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The trouble with white liquor is that it works.
For an hour. Maybe two, if he starts early enough, if he drinks it fast enough to outrun the part of his brain that keeps the ledger. And then it stops working, the way everything stops working in Twelve — the mines, the lungs, the hearts — and Haymitch Abernathy is sixteen years old and alone in a house with twelve rooms and nobody to put in any of them.
He’s counted the rooms. Twice. Once sober, once not, and he got the same number both times, which he supposes means he isn’t drinking enough.
That’s the thought that keeps coming back to him, sitting on the cold kitchen floor of the Victor’s Village house because he still can’t make himself use the chairs. The chairs are for a family. The table seats eight. The Capitol built these houses for the lives victors were supposed to come home to, and then they made sure he came home to nothing, and now he lives in a monument to the arithmetic of it. Twelve rooms. One boy. A subtraction problem the whole district can see from the road.
He drinks straight from the bottle. Glasses are for a family too.
The new house didn’t burn. That’s the joke of it. He has walked past the old one — once, only once — the black ribs of it still standing where the Seam curves toward the meadow, and he stood there in the ash-smell for a long time waiting to feel something large enough to match it. His mother’s washtub had survived. That was the detail that finally got him. The fire took her hands, her voice, the smell of lye soap she never got out of her skin, took Sid mid-sentence — Sid was always mid-sentence — and it left the washtub, dented and soot-black and sitting in the wreckage like it was waiting for Monday’s laundry.
He hasn’t gone back. But the washtub follows him. It shows up around the fourth drink, right when the liquor should be winning, and he understands then that he’s measuring wrong. He keeps drinking to the point where he can’t feel his face and stopping there, like a coward, like a boy who still thinks there’s something in him worth preserving. The face isn’t the problem. The problem is three drinks deeper, in the rooms where the others live.
Because that’s what the rooms are for. He figured it out around the third week. The Capitol didn’t build him a house.
They built him somewhere to keep his dead.
Wyatt lives in the study.
It’s the room with the desk, and Wyatt Callow was a boy made for desks — a mind like an abacus, clicking through numbers while the rest of them were still moving their lips. The oddsmaker’s son. He could tell you the chances of anything: rain by noon, a coin coming up tails, a kid from the Seam making it past the bloodbath. He quoted their odds on the train like other boys quote ball scores, flat and precise, no cruelty in it. Numbers were just the language he thought in. Numbers were how he told the truth.
Wyatt calculated everyone’s chances but he never once said his own out loud, and Haymitch didn’t understand why until he watched him die, and then he understood that Wyatt had known. Had run the figures on himself somewhere back in Twelve, probably before the train even left the station, and had folded the answer up small and carried it quietly the whole way, the way you’d carry a note excusing you from the rest of your life.
Some nights Haymitch sits in the study with the bottle and does the only math he has left. One in forty-eight. Those were his odds, that year, with double the tributes and half the mercy. One in forty-eight, and the one was him, and he’s spent two months trying to find the version of the equation where that’s not an obscenity. Wyatt could have found it. Wyatt could have shown him the work.
But the house only got one boy, and it got the wrong one, and there’s no number for that. He’s checked.
Louella lives everywhere, because she never got a room at all.
She never even got the arena. Fourteen years old, his neighbor, his friend since before either of them could walk to school alone — and the Games killed her before the Games even started, killed her in the Capitol’s own streets during their own parade, and then had the nerve to act like it hadn’t happened. Like she was a prop that broke in shipping. Replaceable.
He carried her. That’s the part his body won’t give back. Everything else from those weeks has gone smeared and underwater, but his arms remember the exact weight of Louella McCoy, remember carrying her when nobody else would touch her, when the cameras wanted her disappeared, because somebody from home had to hold her and there was only him. She deserved to go back to Twelve. He’d wanted them to see — see what they broke and shrugged at.
Sweetheart. That was his name for her, from way back, from the Seam, a big-brother word, a walking-her-home word. He’d said it to her a thousand times when it cost nothing.
He can’t stop saying it now. It comes out of him crooked, aimed at anyone — the escort, the reporters, the geese, the Peacekeepers at the station. Sure thing, sweetheart. Whatever you say, sweetheart. People take it for insolence, and he lets them, because it’s easier than the truth: that it’s a bell he can’t stop ringing. That every time he sneers it at some Capitol face, somewhere underneath he is sixteen and his arms are full and he is saying it to her, saying it the old way, the soft way — I’ve got you, sweetheart. I’m taking you home.
He drinks to make the word lie still. It never does. Some words are buried standing up.
