Chapter Text
He still remembers having to face Sirena’s parents after his Games. She hadn’t made it far, taken out by this kid from 8 who she thought she could take on easily but soon realized she couldn’t. He remembers watching him beat her to death, remembers thinking about it while he stared down her parents. He remembers wondering what they’d been thinking when she joined the Lanistarium, how they had felt when they found out she died, if they had seen it happen on TV, if they’d seen him get away. That much he can say for Annie; Eisen took Ciaran’s head, she took Eisen’s face.
Calypso Whelk can’t be more than 30, baby-faced and bespectacled, small like her son and bent sideways under the weight of her two year old daughter, Nisha, who has a chubby little fist perpetually knotted in Calypso’s long auburn hair. He recognizes her husband, Ronan, who has Ciaran’s face on a tall, sturdy frame. He lost a leg to a propeller a few years ago and was right back at work in a matter of months like nothing happened. Sligo had paid for a prosthesis, a good one all the way from District 3, and there was a picture of the two of them in the Portside Post; Ronan beaming and Sligo looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. But now Sligo won’t look Ronan in the eye, and Ronan is very obviously thinking about nothing but his dead son. The four other daughters, 10 year old Maren, 8 year old Asha and 5 year old twins Sabrina and Adriane, are kept a good distance away from their dead brother by a smattering of family. Calypso and Ronan are glued to the body, dead-eyed and silent, tears spilling quietly down bloodless faces.
They cover Ciaran from the chin down with the flag of District 4, a coin placed over each of his eyes, surrounded with shells and beach-glass, letters from his sisters and parents and his favourite childhood toys. They lay him in a wooden canoe painted with prayers in a language that no-one pretends to understand anymore. Everyone who cares to come by drops something off for him to take with him wherever he’s going. He decides on one of his Victory Tour gifts that he’ll probably never use, a tasteful pair of abalone cufflinks he received from Mayor Valonia at the end of the tour. They had been one gift of many, he won’t miss them, and decides that something from a Victory Tour that Ciaran will never go on would be more meaningful than some cast-off jewelry from any number of high-rolling rapists. He fastens them to Ciaran’s undersized jacket himself and offers one last whispered apology. He and Sligo carry the canoe down the pier at the edge of the marina in town and set it, set Ciaran, in the water as Ronan loads the crossbow and Calypso lights the match. They drench him in fuel and Sligo hooks the canoe up to Lysandra , tows him out to a safe distance, and turns him loose into the current before Ronan lights the canoe up.
He told everyone that Annie was indisposed, when in reality she’s drugged to sleep in Mags’s guest room with Asenath and Macie checking in at alternating half hour intervals. By the end of the evening, Ciaran has dissolved in ashes into the ocean after barely 12 years in a world that never wanted him. They all watch the flames fold into the waves as the sun sets and Calypso sobs into her husband’s shoulder. It’s a hot night, the air is thick and smells of death.
Neither Mags nor Sligo have anything to say, which he appreciates. There really is nothing they can say that will do anyone any good beyond the condolences they offered after the speech. Asenath, on the other hand, can’t seem to turn herself off, scampering through the crowd and yapping about how tragic it is and how he was so precious and how 4 has lost one of its best. Calypso is giving her a look so full of hatred he can almost smell her hair burning. Ronan is doing his best to humor the woman who called his son to his death and almost succeeding, but his lips are tight and his grip on Calypso’s shoulder is iron. The sisters are running around by the water with a couple other kids from town, either too young to fully grasp what’s going on or already past the initial shock. The one exception is 10 year old Maren, a solemn little carbon copy of her mother down to the long red hair and diminutive build. She’s perched on the pier watching her sisters play, her arms wrapped tightly around a chubby girl who hasn’t stopped sobbing all night. Ciaran has a little girlfriend back home, he remembers Annie telling him. Her name is Maia. He saved his allowance for a month to buy her flowers on her birthday, doesn’t that just make you want to set yourself on fire?
He has always liked Macie Flanagan. She’s nearing her mid-thirties now, short and full-figured with long black curls and kind eyes. He hadn’t known Mags had siblings, much less a niece, until he met her the year after his win. Her mother, Mags’s sister, died of some lung disease with an ominous name when she was young and she’s lived in the Victor’s Village ever since, making occasional trips back to the Peninsula to visit extended family.
