Sunrise on the Reaping

“Look at me,” I say. “In every way, you are a thousand times better than anybody in the Capitol. You are loved better, raised better, and a whole lot better company. You are the best ally I could ever hope for. Okay, sweetheart?”

She nods and straightens up. “You and me to the end. Right, Hay?”

“You and me to the end,” I promise.

will never see Lenore Dove again. Never hear her laugh coming from high above me in the branches. Never feel the warmth of her in my arms as we lay on a bed of pine needles, my lips pressed into the hollow of her neck. Never pull a stray goose feather from her hair, or listen to her play her tune box, or press my finger into the crease that forms between her eyebrows when she’s puzzling out a thought. Never see her face brighten at a bag of gumdrops or a full moon or the sound of me whispering, “I love you like all-fire.”

She says all the Covey girls are a mystery, it’s half their charm.

brought our victor up with Lenore Dove a few times, but she never wanted to discuss her

Either we outrun the storm or it outruns us.

The moment our hearts shattered? It belongs to us

It’s all been taken away

you know what they say, unlucky at cards, lucky in love

Today I have twenty slips of paper with my name in the reaping. Every kid automatically gets one each year, but I have an additional three because I always take on three tesserae to feed myself and my family members. A tessera gets you a ration of tinned oil and a sack of flour marked courtesy of the capitol for one person, collectible each month at the Justice Building. In exchange, you have to put your name in the reaping an extra time for each tessera that year. Those entries stick with you and add up. Four slips a year times five years — that’s how I have twenty. But to make things worse, since this year’s the second Quarter Quell, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Hunger Games, each district has to send twice the usual number of kids. I figure, for me, it’s like having forty slips on a regular year. And I don’t like those odds.

You can’t count on things happening tomorrow just because they happened in the past. It’s faulty logic.”

“Is it?” I say. “Because it’s kind of how people plan out their lives.”

“And that’s part of our trouble. Thinking things are inevitable. Not believing change is possible.”