are the statues from the Blood Bank, but the obelisk was made by human hands — not supernatural monsters.
To my surprise, the obelisk says, “Jacob! Is this Bella? The one you said you’re in — ” I would think it’s Jacob playing a trick, but the obelisk sounds not like his imitation of a ghost, but like a girl, a young one.
I lean to one side in order to peer around. There, hiding behind the obelisk, holding Jacob’s hand is a small girl. She can’t be more than twelve or thirteen, and her skin is dark like Jacob’s, her eyes wide and vulnerable. Instantly, I’m wary.
“Emily,” Jacob says with a sigh.
I freeze. This is our place; this is the place where no one can hurt us, no one can inform on us. No one else should be here. No one. This is where I’m supposed to be able say things that would get me killed inside the city walls. Where I can laugh, smile, blush, and be human.
“Jacob,” I say slowly as to contain the anxiety, “who is this?”
The little girl takes this as an invitation to launch herself at me, and I react that the way I was trained, bracing myself and catching her weight, using her momentum to rebuff her. She lands with a thump on her rear in a pile of leaves. They flutter up around her like a flock of autumn birds taking off.
“Owww!’” she yells. “I was just trying to give you a hug, jeeze!”
Jacob rushes to help pick her up, brushing the stray leaves stuck to her gray jumpsuit off.
“Did she follow you?”
“Hell, Bella, she’s my sister. I bring her up when you can’t come sometimes for company. You don’t have to wrestle her.” He presses her to his side tightly, protecting her from me.
Still, it doesn’t matter that he’s mad. His safety is more important than his affection. Jacob isn’t the best at keeping things secret or vetting the people he tells those secrets to.
After my brother, Charlie and I moved to the poorer part of District 2, I had to move schools as well, exchanging my education Femme Training Elite, an academy specifically geared for toward preparing for the Morphing Games, to School #12, a coed manufacturing and ‘life skills’ institution . . . calling it an institution was being generous.
Jacob was the only boy whom I couldn’t beat to a pulp, which meant that I had to be nice to him. But it wasn’t until that night that we became friends, that he showed me the secret passage out of the city. I don’t know what else we could have become after what he did for me.
I would’ve never hurt Jacob, but there’s no way he could have known that at the time. It was foolhardy for him to take me in, and I’ll be in debt to him for his stupidity for the rest of my life.
“Which sister?” I ask.
Jacob has six sisters and five brothers. His mother and father are breeders, given the edict to have as many babies as possible because of their superlative genes and delicious blood.
The girl smiles and I can see the familial resemblance, which eases me a little “I’m Emily. You gave me a rubber ducky. Well, Jacob did, but he said you found it. So thanks for that.” She gives a warm smile, the same smile her brother has.
“You’re welcome.” I give her a pathetic mockery of one in return. “Jacob, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
He gives a little grunt sigh, and taps his fingers against the tombstone. “Bella, come on, the more hands on deck the bigger the haul. And you know my mom just had a new baby. We need the help.”
“I won’t tell anybody! Jacob made me promise.” She holds her hand up high as if she’s saying the Volterran Pledge of Allegiance. It makes me shudder.
I like this plan less and less.
“Does she know the rules?” I ask. “Not to get too close to the water.”
“Yep!” she chimes, skipping around the tombstones like they’re her playground.
I sigh. “Fine, but if she slows us down, she goes home.”
“Deal!” yells Emily brightly, so loud I think a far away crow flies away out of fright.
We comb the beaches until it gets too dark to see. Emily is useful, despite how annoying she is, sometimes walking between Jacob and me, other times pointing and giggling at us like we’re some kind of couple. But she has an eye for things on the beach that me and Jacob and I don’t, and she’s nimble, dodging easily every time a wave creeps too close to her tiny, bare, dark feet.
While I only find a plank of wood and a rusty piece of pipe and Jacob doesn’t find anything at all— he’s much better at fishing than combing— she finds a small bottle-cap pin, a scrap of net not too badly damaged and a couple of aluminum cans. Still, she slows us down.
“Look at all these colors, Jacob! It’s so pretty! You should give one to Bella as a present,” she says once, stopping at a particularly vivid collection of salmon sea-glass. “Maybe then she won’t be such a stick in the sand,” she whispers, unaware of my superlative hearing.
“Emmy-bear, we have to keep walking,” says Jacob, but instead of hurrying her on, he picks her up in his arms and carries her forward.
I roll my eyes and pick up my pace. I trust Jacob with my life. He’s my only friend, but that doesn’t mean I have to put up with his sister invading our place and calling me names. I would never bring my brother here, but then again I would never call my brother “Benny-Bear”. I think that would be the final straw for him; he’d try and strangle me in my sleep.