“I’m going back to see how Annie’s doing. Do you need me to grab you anything?”
“I’m alright.”
She puts a hand on his shoulder. “Auntie told me he thought the absolute world of you.”
Stupid kid. He can’t come up with anything, just smiles stiffly as Macie departs in the direction of home and Annie. Mags is talking to Sligo, who looks utterly defeated, sitting on the edge of the pier with his head in his hands, Mags beside him with a hand on his shoulder, staring out at the water. He watches them, watches Asenath, watches the Whelks as they watch the crowd.
“Mrs Whelk-.” he approaches Calypso once Ronan has gone off to corral the children. He knows Ronan doesn’t like him and isn’t in the mood to get his face rearranged. “I wanted to offer my condolences again. Even though my time with Ciaran was brief, I feel immensely lucky to have had the privilege to know him. If you or your family need anything at all, my door is open.”
Calypso stares at him, her expression switching from rage to something he can’t really identify. She’s actually very pretty up close, a demure, wholesome beauty that almost reminds him of Annie on the train platform in her hair ribbons and yellow dress. Her features are more delicate; tiny sloping nose, thin lips, downy eyebrows, and she has about a quarter of the presence Annie does. Everything about her seems small except the sky-blue eyes behind her thick glasses, the lenses of which make it uncomfortably obvious that she’s been crying for days on end. She nods slowly, with that very specific detachment of a grieving parent.
“I appreciate that. Thank you.” She stares at the ground, knitting her fingers together. He doesn’t know what to do, if he should leave or say something else. Down by the water, Ronan grabs Sabrina’s wrist as she makes for the pier. “Annie couldn’t make it?”
He doesn’t like her tone. “She’s very sorry. There are some… complications we’re still dealing with from the Games. The fish, you know, they bit her, she hasn’t been well. She was devastated when we lost Ciaran, and once things are a little more stable, I’m sure she-.”
“Mm.” Calypso nods again, looking up at him. Her brows are knit now, eyes narrowed, lips tight. “The fish.” She runs a hand through her hair and forces a cordial expression, so reluctant it almost looks like it hurts. “Excuse me.”
She leaves in Ronan’s direction, picks Nisha up and stands at the edge of the water, staring at the horizon. The crowd is beginning to thin, the Whelks and their extended family will probably be out for a while as families of dead tributes often are, drifting along the boardwalk for hours as if the child they just buried will swim back to them unscathed. This is the first Portside funeral since he won, but he remembers one year when he was little, when a girl from Brineridge was sent back to the ocean by her family. Her mother sat there on the beach for almost a full 24 hours. He can’t remember her name but knows she had been one of Gil’s, because the mother would skulk around his trailer with murder in her eyes until her older son would come and drag her away. Mom would always watch her with a look of nauseous trepidation, and every time she came around he would wonder if that would be the thing that made Mom reconsider, but then they would be back again the next day, and Gil would take Mom behind the curtain to ‘talk’ and he would throw the pitchfork at the targets until his wrist and palm and shoulder felt like they were on fire.
Skipjack’s Speakeasy, a precarious two-storey shipwreck of a building just off Portside’s main drag, should not exist, but it does. Having been tied to another illegal business for the past eight years, he isn’t entirely sure how this one has managed to go undisturbed for all this time, at least as long as he’s been alive. It’s never moved, never changed names, never even restructured, it’s the same as it’s always been and always will be. He remembers going there with Mom after his first reaping, she got drunk with some handsy lobstermen and he watched the reaping on the TV above the bar, trying to catch a glimpse of himself in the crowd. He remembers seeing Asenath, pre-nose job, and thinking she looked pretty.
He remembers the footage they’d edited in after the fact, when they aired the Victory Tour and spliced in the footage of Mom watching his win at the bar, surrounded by anxious onlookers who only knew who she was because of the camera crew. She’d started screaming and grabbed onto one of the women standing next to her, who he’d learn years later had been Saira Pollock of all people, who has been checking in on Annie whenever she gets a rare break from WP and leaving looking like she’s seen a ghost.
