[The Reaping: Prim’s POV]
I get this funny feeling sometimes. It’s like when a teacher is about to call on someone in class and you just know it’s going to be you. A strange sense of peace, or maybe it’s a resignation.
Under the summer sun of reaping day, as Effie Trinket unfurls a single slip of paper, I feel that thing. Peace, resignation, whatever it is, it moves my feet forward before the last syllables of “Everdeen” are out of her mouth. I’m afraid, but I’m not startled. My heartbeat goes faster and faster as I get closer to the stage, but it doesn’t lurch in agony against my ribs until I hear Katniss cry out, until she throws me back from the stage and into Peeta’s grip. I claw at him as he drags me away from her.
“I hate you,” I sob into his shoulder, pinioned in a vise of an embrace. “I hate you, Peeta.” I don’t hate him. I could never. He must know that.
He doesn’t react to my words. He keeps repeating the same phrase into my ear, trying to calm me down. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
But it’s not. It’s not okay. She can’t go. She can’t.
It was supposed to be me.
I’ve gone limp against Peeta by the time Effie’s straightened herself out and trotted over the other bowl. I don’t even pay attention to hear who it is. I don’t care. I don’t care about him. I don’t care about anything. Except that my sister has to come home. She has to come home to us —
Peeta is trying to tell me something. I ignore the inevitably dismayed sound of the crowd as the male tribute’s name reverberates on the buildings around the square and focus on him, my only other family, the boy who is as good as my brother, who has raised me like a father. The boy who loves my sister more than anything, though she doesn’t know it yet. Now she may never know. “Prim,” he’s saying. “Prim, sweetheart.”
I wipe my eyes and blink at him. His face is stony but his lip is shaking. “Prim, sweetheart. It’s me. I have to go.”
“Wh — what? It’s — what?” I’m still trying to process what he’s saying when I catch sight of my sister’s face. It’s gone completely bloodless, ashen. The scream is torn from my lungs before my brain realizes what has just happened. “NO!”
Then there’s a fleeting kiss on my forehead, Gale Hawthorne’s arms around my middle, my sister’s body, pitching forward at the knees, crumpling onto the dusty ground in front of the stage, Peeta rushing to gather her up, and Effie Trinket’s dramatic gasps shrilling unbearably in the microphone as the reaping dissolves into ratings-boosting chaos.
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