nothing for you to be sorry about. You were just keeping us alive. But I don’t want us to go on like this, ignoring each other in real life and falling into the snow every time there’s a camera around. So I thought if I stopped being so, you know, wounded, we could take a shot at just being friends,” he says.
All my friends are probably going to end up dead, but refusing Peeta wouldn’t keep him safe. “Okay,” I say. His offer does make me feel better. Less duplicitous somehow. It would be nice if he’d come to me with this earlier, before I knew that President Snow had other plans and just being friends was not an option for us anymore. But either way, I’m glad we’re speaking again.
“So what’s wrong?” he asks.
I can’t tell him. I pick at the clump of weeds.
“Let’s start with something more basic. Isn’t it strange that I know you’d risk your life to save mine … but I don’t know what your favorite color is?” he says.
A smile creeps onto my lips. “Green. What’s yours?”
“Orange,” he says.
“Orange? Like Effie’s hair?” I say.
“A bit more muted,” he says. “More like … sunset.”
Sunset. I can see it immediately, the rim of the descending sun, the sky streaked with soft shades of orange. Beautiful. I remember the tiger lily cookie and, now that Peeta is talking to me again, it’s all I can do not to recount the whole story about President Snow. But I know Haymitch wouldn’t want me to. I’d better stick to small talk.
“You know, everyone’s always raving about your paintings. I feel bad I haven’t seen them,” I say.
“Well, I’ve got a whole train car full.” He rises and offers me his hand. “Come on.”
It’s good to feel his fingers entwined with mine again, not for show but in actual friendship. We walk back to the train hand in hand. At the door, I remember. “I’ve got to apologize to Effie first.”
“Don’t be afraid to lay it on thick,” Peeta tells me.
So when we go back to the dining car, where the others are still at lunch, I give Effie an apology that I think is overkill but in her mind probably just manages to compensate for my breach of etiquette. To her credit, Effie accepts graciously. She says it’s clear I’m under a lot of pressure. And her comments about the necessity of someone attending to the schedule only last about five minutes. Really, I’ve gotten off easily.
When Effie finishes, Peeta leads me down a few cars to see his paintings. I don’t know what I expected. Larger versions of the flower cookies maybe. But this is something entirely different. Peeta has painted the Games.
Some you wouldn’t get right away, if you hadn’t been with him in the arena yourself. Water dripping through the cracks in our cave. The dry pond bed. A pair of hands, his own, digging for roots. Others any viewer would recognize. The golden horn called the Cornucopia. Clove arranging the knives inside her jacket. One of the mutts, unmistakably the blond, green-eyed one meant to be Glimmer, snarling as it makes its way toward us. And me. I am everywhere. High up in a tree. Beating a shirt against the stones in the stream. Lying unconscious in a pool of blood. And one I can’t place—perhaps this is how I looked when his fever was high—emerging from a silver gray mist that matches my eyes exactly.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“I hate them,” I say. I can almost smell the blood, the dirt, the unnatural breath of the mutt. “All I do is go around trying to forget the arena and you’ve brought it, back to life. How do you remember these things so exactly?”
“I see them every night,” he says.
I know what he means. Nightmares—which I was no stranger to before the Games—now plague me whenever I sleep. But the old standby, the one of my father being blown to bits in the mines, is rare. Instead I relive versions of what happened in the arena. My worthless attempt to save Rue. Peeta bleeding to death. Glimmer’s bloated body disintegrating in my hands. Cato’s horrific end with the muttations. These are the most frequent visitors. “Me, too. Does it help? To paint them out?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m a little less afraid of going to sleep at night, or I tell myself I am,” he says. “But they haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Maybe they won’t. Haymitch’s haven’t.” Haymitch doesn’t say so, but I’m sure this is why he doesn’t like to sleep in the dark.
“No. But for me, it’s better to wake up with a paintbrush than a knife in my hand,” he says. “So you really hate them?”
“Yes. But they’re extraordinary. Really,” I say. And they are. But I don’t want to look at them anymore. “Want to see my talent? Cinna did a great job on it.”
Peeta laughs. “Later.” The train lurches forward, and I can see the land moving past us through the window. “Come on, we’re almost to District Eleven. Let’s go take a look at it.”
We go down to the last car on the train. There are chairs and couches to sit on, but what’s wonderful is that the back windows retract into the ceiling so you’re riding outside, in the fresh air, and you can see a wide sweep of the landscape. Huge open fields with herds of dairy cattle grazing in them. So unlike our own heavily wooded home.
We slow slightly and I think we might be coming in for another stop, when a fence rises up before us. Towering at least thirty-five feet in the air and topped with wicked coils of barbed wire, it makes ours back in District 12 look childish. My eyes quickly inspect the base, which is lined with enormous metal plates. There would be no burrowing under those, no escaping to hunt. Then I see the watchtowers, placed evenly apart, manned with armed guards, so out of place among the fields of wildflowers around them.
“That’s something different,” says Peeta.
Rue did give me the impression that the rules in District 11 were more harshly enforced. But I never imagined something like this.
Now the crops begin, stretched out as far as the eye can see. Men, women, and children wearing straw hats to keep off the sun straighten up, turn our way, take a moment to stretch their backs as they watch our train go by. I can see orchards in the distance, and I wonder if that’s where Rue would have worked, collecting the fruit from the slimmest branches at the tops of the trees. Small communities of shacks—by comparison the houses in the Seam are upscale—spring up here and there, but they’re all deserted. Every hand must be needed for the harvest.
On and on it goes. I can’t believe the size of District 11. “How many people do you think live here?” Peeta asks. I shake my head. In school they refer to it as a large district, that’s all. No actual figures on the population. But those kids we see on camera waiting for the reaping each year, they can’t be but a sampling of the ones who actually live here. What do they do? Have preliminary drawings? Pick the winners ahead of time and make sure they’re in the crowd? How exactly did Rue end up on that stage with nothing but the wind offering to take her place?
I begin to weary of the vastness, the endlessness of this place. When Effie comes to tell us to dress, I don’t object.
I go to my compartment and let the prep team do my hair and makeup. Cinna comes in with a pretty orange frock patterned with autumn leaves. I think how much Peeta will like the color.
Effie gets Peeta