“That’s my boy!” Mom had shrieked above the drunken cheers as everyone reached forward to congratulate her, “that’s my fucking son!”
A dour-looking waitress shoves past him on her way out of the kitchen, holding two plates of battered smelt. She shoots him an acrimonious look before giving the plates to two middle aged women at the bar. He’s never gotten the impression that people think of Mags and Sligo the way they think of him, but maybe that’s because Mags won so long ago and Sligo seems to be allergic to money. He knows Ptolemy is to blame for most of it, everyone in Portside knows he’s the Capitol bicycle but they don’t know he doesn’t have a choice. Sellout, puppet, lapdog, money-grubber, narcissist, he had already heard it all before he turned 16.
Annie won’t hear any of it , he thinks to himself, I won’t let her get a complex on top of everything else.
It’s busier than he anticipated it would be. Most of the tables on the main floor are occupied with locals, a trio of Peacekeepers have occupied the corner of the downstairs bar a few seats down from the six-man crew of Little Leilani, a local commercial vessel, and there is a din of conversation coming down from upstairs. He watches the room for a few moments before thinking better of being there at all and all but bolting down the steps and out of the building. After a brisk walk back up to the boardwalk and North a few blocks, he finds that Lotyde Family Liquor has been closed since the early afternoon. He’s beginning to feel itchy inside.
“Damn it.” He says out loud, staring into the dark store, the shelves of bottles and the sign that reads ‘ The Lotyde family extends our condolences to the Whelk and Murrel families and those close to them, today we will close early in Ciaran’s memory ’. He finds it ridiculous. Wouldn’t Ciaran want his parents to have some kind of liquid relief? What about me? Come on, kid, if you actually thought so highly of me wouldn’t you want me to- he cuts off the train of thought right as it begins to pick up steam, feeling like an absolute dick.
Despite the fact that she’s only had two victors under her belt in twelve years, he’s never seen Asenath look this defeated before. She’s sitting on the boardwalk, right near the end, leaning against one of the slips and staring out over the black water with a bottle of wine (one he knows to be prohibitively expensive) in her hand. The damp weather has caused her chemically flattened hair to start reverting to its natural texture, with a couple corkscrews of hair sticking out of the two-toned curtain and one dangling over her face. Her eyeliner is smudged.
“Whole bottle of wine at a funeral. Classy.” He offers. She looks up at him with no expression. He sits next to her, takes a sip of her wine and gags. “Strong.”
“Yeah.” she shrugs, can’t come up with anything else to say. “Yeah.”
“Where’s Sligo?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“I figured I could find him where there’s alcohol.”
“Makes sense. But he has his own. And I think he’s probably taking the boat out, which is very dangerous and very illegal, might I add, but I don’t think he really cares.” Asenath goes quiet, pensive almost, and her forehead moves as much as it possibly can when she knits her eyebrows as far as they will go. She places a hand between his shoulder-blades, it’s an awkward hand, a very Asenath-esque attempt at comfort, but it’s something. “I want you to know that I care about you, okay? You were my first victor and it felt like a huge deal at the time but I just remember thinking how happy I was that one of those scared little kids ended up okay. And Annie is a great girl. I think she deserved to win, but I don’t feel anything like what I felt when you won.”
“How do you mean?”
Asenath’s eyes are a little glossy, her voice breaks slightly. “I don’t see things getting much better for her. I think, best case scenario, she won’t have to watch shrimp fuck for the rest of her life, but I can’t say that what she has coming is much better. People snap in there, kid. To be honest, Mags and I have been waiting for you to go off the deep end for a while now.”
“I'm flattered that you think I haven’t.”
She looks at him, her swollen lips slide back from her teeth in a somewhat scary looking smile. She brings a hand up, pushes his hair back, a gesture he can only describe as maternal. “She’s gonna need you. She’s gonna need all of us.”
“Even Sligo?”
Asenath snorts. “Hey, he has his moments.” She leans back. “I’m serious, Finnick. We’re family at this point. And, yeah, maybe Sligo is like… the weird uncle in the equation and you’re my little twerp of a nephew who I want to smack more often than not but I’m okay with having that be what it is.”
