Chapter Text
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟
Dear Diary,
Have you ever watched a teenage romcom? I guess this is how the movie would begin. Me, sitting at a public space, journal in hand, writing all of the melancholia about the tragedies of my life with a blue sparkly pen.
I’m, in fact, using a sparkly gel pen — and it’s blue —, sitting at my house doorstep as my father loads the car with my luggage for the forty five minutes car drive to the University campus I recently enrolled in.
This is not a pretty story, diary. This is not a fairy tale with princes and princesses, and castles hidden in magical forests. This is the story of an ordinary girl and her extraordinary life and, of course, her descent into madness.
This is how my broken brain screwed everything.
—
“Are you sure you have everything?” Meri, my older sister, asks from the front seat. She is an Olympic medalist and she didn’t have a mental breakdown that ruined her career, so she gets shot gun. I love her, but since The Incident — that’s what we are calling the event we are not supposed to talk about — she has been looking funny at me, like I finally snapped and became exactly who she was always expecting me to be: Mad Annie.
I’m not mad, by the way.
I’m just twenty two.
“Yep,” I say, looking up from the blue sparkly staining the gel pen left in my hand. “Laptop, childhood teddy bear and condoms. I’m all packet.”
She gives me a look — “The Look” — like I’m not funny at all, just a big disappointment.
“Glyn can hear you, you know” she stage-whispers. Glyn is our younger brother, who is clearly pretending not to laugh at my joke. He gets me. I give him ten bucks to buy chocolate at school every time I’m home because our parents are over dramatic about our sugar consumption and he laughs at my self-deprecating jokes. See, perfect match.
“Okay Annie, say goodbye to your brother so we can go,” dad screams from the trunk. He closes it with a thump, an evident tired look in his eyes that says stuffing dozens of bags in his car and dealing with two passive-aggressive daughters in an hour trip to the neighbouring district was not something he was looking for today.
I look up from my blue stained hands and wave to Glyn, who is sitting at one of the chairs inside the porch of the house. We have already said goodbye last night, when I sneaked into Glyn’s bedroom with a bag full of cheap candy I bought at the dollar store and we watched 10 Things I Hate About You for the millionth time — it’s Glyn’s favourite movie because mom says it’s “an adult movie” and he can’t watch it, which just makes it more fun to let him watch it. It works for me too, because I love Shakespearean tragedies adapted as teenage dramas with an amazing soundtrack. Win win.
“Bye Glyn,” I say with a smile. It’s not like I’m not going to see him every other weekend anyway.
Glyn waves back and his clear eyes are sincere, “Bye Annie.”
We are not big on hugs. My family, in general, and Glyn and I had bonded over I Love You Baby yesterday, so it’s all good.
“Call me when you get there,” mom says without looking at me from the front door. I try not to take it personally. The Incident has been the biggest humiliation my mother has ever gone through in all her professional career. She is… adapting.
“Sure,” I say, even though we both know I will be calling at hours of the day when I know she won’t be home so neither of us can go through the awkward polite questions of how it’s my mental state.
Mom walks to the car to make a big deal of saying goodbye to Meri and dad, while I try to fit myself in the backseat. It’s full with all the paraphernalia one needs to drag to a new dorm room, except I only have three bags in the truck and everything else is what Meri bought for herself over the summer. I truly, wholeheartedly love her, but she desperately needs advice in overbuying things I don’t even think she will be using. Not that she would care to listen, because she’s not the one stuck between a box full of sunglasses, a lucky tree whose leaves keep hitting me in the face and all of her four pillows.
Dad honks so Glyn can look up and waves us goodbye — when mom isn’t looking, he makes a gun with his fingers and pretends to shoot himself and I laugh silently at him. I don’t know what’s worse: an hour trip with my dad and Meri fighting over what cds to listen to or being stuck at home with your only source of supply for candy being sent across district lines.
Meri wins and we spend the next hour listening to Britney Spears. I humm to (You Drive Me) Crazy all the while being quite aware of the irony of this song as the soundtrack of my life’s next chapter.
We arrive at Sirenuse Bay a couple minutes after three o’clock, which is close to my favourite hour of the day. Dad bypasses every store Meri asks for him to stop and crosses the coastline to the University campus, where our dorms are.
Pelorum State University is a size too small for my own taste — I enjoy things being expansive and too far to cross by a fifteen minutes walk — but it glows different with intimacy. I have been here before. I grew up on these cliffs, in between my mom’s yearly seminars where everyone would treat her as a celebrity and my dad’s Department Christmas Parties.
PSU is homey, comfortable, and familiar but I haven’t been here in years. The Christmas parties were distractions I couldn’t afford since my family moved me away to the Capitol when the national team took an interest in me at the age eleven. When I came home, it was not to visit Sirenuse Bay or my dad’s workplace. I usually spent a week doing grocery shops with my mom all the while she pointed out the things I should do better in the water, went to the gym with Meri so she could keep me updated on everyone’s lives — people we used to know in middle school and whose faces were completely foggy in my mind, even though she could not understand this because Meri stayed home — and made late night movie sessions with Glyn.
