#no mojo

Send me your tune suggestions people! OH GOD...i’ve been staring at this line for an hour...

You sat in you room on the Waverider wearing Len’s parka. Your eyes were shut simply listening to the familiar hums of the machine around you.

@peetabreadgirl - I have a bit of non-age gap runaway Peeta in my drafts… for you and your trained bunnies…

We were best friends.  I first noticed her in kindergarten, the shy girl with the shiny black braids and luminous grey eyes who sang under her breath in the playground.  I was utterly smitten even then, but we never really talked until the summer before seventh grade.  I’d just turned 12, and things were getting rougher and rougher at home.  My mother has always been cruel and abusive, but that summer was the worst.  In hindsight I think it had to do with my eldest brother, Brann, getting ready to leave for college, but I didn’t understand it then.  All I knew was that the slaps and shoves had progressed to punches. Brann was the only person who had ever tried to protect me from our mother, and he was leaving.

One awful Sunday when Brann was out with his girlfriend and Rye was who knows where, my mother snapped.  When she finally finished with me I could barely open my left eye and I ached everywhere.  My father did nothing.  I knew he could hear her screaming, knew he could hear me crying and pleading with her to stop. But he didn’t intervene.  He’s never once intervened.

I threw my sketch pad, a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread into my school backpack, along with all of the money I had in the world – which might have been twenty dollars all told – and ran away.

There is a heavily wooded section of the state park on the outskirts of Panem, with only a dilapidated fence separating it from the poorer section of town, which we call the Seam.  Teens frequent the area, it’s a good spot to drink and party since it’s generally unpatrolled, but at twelve it was dark and frightening, and in my imagination full of predators.  But I was broken and my only thought was getting away.  The woods were far less scary than my mother.

It was late afternoon, but in the woods the dark seemed absolute. I made it no more than 50 feet inside the fence before I collapsed under a tree.

I’d never felt more alone. My head hurt, my body hurt, my heart hurt.  I don’t know how long I laid there crying before I sensed a wild animal approaching. Only it wasn’t an animal. The wildling looking down at me with curious grey eyes was Katniss Everdeen.

My first instinct was self-preservation, and I begged her not to turn me in, afraid the adults in her life would take me back, or maybe they’d take me to the police. I couldn’t face either scenario.  But she didn’t.  Instead, she led me deeper into the forest, to what she called her special tree, and she helped me climb up onto a thick branch about 4 feet off the ground.  A second branch ran parallel to the first, slightly above and to the side of the main branch, forming a backrest of sorts.  It was fairly stable to sit on, for a tree.  Once there we were all but invisible.

She told me it was her favourite place.

We stayed there for hours.  Though she was quiet and reserved at school she was talkative with me that day.  She made sandwiches from the supplies I’d packed and told me stories about ‘her woods’, as she called that part of the state forest.  She calmed and soothed me.

When darkness fell she led me out of the forest.  I was surprised to find we’d been less than a hundred feet from the fence the entire time.  The place where we slid under was mere feet from the back yard of the house she shared with her mother, sister and uncle.  I panicked but she assured me that Uncle Haymitch was the only one home, and that he wouldn’t take me back.

She was right, sort of.  Haymitch was drunk that night, I quickly learned that Haymitch was drunk most nights, but he was kind to me in his gruff way.  He fed us both dinner and let me sleep on the couch.  The following morning he took Katniss and me to the bakery.  Brann was beside himself when we got there, he fussed over me and fed us both cheese buns while Haymitch spoke with my father in the back.  I don’t know what was said, but my mother never hit me again after that day.  She still yelled, called me names, demeaned me every chance she got, but the fists stopped flying.