“But you have an actual family.” He doesn’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but Asenath tilts her head forward and gestures vaguely with the very tips of the fingers on her left hand.
“You know what I mean.” She looks back out at the water and sighs heavily, bringing the bottle back up to her mouth to take a long sip before she continues. “I don’t, by the way.”
“Don’t what?”
She stares into her glass, alcohol and exhaustion dredging up something she’s been forcing down. “Have a family. My dad killed himself when I was your age. My mom died… having me. My aunt is a raging cunt who I hope is dead but I can’t be fucked to check and I haven’t spoken to my cousins since I had my original nose.” She smirks at him in a rare flicker of self-awareness. “So, you can imagine how long that’s been.”
“I’m sorry.”
Asenath shrugs. “It’s fine. I’m good, you know? Government job…” she gestures vaguely like she’s trying to come up with something else. She drops her hand and sighs heavily. “Sometimes I feel like I was District in another life. I’d be able to hack it, you think?”
He wants to laugh. He’s always known Asenath means well despite having glitter where her brain should be but that comment is just so asinine he almost wants to slap her. She’s looking at him still, her stupid microneedled eyebrows knit, waiting for him to validate her like her kind always do. He stares back at her, this ridiculous, self-indulgent cartoon of a woman with her inflated face and her thick strip-lashes, and something sick inside him pulls him forward, his hands on her shoulders and his tongue down her throat. She lets out a low squeak, he can feel her trying to reconsider, then he can feel her just going with it.
Asenath Glass, as exhausting as she can be, is an excellent lay. She’s older than he thought, 45 where he would have assumed 37, but her body is still taut and agile. She’s gentle, graceful, and she carries herself better in bed than she does otherwise, if a bit maternal. She’s a cuddler, a forehead-kisser, a pillow-talker, and despite being an older woman from the Capitol she doesn’t remind him of Liv or Procula at all. Personally, it’s nice, but at Ptolemy’s she would be a waste of his time. He doesn’t see her tipping well.
He finds it a bit funny that this didn’t happen earlier. She’s been in his guest room since she came out for Annie’s birthday, which nobody wants to talk about, smelling up his house with that damn eucalyptus perfume and leaving smudges of spray tan on everything. Then again, sometimes she seems like she can’t look him in the eyes, and he knows this is going to be something that weighs on her for as long as she has this job. Asenath Glass may be callous, she may be privileged, she may be jaded and frivolous, but she has too much of a conscience to do what she does and he knows that one day it may kill her.
When they’re done, they drink more and she sits on the counter and laughs and smokes out the window and no longer feels like she’s been leading children to their deaths all this time. In their two-or-so hours of intercourse, whatever she puts in her hair to straighten it has evaporated entirely, leaving her with a mop of red and black ringlets that reach to just below her breasts. He likes her hair curly, it balances her beestung face, and under her clothes he can see patches of her natural skin colour, a delicate olive tan. There’s something different about her, he considers briefly at one point. Capitol people are human at the end of the day and he knows that intimately, has seen every dank inch of a good margin of Snow’s inner circle, people who, even in their own ivory tower of a city, are essentially untouchable to the layman, but there is something different about Asenath. He knows that, as an escort, she is to most of his customers what Calypso Whelk is to Mayor Valonia, but he’s slept with escorts, slept with the nieces and nephews of Tier 4 Gamemakers, even once slept with some no-name intern of Caesar’s who booked her session as an Employee-Of-The-Month gift. There is something very different about Asenath, like all that shit she does to her face and hair and body is an act that she’s always going to be a few steps behind in keeping up. Even her voice is different. Since she’s been in town, he’s realized that she’s been putting on this awkward affectation since he’s known her. When she’s relaxed, her voice is much lower, her speech pattern just slightly languorous, and there is this vague monotony to it that he can’t quite place. The asininity of her earlier comment aside, Asenath could pass for District if she really wanted to.
“I miss your mom.” she confesses, once they’ve opened one of the only good bottles of wine he has, left over from the weeks following 69, when some distant Whimsiwick cousin came to Ptolemy’s and the furthest she made him go was a hand up her dress. Asenath gestures around the room with her glass. “Our little Leyla… the house feels empty without her.”