And after Louella came the other one — the girl they poured into Louella’s name, blank-eyed and shaking, a stranger wearing his dead friend’s life like a coat that didn’t fit. He couldn’t save her either. He carries her without even a name to carry her by, and some nights, three drinks past his face, he grieves her twice: once as the girl she was, and once as the girl she was forced to be, and he doesn’t know where one grief ends and the other starts. The Capitol made sure of that too. They even take the shape of your mourning.
Maysilee lives in the room with the window facing town.
Maysilee Donner, of the sweetshop, of the golden hair and the gold pin, who he’d have sworn he had nothing in common with — merchant class, soft hands, a canary in her kitchen — right up until the arena taught him that Maysilee Donner was the least soft person he had ever met. She was vicious the way honest people are vicious. She hated the Games with a clean, articulate, blowtorch hatred, and she never once pretended otherwise, not for the cameras, not for sponsors, not for anyone.
She saved his life. He’d be a name on a list without her. And then they split up because they both knew the shape of the thing they were walking toward, because neither of them could stand to do the arithmetic Wyatt would have done in a heartbeat — two allies, one victor — and going separate ways was the only mercy the arena left on the shelf.
It wasn’t mercy. It just meant he was almost, almost too far away.
But he heard her. He ran. He wants that on the record, in whatever ledger the dead keep: he ran, and he got there, and he held her hand while it happened. He didn’t look away. Her hand in his hand, her eyes on his eyes, the sky very blue, everything in that arena beautiful the way a poisoned thing is beautiful, and he held on until there was nothing left holding back.
She had a twin. That’s the part that finishes him, every time, three drinks past his face. Somewhere down in town, right now, tonight, there is a girl with Maysilee’s exact face buying bread, sweeping a shop, turning at the sound of her name — and one day he’ll round a corner in the square and the world will hand him Maysilee Donner alive again for one full second before it snatches her back. It hasn’t happened yet. It will. Twelve is too small for it not to.
He keeps the window room dark and drinks facing town, and waits for it, the way you’d wait for a second reaping.
The geese are the reason he’s still eating, if you can call it eating.
They showed up in the second week, waddling into the Victor’s Village like they owned it, honking at the fine houses with a contempt Haymitch found almost restful. Her geese. Nobody else would claim them and nobody dared to cook them — you didn’t eat a dead girl’s birds, not in Twelve, not when the dead girl was Covey and half the Seam could still hear her singing if the wind came off the meadow right.
So they came to him. Of course they came to him. Animals and debts always find their way home.
He feeds them in the gray hour before dawn because that’s when he’s awake anyway, having either not slept or not stopped sleeping, the two conditions having become difficult to tell apart. He stands in the frost-stiff grass in his father’s old coat — the one thing he took from the burned lot, it had been on the line, it survived because it was drying, because his mother had washed it, her hands are still in the weave of it and he will wear it until it rots off his body — and he scatters grain, and the geese scream at him like he’s late, and for those few minutes he is a boy doing a chore for a girl who is going to laugh at him about it later.
Then the sun comes up over the ridge and ruins everything.
She used to love sunrises. Used to drag him up hillsides in the dark to watch them, her cold fingers laced through his, and she’d say the sun rising was proof — proof that no night got the final word, proof that things could be new. Look at it, she’d say, like the sky was doing it just for her. Maybe it was. The sky always seemed to be on her side, right up until it wasn’t, right up until she died in the meadow with her head in his lap and the sun came up the next morning anyway, shameless, right on schedule, and he understood that it had never been proof of anything. The sun rises on reapings. The sun rises on graves. The sun rose on Louella in the streets and Wyatt in the dirt and Maysilee under that blue, blue sky, and it would not, not once, have the decency to hesitate.
He promised her something, at the end. He tries not to remember what. Promises are for people with futures, and he traded his in the arena for a forcefield and a joke about the Capitol, and look what it bought him. Look at all these rooms.
Here is the secret he keeps even from the bottle: there is one place left where all of them are still alive, and it’s behind his own eyes.
He only has to close them. That’s the whole trick, the whole shameful ritual — kitchen floor, lamp off, eyes shut — and the house fills. His mother is at the washtub with her sleeves rolled, steam curling past her face. Sid is mid-sentence, always mid-sentence, hands going like windmills. Wyatt is bent over invisible figures, frowning his patient frown. Louella is on her porch step where she belongs, fourteen forever, waving him over. Maysilee has her arms crossed and her eyebrow up, unimpressed with him even now. And behind them all, up the hill, in the gray before dawn, a girl is holding out her cold hand for his, telling him to hurry, they’ll miss it.
And for a moment — one whiskey-warm, unforgivable moment — it’s almost like it used to be. It is exactly like it used to be. He could stand up inside that darkness and walk into any of their arms.
