Chapter Text
It just seemed easier to hide in my room most days. As long as the door was closed, it brought along a sense of freedom that was occasionally quite difficult to find anywhere else. At least my family had the decency to knock before entering, which was nice. It gave me a chance to anticipate their arrival and hope nothing bad had happened. But for all purposes, my bedroom was my safe space. It was where I kept all my belongings, and where I could be alone. I actually did like being alone, when I chose it. Sometimes, it felt like all I was good at being.
There was an argument between my mom and my brother last night, the tension of it still permeating the air of our home. My brother wanted to use the family car again. That seemed to be a topic of much debate lately. We were fairly lucky, to actually have access to a vehicle in the vehicle-making district. That was a luxury reserved for only the wealthier. But gas and potential repairs were not cheap. And as far as my mom was concerned, that car was her third child.
She didn’t like the joke when I told it to her. I guess it wasn’t as funny as I thought.
Sitting in my room, drawing the same few characters over and over, a touch of jealousy stirred up within me. I knew how to drive too. Why was I always the one stuck walking everywhere instead? Okay fine, it wasn’t like I needed the car. And if it was my brother driving me somewhere, I really wanted to avoid riding with him as much as possible.
Lately, he seemed moody and easy to anger. That was admittedly a little bit terrifying. Those irrational thoughts were coming back in full force again. Those were scary thoughts to have. Wasn’t family supposed to make you feel loved and safe? I always felt like I was doing something wrong, feeling scared about being around my brother and filling my head with worry that he might do something to me, even if I knew it was all a load of bullshit.
But I knew I couldn’t hide in my room forever. Today was my turn to put away the cleaned dishes from last night, a chore that I was never particularly fond of but did anyways because the five minutes of inconvenience was preferable to my mom’s meltdown if things weren’t fair. Huh. Fairness. How could it be that my parents’ obsession with fairness could sometimes feel…a little unfair?
Anyways, today I didn’t have to work. That was nice. So I headed downstairs and began pulling clean dishes out of the rack and putting them away in cupboards. There was a note on the table. My mom wanted me to head to the market in the afternoon and buy some meat to roast for dinner. Okay. That was fine. And then I was also in charge of figuring out lunch for both myself and ideally my brother, if he was home.
That felt…less fine. In fact, the idea of it was just plain dreadful. Just talking to my brother lately seemed to spike some strange instinct within me, a voice in my head that desperately wanted to flee from the possibility of conflict or being yelled at. It stung.
I just sighed and chucked the note into the garbage.
Lunch for myself was easy. I just made a small sandwich with some leftover sliced meat and cheese in the ice box. That seemed healthy enough, without going too overboard. Just because my family was a lucky one, didn’t mean that we had to flaunt our wealth and fortune. Something simple was usually good enough for me, and easy for me to eat without feeling guilty.
But the guilt was always there every time I ate. Mainly, it manifested in the fear of wasting food. Things I didn’t eat, that could be potentially thrown out, when they would’ve been perfectly fine in someone else's stomach.
But there was the debate: which was better? To look appealing or to not waste food? I couldn’t help but stare down at my stomach when I ate, the way it budged over from under my breasts. I had my mother’s figure, and she never seemed to like hers. She was never quiet about how "naughty" she felt whenever she ate, how she hated the roundness of her stomach, and the constant need to burn off calories. Once more, the guilt returned in full force as I tried to calculate in my head how much dinner I could eat without making that stomach grow rounder.
It sucked. But it was all I could think about sometimes. Food, and the way it ruined my body. There came that stupidly selfish thought again, of how I wished I was in a poorer district. Where food was a luxury, not an everyday occurrence. On TV during the Games, I could catch glimpses of other districts and how skinny the girls there were. Oh how I desired to look like them.
And I always felt so shameful for thinking like that. For ignoring my privilege and prestige. How horrible of me.
With my lunch now taken care of, I prepared mentally for a quite monumental task: figuring out what my brother wanted to eat.
To say that Hermes Kuiper and I were polar opposites might be a bit of an understatement. We were wildly different, and those differences were only exacerbated as we both grew up and became difficult teens. To say I was jealous of Hermes might also suffice too. He just seemed to have it so much easier. Even with constant arguments with my mom over the silliest of things, I felt like she just still seemed to prefer him. I always had the reputation of “emotional and difficult child” looming over me, and it seemed to cloud everything about my position in the family. Logical parents who were good at what they did. A brother who really could become a Peacekeeper in a few years. And then there was little old Adi.
Wasting food gnawed at me and made it a monumental task to accept my hunger. Hermes never seemed to care. He was picky, to put it lightly.
I braced myself for impact and knocked on his door.
“Yes?” I heard him call from inside his bedroom. Okay, so he seemed to be in a good mood. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. I pushed the door open and stepped inside. No huffs of exasperation. Thank God.
“I just wanted to know what you’d like for lunch.” I had already rehearsed my tone and words in my head. Hopefully this sounded pleasant enough with just a touch of urgency to help him make a decision soon. “Don’t worry about me, I already ate.”
“What did you eat?” he asked me, and despite the innocence of the question, I couldn’t help but feel my heart race. Shit. This seemed like a trap. I had been so sure Hermes didn’t really care for most of the food I usually ate, so he’d have no reason to snap if I took it for myself. It wasn’t like his name was on it. I was well aware of the foods he liked and I usually left those alone, even if I really wanted some for myself. But I didn’t want an argument, so letting him have his way was easier.
“I just made a sandwich.” Keep the tone light, don’t freak out. You got this, Adi. “Some cheese, bread, the last of the turkey, some lettuce-”
“I wanted the turkey.”
“Oh.” There was an odd sensation in my stomach. “Sorry, I…I didn’t know that. Um, we have some ham or salami if you want?”
“Fine,” Hermes huffed. I quickly dashed to my room, but I still managed to hear him mutter a last comment under his breath. “Of fucking course she always does this. Idiot.”
The rest of the afternoon was shaky and I could just feel that whole conversation weighing down on me. I just squeezed my eyes shut and went back to drawing in my sketchbook, hoping that it would provide enough of a distraction from the daily struggles of just trying to eat food in a house with Hermes. I hated that he had such a profound effect on me.
After dinner, Mom hunkered down in the basement to look over reports from the factory. Hermes had taken the car to visit his girlfriend, to nobody’s surprise. Dad was probably going to leave soon to join his trainspotting group.
I wondered if I should say something.
“I don’t get why Hermes is so snappy lately,” I finally muttered, after a minute of agonizing in my head over the pros and cons of bringing things up.
“Dunno,” Dad replied, putting on his jacket.
“He got mad at me for eating lunch today.”
“Well, the way I see it, you two need to both work it out.” And just like that, Dad was off. I wanted to slap myself silly, for expecting a different reaction. It was always that, or “you need to be nicer to your brother, Adi.” Or “you’re the older one, Adi, so you should act like it.” A very sad pattern. I just glared at the front door after my father closed it, feeling tears prick my eyes again. I wanted to smash something.
I had no idea how I was supposed to work things out if nobody wanted to help me do it.