He wonders distantly if Asenath knows how she died. “I think about that all the time.”
“I’m so glad you had Mags.”
“Me too.”
Asenath leans back against the cabinets lining the walls and closes her eyes. “God, can you imagine if Ciaran would have won? You’d have six little kids running around here and they’d have actual parents. Fucking bleak.”
He doesn’t want to think about all that collateral, can’t bring himself to consider little Ciaran, not even 13 yet, getting passed around that tacky room in the Media Tower with seven people on the chopping block. He wonders who they’d go after first, if it would be Nisha who washed up blue on Victory Beach or Ronan leaving for the day’s work and never coming home. When he thinks about it, he can feel the scrape of Liv’s nails, right around the area Eisen brought the axe down.
“Too bad.” He manages.
Asenath takes a long drink of wine, pauses and looks over at him. “We, uh…” she motions between the two of them. “We don’t… do this.”
“Yeah. I get it.”
“Not just that I’m old enough to be your mom, but it’s a massive conflict of interest. You could get in huge trouble and I’d lose my job.”
“No, it… one time thing.”
Asenath stares at the floor. “Thanks though. It was good. For me.”
“I’m glad. Me too.”
“I have to say you are very… horizontally talented.” she smirks, her face contorting shortly after. “That felt wrong. Forget I said anything.”
“I get a lot of practice.”
Asenath gives him a withering look and drinks again. “Stop it. You shouldn’t sleep around, it isn’t good for you. Your soul, I mean. It’ll wear on you, believe me, I would know.”
In that moment, he almost wants to tell her about everything, about Mom and Ptolemy and every stinking, sweaty body that’s been forced on him but the impulse catches in his throat. They’re having a moment, Asenath is acting like a regular person, and it’s the first he’s felt remotely relaxed in God knows how long.
“Yeah.” He offers. “I think it’s getting to that point.” They’re quiet for a while, listening to the ocean sighing to itself outside and the sound of bugs frying themselves in the porch light. Asenath hums something under her breath that he recognizes but can’t place, a jaunty, staccato minor key, and hands him her glass of wine. He tops her off. “Hey, Asenath?”
“Yeah?”
He takes a deep breath, not knowing whether or not the question is appropriate. “How did you become an escort?”
“Oh.” She laughs dryly. “I was Neptunia Cox’s assistant for a while, when I was… I think I started when I was about 22? God, that woman is a piece of work. I was more like a slave, honestly. But when Salacia retired, they were looking for a new escort and I applied. My dad still has a few friends in the Embassy, I guess.”
“Do you like it?”
She gives him a long look, her makeup sweat-smudged and beginning to look clownish, at least more clownish than she normally looks. “Why do you ask?”
“Just because.”
She turns back to stare across the living room, the overhead light humming. They seem to notice the sound of it at the same time, because when he turns to switch it off, Asenath is already reaching for the lamp on the nearby console table.
“No.” She answers finally, boosting herself back up on the counter and taking another long sip of wine. “I like you and Annie and Mags and, yes, I even have a level of appreciation for Sligo, but I do not like my job. I thought I would, but I don’t.”
“I know.”
Asenath nods slowly. “I know you know. I know you all know. And I should quit, but I can’t. I’ve seen the way some of these other escorts are with the kids, I think if there’s anything I can do at this point, it’s…” She bites her lip, her voice is thick when she continues, but she doesn’t cry. “If not me, it’ll be someone else.”
Asenath falls asleep on the couch eventually, frizzy and sweaty and smiling, her glass empty and hanging from delicate, manicured fingers. He puts the glass in the sink, lays a blanket over her and goes outside. Mags has the light on in her guest room, showing him where Annie is. He stares up at the window for a while, trying to see if she’ll pass by it, but she never does. There are shadows moving up there, though, what could be an elbow, possibly the ends of long hair. He watches for a while until, as if she could feel him watching, Mags steps in front of the window and draws the blinds. Before he loses sight of the room, he sees Mags turn back and address someone. He wonders what they could be talking about.