Then he catches the seams. Sid’s voice has gone slightly wrong — pitched too low, or too high, he can no longer tell which, and that’s the horror of it, that he can no longer tell. His mother’s face is starting to be a face he’s built rather than a face he remembers. The girl on the hill is lit by a sunrise his mind is painting for her, generous, secondhand light. They aren’t visiting him. Nobody is visiting him. They’re ghosts at most, and probably not even that — probably just fragments, scraps of his own skull dressed up in the clothes of the dead, a boy haunting himself because no one else stayed to do it.
He opens his eyes and buries all seven of them again. He does this every night. Every night the sun goes down and hands him back to them, and every morning it comes up and takes them away, and people wonder why he drinks against the dark and drinks against the dawn — because both of them are burials, and he’s the only pallbearer left in town.
Bring me back, he thinks, to no one, with his eyes squeezed shut like a child. He doesn’t even know which of them he’s asking. All of them. Any of them.
The house says nothing. Houses full of fragments never do.
Tonight he loses.
Tonight the bottle is half gone and his hands are still his hands, and in the pocket of his father’s coat — he doesn’t remember putting it there, that’s a lie, he remembers exactly — is the flint striker. The snake and the bird. Her most precious thing, the one object in the world she’d have run into a fire for, and it sits in his palm now with all the weight of a hanged man.
She could start a fire with this anywhere. That was her talent, one of her hundred talents — fire, music, believing in things. She’d strike sparks off it in the dark just to watch his face in the light, and she’d grin like she’d invented the whole concept of burning.
Fire took his mother. Fire took Sid. And the last of her fits in his fist, cold as a coal seam, and he cannot make himself strike it and he cannot make himself put it down.
So he does the count instead. He’s drunk enough that the count feels like an idea and not a wound, which is the only time he lets himself do it. He goes room by room, the way his mother used to check on them at night.
His mother. Sid. Lenore — no. Her. Louella. The girl who wasn’t Louella. Wyatt. Maysilee.
Seven.
Seven dead, and twelve rooms, and for one long liquor-bright moment he almost laughs, because look at that, the house isn’t even half full. All that grief and he’s barely moved in. And then the second half of the thought arrives, the way the second half always arrives, quiet and patient and wearing the escort’s bright Capitol smile:
Two a year, Haymitch.
Two a year. Every year. From now on he is the mentor, the only living victor of District Twelve, and every summer they will hand him two children on a train platform — children who jumped rope past his mother’s washing line, children Sid’s age, children with Louella’s laugh and Wyatt’s careful eyes and Maysilee’s temper — and he will learn their names, because he won’t be able to help it, he has never once been able to help it, and then he will bring them home in boxes and carry them into this house whether he wants to or not. The rooms will fill. The rooms will fill and fill and fill, two a year, decade after decade, until there are more dead children in this house than there are boards in the floor, until the whole Victor’s Village is just one boy from the Seam rattling around inside a mausoleum the size of his remaining life —
The sound that comes out of him isn’t a sob. It’s smaller and worse, the sound Sid made when he was little and skinned his knees, and Haymitch would haul him up and say you’re all right, you’re all right — and there is no one. There is no one in twelve rooms. There is no one in the whole scraped-out district to haul him up and lie to him now, and so he sits on the kitchen floor of the house the Capitol gave him for surviving, one in forty-eight, the wrong boy, the lucky one, and he weeps for every name on the count and every name not on it yet — for the children he hasn’t met, whose rooms are already waiting, whose deaths are already rising toward him like the sun behind the ridge.
He weeps until it stops working, the same way the liquor stops working. Then he is empty and shaking and the bottle is still half full, and he looks at it a long time, and he understands the assignment of the rest of his life.
The problem is dosage. There’s a version of Haymitch Abernathy who can carry a full house — he’ll have to build him, drink by drink, year by year. He simply doesn’t drink enough yet. But he’s young. He’s a victor. He has, the escort told him brightly, his whole life ahead of him.
That’s a lot of rooms to fill. That’s a lot of mornings to get through.
He’ll need practice.
Haymitch puts the flint striker back in his pocket, where her sparks used to live — the snake and the bird, the last unburned piece of her, kept the way you keep a promise you have no idea how to keep. Outside in the dark, the geese shift and mutter, guarding her small kingdom, waiting for the boy who feeds them. He will feed them at gray light. He will say there you go, sweetheart to the meanest one, the way he always does, and the word will ring its bell, and he will let it.
And when the sun comes up over the ridge — shameless, punctual, rising on reapings and graves and every room in this house — it finds him still awake to see it, glass-eyed and gone, the bottle empty at last. He watches it with his eyes wide open. He has to. Because if he closes them, she’ll be standing on the hill in that borrowed light, holding out her hand, telling him to hurry — and he is done pretending he wouldn’t go.
Not nearly enough.
But it’s a start.