Behind me I hear her giggling and urging Jacob to carry her faster like a good little horsie. I hope this doesn’t become a routine. I don’t know if I can deal with her in the close quarters of the small fishing kayak we have stowed further up shore where the bacteria aren’t as strong.
Thankfully, it’s too cold to fish today. We can only fish during the summer, when we’re sure that if we capsize we won’t die of hypothermia.
By twilight we’re back at the graveyard, and Jacob and “Emmy-bear” seem to be more merry than humanly possible. I just want to go home and sleep; unfortunately, I’ll only have an hour or two before the midnight Reaping.
I’ve been avoiding thinking about it; that’s kind of my strategy for dealing with things I can’t change like the blood quotas, my brother, my mother. But in the end, my mind always rebels against me, wielding the sword of guilt and the shield of facts.
The fact is this: if my brother volunteers, he’s going to die. Whatever feel-good nonsense he tells himself about his eye, there’s no way he can win the games half-blind. Maybe if he had another skill to make up for it, but being able to lift rusty weights and insult your sister won’t help when a bulky tribute from District 4 comes at you with a trident.
Theoretically, I could volunteer, beat him in hand-to-hand combat and take his place, entering the one game I want more than anything not to play.
My nightmares are haunted with the Morphing Games’ exercises from training school: how to test the soundness of rickety bridges, how to use a reed as a snorkel when under pursuit, how to trick someone into trusting you before snapping their neck, how to torture them if they have information you need, but mostly how to kill them if they don’t. God, hasn’t the Morphing Games tortured me enough? Will I really enter the Games so they can do it some more, so that they can laugh at me and bet on my suffering? Dance, human dance!
Yes. I will do anything to save my brother. Not because I love him— I don’t know if it’s possible to love someone that hates you as much as Ben hates me—but because I owe him.
There’s only one problem. My brother is a boy and I can only volunteer to take the place of someone who is the same gender as me. I can feel another option on the edge of my brain, like acid rain on a tin roof, tapping and burning.
“Bella,” Jacob says. “Thoughts taking you to worry-land again?” He’s alone now, standing near a single tombstone on the edge of the graveyard.
“Where’s Emily?” I ask. I don’t want her to know my secrets. Having her here while we combed was bad enough.
He mistakes my concern for privacy for concern for her welfare. “I told Emily to go to the sewers and wait there. She’ll be fine. Now, what’s up?”
Guilt shoots through me at forcing a twelve-year old into the sewers just so I can talk to my friend. “It’s nothing.”
It’s not fair for me to burden Jacob, happy, carefree Jacob who has a sister with a nickname and a smile that, if I’m honest, makes me want to pick her up and never let her go too.
“Bella,” he groans. “Just tell me. you know what they say— ‘the best Bloodletting is a quick one.’ Get it over fast.”
“Whatever, I said it’s nothing. Let’s go.”
I try and hurry past him, but he grabs my arm. “Come on, Bella; I know you. It’s about Ben, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I mumble lamely, prying his fingers from my arm.
He pivots to face me, nods and raises an eyebrow. “And?”
“He wants to volunteer, and he can; he’s sixteen now.”
Jacob’s face falls. “Volunteer?”
I roll my eyes. Why does everyone seem to have such a hard time understanding the concept? “Go fight in the Morphing Games. If he’s lucky he’ll become a murderer, and if he’s not he’ll become a corpse.”
“He’s not one of those idiot careers, so why would he ever—” He stops himself, realizing that he’s talking about me, or at least who I used to be.
I give a knowing smile. “It’s alright; I was stupid back then. But it was also all I knew. I didn’t study manufacturing or construction or cleaning like we do in trade school.”
I don’t like to talk about the time before, and Jacob knows that. He has a vague idea of what training school was like, but I had never stated it explicitly. “I studied how to win the Morphing Games, how to kill people, how to kill my friends. And my brother did too, although not for as long.”
He shakes his head. “That’s sick, Bella. To want to be in the Morphing Games, to train for it.”
I can’t help but find the whole thing a little ironic. “You know that most of the careers, the ones who train their whole lives, they all think that you poor people are the ones with it bad.”
His hand snakes into mine and pulls me closer. We’ve held hands before, but not like this. I mean, he makes the occasional innuendo, but I don’t feel those feelings that other girls talk about, and certainly not for someone like Jacob, who feels more like my brother than my real one ever had. But I don’t move away. Maybe it makes me a coward, but I can’t lose his friendship just because I don’t have a crush on him back.