He wants to see her but doesn’t at the same time. The birthday dinner was rough. Everything had been fine until Asenath’s toast, Annie had raised her glass, the red wine had lapped over just slightly then she checked out entirely. Logically, it shouldn’t have been that bad, the wine spilled, the glass didn’t even break, but in about two seconds flat she’d fled the dining room and locked herself in the guest room closet. Macie went up to try to get her to come out but was unsuccessful. They ate crabs and cheesecake in silence and went back to their respective houses and steeled themselves for Ciaran’s funeral. As they were reconvening over breakfast in the morning, he overheard Mags telling Sligo that she was still in the closet.
Sligo is chain-smoking on his front porch, his long, dilapidated body draped across two lawn chairs, absolutely smashed. As he approaches, Sligo perks up, watches him warily as if he’s debating whether or not to knock him out on sight. He isn’t sure what his reasoning could be, he hasn’t done anything to inconvenience Portside’s resident trainwreck today beyond, arguably, existing.
“Has the golden boy decided to grace me with his presence?” Sligo puts on a mocking lisp and fans himself with a limp wrist.
He holds up a bottle of pisswater wine that was a gift from a client in the days preceding Ciaran’s death, some porcine, hesitantly kinky Gamemaker named Sabucia who had taken a solid two minutes to gather the courage to ask him to suck on her toes. “Olive branch.”
Sligo eyes him, intrigued, then brings his legs down from the chair opposite him and nudges it forward with his ankle, breaking the silence with a loud, tarry cough. He sits down, taking in how gross Sligo’s porch actually is, mostly beer cans and fish guts. He is suddenly no longer offended by the assertion that he is prissy or effeminate in some way when this is the alternative.
Drunk Uncle produces a wine key from his pocket, because of course, opens the wine and raises it to him before taking a long sip. “Girl wine.” he snipes.
“Well, a girl gave it to me, so.”
Sligo raises an eyebrow. “Asenath?” He knows he will bring up that he slept with her eventually, but not now.
“No.” he tries to think of a woman from the Capitol whose name Sligo will recognize. Instead of the easy answer, Procula, for some reason he lands on- “Andronica Dovecote.”
“Stupid name.” Sligo hands the bottle over. “I was gonna take Sandy for a rip, but Mags took my damn keys, so here I am.”
How unreasonable of her to not let you use your single pickled brain cell to crash that tin can of a boat into the pier . “Hm.” He takes a sip of the wine. It’s bad, but then again he knows better. “I guess we’re all disappointed.”
Sligo stares at the sandy main road of the Victor’s Village, across the way at one of the empty houses that will sit there, waiting for the next rotation of 23 dead children, then the next, until someone moves in. “Humid out.”
There is no reason to reply and they both know it, so they sit there and pass the wine back and forth. He wants to be satisfied with the fact that they are within ten feet of each other and haven’t exchanged blows but can’t manage it. He doesn’t think he can feel anything anymore.
“It won’t get easier, will it?” He manages eventually. Sligo makes a bitter sound that could pass for a laugh and takes the wine from him.
“You’ll find ways.” There is another gap of silence before Sligo leans forward, sniffing the air, then grimaces and shifts his chair away. “You reek of sex.”
He doesn’t have the energy to argue. “Sorry.”
Annie’s new house, like his, is on the South side of the Village, so it’s a near carbon copy as far as the layout. The wrap-around porch is on the same side, the kitchen window, then through to the living room, the back dining room, the drawing room, then upstairs to the bedrooms and bathrooms, the widow’s walk, the attic. The lights switch on slowly, like they know they won’t be on for long, or shouldn’t be. It’s sparsely furnished, the only sign that anyone has been living in it for any period of time are the boxes of Annie’s belongings arranged in the living room.
