22nd Throw - [ voice ]

[shenevermisses]

There are some things you just can't teach. Not after a certain point.

[She doesn't sound frustrated or upset. Just... interested, in a way.]

It's weird, in a way. Trying to teach someone to be like me and finding out that's not possible. I mean, we're doing good. Great student.

[For Rue's sake more than anything, she's not going to name her over the journals, not going to divulge what they're doing.]

But there's just something different. How we were brought up. You can't teach that.

Which I guess is why they start us young. Start training us when we're five, where I'm from. Parents who think their kids have potential agree to send them off to the Academy, where they'll only see them maybe every weekend.

Usually less than that.

From there, they weed out the undesirable. The weak, the emotional, the nervous. Every year, there are fewer students your age. By the time we're sixteen or seventeen, there's only the best left.

At that point, only the girls who are stupid enough to get pregnant get sent away.

I guess I never really thought about it, but trying to teach someone else what I grew up with? You realize that some things just can't be taught. Not after a certain point.

Comments

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

Twelve.

[voice]

[girlverine]

[Laura is quiet for a bit, thinking it over. Twelve isn't too young to fight. Even if it is sort of sad, still.]

Why were you trained to fight at five?

[A subject change, but she's curious regardless.]

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

Because in my District, Academy students from the athletic program are chosen every year for the Hunger Games -- where we fight to survive.

[voice]

[girlverine]

['Fight to survive' was a clue but...]

What are the Hunger Games?

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

Like I said: we fight to survive.

Two from each district, a boy and a girl, both between twelve and eighteen. Twenty-four go in, one comes out.

[voice]

[girlverine]

[She wasn't expecting that. There's a long pause. Forcing children to fight to the death. It was like something the Facility would have thought up to train people.]

...I'm sorry.

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

There's nothing to apologize for.

[voice]

[girlverine]

I am not apologizing. I am just sorry.

I know what that's like. To be raised that way.

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

It's how we're raised. The Hunger Games are a part of life where we're from. My year, they'd been around for seventy-four years.

[voice]

[girlverine]

[It takes Laura a moment to do the math in her head.]

...That's over seventeen hundred children.

[Suddenly her own murder count doesn't seem quite so terrible somehow...]

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

One year they doubled it. There were two victors the Games I was in.

[1725, by the time the last cannons sounded during the 74th Games. Then one more round... and it was over, according to everyone else.]

[voice]

[girlverine]

Why?

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

Why what?

[Either of those anomalies might be questioned, or neither.]

[voice]

[girlverine]

Why do they do it? The 'Hunger Games?'

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

Because the Districts rebelled, and the treaty that ensured peace laid out the terms of the Hunger Games.

[voice]

[girlverine]

Powerful people keeping control.

[Laura says this mostly to herself, after a quiet moment.]

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

The Capitol, yes.

[voice]

[girlverine]

The people who created me did so for similar reasons, but they were more...subtle. No one knew about them.

It's hard to imagine a society that would allow something like the Hunger Games to exist.

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

It's what I grew up with. It's hard for me to imagine a world in which it's considered anything but normal.

[voice]

[girlverine]

Why did you accept it?

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

Because that's life in Panem. Or was, when I was there.

[voice]

[girlverine]

[It's easy enough to understand. 'The way things were' was true everywhere.]

...But it changed, after you left?

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

A bit more than a year after I died, there was a revolution. To my knowledge.

[voice]

[girlverine]

[Died. Hmm.]

Does it change what you thought of things? Knowing that things could have changed?

[voice]

[shenevermisses]

No. Because they wouldn't have changed in my lifetime.