“We should drop Meri first,” dad says, cutting off my staring contest with the campus outline. “I have a meeting at four, so it should be enough time to get you both settled.”
When dad talks like this, we know he is just planning out loud and he doesn’t need any input. I’m used to it.
“If you need a campus tour, just let me know,” Meri also says, turning the volume up on the radio.
Meri stayed at Sirenuse Bay because the District had a better swimming division in high school and because mom was managing her career. When high school ended, PSU offered her a full athletic scholarship and she is a fifth year senior now. Her suggestion of a college campus tour is laughable, because I was there when she threw a fit about me transfering University’s programs and just making her “an unpaid babysitter”. Mom promised her she wouldn’t have to parade me around campus, so I just shrug her offer and say I can find my way around.
The babysit fiasco is also the reason we are not sharing a dorm room. At the Capitol, I was a third year junior but I took a year off after The Incident, so I’ll be starting my fourth year now. Theoretically, Meri and I could choose to share a place outside campus, but she will be living with her friend Noe because they have been planning this for a whole year. A third person in the mix would just ruin the dynamic.
The athletes dormitory is a separate six store building, just right by the coast, close enough by the rocks that, fortunately, we get an amazing view of the crashing waves, even though there isn’t a bad view in this entire campus. It’s a bit surreal, how Sirenuse Bay and PSU are just the right amount of perfect. The Capitol was surrounded by mountains and the only source of water we got there was from lakes. I missed the infinitude of the ocean, the relief it is to look at the horizon and not see an ending.
Dad uses his coach’s privilege to stop the car at the entrance of the building and I help him get all of Meri’s stuff to the last floor. The dorms are separated by seniority — this is what Meri is kindly explaining to me as we load all of her stuff at one of the elevators and push the sixth floor bottom.
“They try to put all the divisions together, but because there are so many of us, we usually have to share the same space. Seniors are on the last floor because the rooms are bigger. Freshmen are on the first floor. Every floor has a monitor, basic stuff, I’m sure you know that, and they all report to the faculty and your program monitor. We rarely use them because everyone actually behaves and… oh, yeah, mixed dormitories, so you can share a room only with your gender but there are no divisions per floor.”
I try to tune in to every detail she is saying but Universities dynamics are mostly the same everywhere.
Meri’s apartment is lovely — she has been driving to campus to decorate for the past two weeks because she somehow got her key earlier. Dad drops her things at her room and we pretend to look around at the colourful decorations and music posters she hanged around before Dad claps his hands, kisses her goodbye and goes back to the car so we can load out my things.
I take my three bags and the teddy bear — that part was real — in my two hands and just shush dad away to his meeting because I can’t hear the everything will be perfectly okay speech one more time. We go back and forth with him insisting I will be lost in a six store building and I just roll my eyes and say I can find the floor by myself. Plus, there are dozens and dozens of students loading their things out and looking as lost as any other person, so in the worst case scenario I can just walk around until I find my room number, which I have written at my hand with the blue gel pen.
I do find it easily.
My dorm is marked A407 so I rightly assume it will be the fourth floor. There are other people walking around in the hallway, so I rush myself and my burning arms holding three luggages until I find the sign marked A407, which is one of the last doors, and use the keys hanging from my jeans to open it.
The room is smaller than Meri’s. It has a compact living room with no couch or TV, only two study desks the faculty must have provided, and an even smaller kitchen that seems like the only room with furniture in it. The door to the bathroom is closed but the bedroom is open and there is a girl sitting in one of the beds.
Her grey eyes are serious but approachable.
“Hey,” she says, when she sees me at the door. “You must be Annie. I’m Katniss Everdeen.”
I drop one of my begs to extend one hand at her. “Yes, Annie. Annie Cresta. It’s nice to meet you.”
Her lips twitch and I almost think she makes a face at me, which is strange since we haven’t met before and I don’t think I could have make that bad of an impression in the two seconds it took for me to extend a hand. “Nice to meet you, Annie Cresta. Did you buy any furniture for the room? It’s okay if you didn’t.”
I look around at the empty living room.
“Uh, I didn’t know I was supposed to. I just…” I look back at her. “I just transferred Universities. They had furniture provided in my old one.”
“Yeah, okay. I don’t have furniture either because I was living with someone outside of campus but he moved away, so…”
I swallow. Was I supposed to buy furniture? Are we? I don’t have any money in my bank account and my parents are not going to be very happy to send me any after spending so much on medical bills after… well, after The Incident.
I’m about to ask if I have to call my parents when she interrupts me. “I have a plan. For the furniture, I mean, but I’ll need help.”
I shrug the rest of my luggage out of my arms because my hands are starting to lose circulation, and try to move them with my feet until they are closer to the empty bed.
“What kind of help?” I ask, safely guarding my teddy bear by the pillows, sitting across from Katniss.
She eyes my teddy bear.
“Is that a teddy bear?” she asks.
I shrug. “His name is Sparkle Cherry Laffy Taffy.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Like the candy?”
“Yep, like the candy.”
Katniss smiles at me. A sincere, genuine smile. “I like you already, Annie Cresta. Now tell me, what are your moral standards when it comes to theft?”