In a box labeled MISC . he finds a photo album, one of those cheap plastic-sided albums that they sell at gift shops near the resorts. The pale blue cover is decorated with white line drawings of sea biscuits and crabs, and someone has written ANČICE in babyish marker letters in the top left corner. On the first page, he finds a black and white photo of a pretty woman with long dark hair, early 30s maybe, holding a very tiny, very pink baby. Written in black ballpoint beneath; Kari i Ančice/ August 52 PT. On the next page, Annie at maybe two or three sits on a brightly coloured carpet, one hand resting on the back of a small white dog, a pacifier in her mouth. Beneath that, Annie, around the same age, grins at the camera, caught in the act of scribbling on a white wall in green crayon. A class picture takes up the entire adjoining page, turned sideways so as to fit. Portside Primary School- First Grade- Ms. V Stone is written on a slate on the floor in front of the first row of children arranged in three rows by height. He finds Annie’s name and connects it to a little girl in a slightly undersized floral dress in the second row between a bespectacled boy with a missing tooth and a fat little baby-doll of a girl with warm brown skin and long curly hair tied back with two white ribbons. Where all the other kids’ faces are contorted into Say-Cheese grins, Annie is staring just off-camera with her eyes wide open, brows slightly lifted, mouth taught. He can’t decide if she looks unimpressed or nervous. When he looks closer, he notices the baby-doll girl to Annie’s left is holding her hand. Marlin Mahi’ai, Eryk Stern, Annie Cresta, Teesha Phyto, Minnow Rudder, Theo Lotyde. The little boy who would become Annie’s ex is slight and pale with neatly cut black hair, his button-down shirt slightly too wide. It’s obvious he has more money than a good margin of the class, with the possible exception of Teesha in her ribbons and a little girl with whom he connects the name Lanna Abalone in a crisp pinstripe matching set.
He keeps flipping through; Annie and Teesha, 8 or 9, standing over a king crab spread out on a table, both smiling up at the camera. Annie, about ten maybe, stands between her father and a young woman in a wedding dress. Annie in another class picture, 6th grade, still in the second row, hair in two braids, her dress threadbare. The pictures start to change around the 13 year mark, presumably after Kari and Nereus Cresta died. Annie appears in group pictures of WP interns, seemingly not caring to document much of her life. She’s pasted in her parents’ obituaries out of the Post, a letter postmarked from the Peninsula and signed Love, Teesha , Pearl, Kalani and Delmar , an old receipt for a bottle of wine beside an expired school ID card and a note from Saira that reads ‘ Happy birthday, sweet girl. I could not be prouder of you. You are growing into the most beautiful woman and I can’t wait to see what the rest of your precious life has to offer.’ That part makes him a little bit nauseous.
A floorboard at the entrance creaks. Gut clenching, he whips around to see Macie in the doorway, giving him a confused look.
“Hey.” she offers.
“I- uh-.” He stands up quickly and backs away from the box, feeling like he did at 16 when Mags caught him getting into Sligo’s beer fridge. “I was just- I guess you’re here to get some of her stuff?”
Macie shakes her head. “No, we don’t have enough room upstairs. Besides, we’re cautiously optimistic she’ll get over it and-.” she gestures around the room. “Easier to leave it here for when she’s…” Macie makes a vague, exhausted noise and starts towards him. She takes a bottle of cheap wine out of the bag on her shoulder and sits on the stiff, plastic-covered couch. “If you tell my aunt about this, you’re chum.”
He mimes turning a key against his lips. “I probably shouldn’t be here either.”
Macie shrugs, then eyes the photo album. “It’s sad, you know?” she gestures to the small blue book with her foot. “After her 18th birthday it’s just blank pages. If she didn’t make it, they probably would have thrown it out.”
“She doing okay?”
Macie opens the wine and takes a hesitant sip. “Better than last night, but not good. Auntie wants to take her to a doctor in town to see if she’s on the right meds but I’m not on board. I don’t think the Capitol’s good for much, but she’ll get better help there than she will here, and she needs it. She’s seeing things, hearing things.”
“I want to see her.”
“I don't think that’s a good idea. Not right now.”
“Is it that bad?” Macie hands him the wine, it’s not very good and they both know better, but it’s something. “Is it about me?”
Macie sighs. “I think there’s a lot of guilt. I think when she sees you, she remembers why she’s feeling the guilt. I think it’s best that you keep your distance. It’s nothing personal. If anything, it’s because she still thinks very highly of you.”
“You think she does?”
Macie slides off the couch and sits on the floor beside him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “I remember when I first met you. I kept thinking ‘what the fuck is he supposed to do now?’ ‘Where does he go from here?’. I think about that with her, but I have even less of a clue.” She shakes her head. “She didn’t want to come back.”
“That’s my fault.”
Macie drinks again, doesn't say anything.