“You know,” he says quietly, a twinkle in his eye. “You’re one of us poor people too now.”
I don’t say anything to this, because the truth is, as much as I love Jacob, I haven’t felt like a part of anything since my family crumbled. This, our space in the rainbow beach and preserved gravestones, it’s an escape. It’s a dream.
He touches a strand of my hair, and I can’t help but back away a little. He lets me go. “Emily likes you, in spite of you being jealous of her.” Most of the time Jacob Black is oblivious, but sometimes he surprises me with how perceptive he can be.
“I’m not jealous,” I say just a little too quickly. The thought never occurred to me, but I suppose it’s a little true. I only have one friend, and the thought that anything might happen to him, that I’d be alone like before . . .
He smirks. “Don’t worry. There’s plenty of Black for all the ladies.” He flexes a thick bicep and waggles his eyebrows as if to suggest that I could have a piece of the Jacob Black pie, right now, right here on the beach if I wanted.
I can’t help but laugh. I don’t laugh often, and Jacob’s the only one who can ever make me. “I’m just mad because she called me a stick in the sand.” I give a fake pout. As if this is the worst insult I’ve ever heard.
He tilts his head back, laughing too. “Bella, she’s twelve. All she wants to do is look at pretty sea-glass.”
I don’t remember what it was like to be twelve and want to pick up sea-glass. I remember learning how to boil water using magnifying glasses, which points of the human body are most vulnerable to pressure, how to check for signs of life on a corpse, then if they are present, learning how to eliminate them.
“Of course if you want to actually do work she’s going to call you names. She’s called me worse things than stick in the sand, but that doesn’t mean she hates me or something.”
“My brother hates me.”
“You always say that,” Jacob says carefully. “But I remember that night, Bella . . . what you were going to do, just because you were worried you had failed him. How could he hate a sister who cared about him as much as that?”
This time it’s me who laughs, but it’s distorted, bitter and quiet. “You don’t understand.”
“Bella, I was there; how could I not understand?”
Because I lied to you, I want to say. Because you weren’t there, not really. You just saw the aftermath.
Jacob’s never asked if there’s something I’m not telling him; he’s always believed he has a complete understanding of what happened. Although it leads to impasses like this, it’s the only way our friendship works. If he ever suddenly gets clever enough to realize that there are gaps in the story, if he ever asks me about what he doesn’t understand, I’d have to tell him. And that would be the end of their friendship.
We sit in silence for a moment; his hand inches toward mine, but doesn’t touch it. I know that if I move a little closer he would have me in his arms. I stay still.
“I have a plan, you know, if he volunteers.” The moment I say it I wish I hadn’t. Jacob will not understand this precariously constructed second option I have. I don’t even understand it; it’s insane.
“Going to call on Jacob Black to save the day?” He’s still laughing, his eyes finding crannies and nooks of my body to stare at. He’s been doing that more and more lately.
“I’m going to volunteer too.”
The smile doesn’t fall from his face, just evaporates so quick I’m hesitant to say it was ever there. “No.”
“I won’t kill my brother. Although, I won’t be surprised if he thinks that. I’ll protect him. I’ll kill who I have to kill and in the end, I’ll let him emerge the victor.”
“L-let him emerge-“ Jacob stutters.
My gaze drifts out to the waves crashing against the rocks. I imagine drowning in multi-colored sand and bacteria water. There are worse ways to die than in mosaics of soft glass every color of the rainbow. I’ll probably be facing them soon.
When I tilt my head to look at him, I’m surprised by how angry his face is; he’s almost snarling.
“Fuck it, Bella. I get you want to protect Ben. But what has he ever done for you? You’ve told me the things he says, what he does. You bust your ass everyday to keep his quotas intact, and he doesn’t give a shit.”
I don’t say anything. At my silence Jacob’s face falls a little. He reaches out to touch my shoulder, but stops before his hand makes contact.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to insult your brother.”
“No.” I shrug. “It’s true. He doesn’t give a shit about me, at least not the good kind.”
“So then, why volunteer? I mean, it’s not like he’s being forced to go against his will.”
“It’s just something I have to do,” I say.
He’s not happy with this answer. Some part of me worries that he will never be happy again if I die in the Games. He’s never had to think about death. Sure, occasionally his mother lost a baby while it was still in the womb, but Jacob had never lost anyone whose face he’d seen, whose name he’d known. One of the upshots of being from a breeder family is having automatically superior blood, just by the luck of genetics. It doesn’t win money, but it does win safety from blood quotas.
I imagine that if I had been born to the rambunctious Black house, my life would have been a lot different.
But now, I’ve brought my problems, my twisted world, into his relatively perfect one. It seems Rosalie is right; the only way I can express love is by hurting the people I care about.
“You know what, Bella?” He’s calmed down slightly, but I can still see hints of real anger through his optimism. “If you volunteer, I’ll volunteer too. If I can beat you in a fight, then I sure as hell can beat your puny brother.”
Jacob is such a child, but even in his immaturity I feel affection for him. I jump off a bridge and what does he do? Follow. Sometimes, I wonder if he is my real little brother and Ben is just some imposter. This makes me hate myself even more.
“Jacob,” I say patiently, “you can’t.”
“Why not?” He’s only a few steps away from sticking out his tongue.
“Your family, Emily, what would they do without you?”
His brow furrows, and I can see he hasn’t thought of this. “They would manage,” he says, but there’s hesitation between every syllable.
“No,” I say firmly, “they wouldn’t. The breeding stipend isn’t enough to feed everybody, and they need the fish and the money from selling junk.”
“Your dad needs you,” he counters.
“My dad’s a ghost; you can’t hurt a ghost, not really.” I know this from experience. After Mom died I shouted at Charlie that I wished he was were dead, that he made me wish I were dead. He didn’t even blink.
“There’s gotta be a way to make your brother not volunteer,” he says firmly, “I’ll take some of the gang and beat him up.”
“If he rats you out for interfering with the Reaping, you’ll all be changed to Chattel. And make no mistake, he will rat you out, Jacob.”
Muffled from the manhole, I hear a high pitched voice. “Jaaacob, come on! It smells like your farts in here. Have you been eating the Mexican flavored Blood Bars again?”
“You should go,” I say. “I think your sister is stuck in the sewer.”
He looks like he’s going to join Emily, but then he pulls my hand closer to his. This time I let, him because know now that I’ve said my plan that if my brother volunteers, I will execute it. There is a good chance this will be our last meeting on the graveyard by the beach.
His lips whisper chastely over my cheek, giving just one peck. “If you asked me to, I would volunteer in his place. I know I haven’t been trained, but I’ve watched the Games on TV like everyone else.”
His lower lips trembles slightly, his brow furrowed. A feeling stirs in my chest, one I know well: guilt. It sharpens the blade of empathy that twists in my gut. I should have never told him my plan, never put that burden on him. But if I didn’t tell anyone, no one would know if I failed my brother.
“I’ll never ask that of you, Jacob,” I say softly.
His eyes are as wide as his sister’s. “Can I ask you something, then?” He looks down at the ground shyly, so different from the boy flexing his muscles.
“What?”
“Can I kiss you, just once? You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to.”
I nod stiffly, afraid, that if I open my mouth I’ll cry. Then slowly, he lowers his lips onto mine. They are soft, warm and real, and while I don’t want to put my hand in his hair, or rub myself up against him, or for him to put his tongue in my mouth, I also don’t want him to go either.
All to soon, his lips leave mine.
“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” he says. He’s so close, I can smell his breath. He has been eating Mexican Blood bars; the thought almost makes me laugh.
“You’re smiling,” he says in wonder. “I love it when you smile.” He cups my face gently, as if checking the freshness of a flower.
It hurts, the way he looks at me. I’m not beautiful; I’m not innocent. And he can never know, or he’d hate me as much as my real brother does. I close my eyes.
“Can I ask you something?” he asks.
“Again?”
“Wear something pretty for the Reaping,” he says lightly.
He gives a long sigh, and I feel terrible that I’m the cause of it. If only I were less selfish and didn’t tell him about my brother.
When I open my eyes, only a few seconds later, he’s gone. All I can see is a half open manhole cover. I wait a minute before following them, perusing the names of the gravestones.
The one on the end is my favorite, although I can’t say why. Maybe because it’s alone, keeping its secrets for eternity. Maybe because sometimes in the sunlight it sparkles a little. Maybe it’s the way the name is etched so cleanly onto the old stone.
Edward Anthony Masen 1901-1927
“You lucky bastard,” I say to the grave, “you got out of here when the going was still good.”
And then I too descend back into the manhole, and to my fate.
30 Friday Sep 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inCOOL BONUS AUDIO RECORDING
I’ll Love you Forever
Yes that is me singing.
Characters
Prim
So obviously Prim is 22 or so. Prim is very very much Claire Danes in my mind.I also imagine that’d be something she’d wear.
How Soviet does that look?
Answer: Very
Receptionist:
The receptionist will really never appear again.But here she is. Doesn’t she looks like she wants to eat you!
Places