Chapter Text
“Oh Fletcher, I just loved the way you pitched in stickball today,” Annika said, smiling so wide her dimples looked like craters. “You definitely won the game.”
“Well, that’s really nice of you to say,” the blond boy rubbed the back of his neck as they walked towards the town green, “but actually Gideon was the one who got the winning hit, so I think you’d have to say that he won.”
The fact was, Gideon won almost all the games. Fletcher didn’t mind much, because Gideon was his best friend. In fact, he was pretty proud of him. Today especially had been an amazing hit that had gone fast and hard right between two players. The dark-haired boy had run like a deer, kicking up clouds of dust before he skidded into the home base just at the last second. It had been a great win.
And Gideon definitely knew he deserved credit.
“Yeah!” the taller boy was indignant. “What am I? Chopped liver?”
“Oh!” Annika jumped, startled by his outburst, “I’m sorry Gideon, I didn’t even see you there.”
Gideon rolled his eyes.
“And yes, I will admit, it was a very fine hit," the girl continued unfazed, "but if Fletcher hadn’t pitched so well, the other team would have been so far ahead that… Fletcher? Fletcher? Are you even listening to me?”
He wasn’t.
“Who… is that?” he croaked.
“Who’re you talking about?” Gideon asked, bewildered. But he wasn’t really asking anyone, because, head tilted at an awkward angle, Fletcher was wandering into the center of the green. Towards a girl.
There were plenty of girls that he had seen before. In general, Fletcher was pretty observant, thanks to his mother. It was important to always know your surroundings as a hunter, and she had taught him to be aware of where he was all of the time. That meant paying attention to people just as much as trees.
But he had never really looked at a girl before. Not like this.
Her hair was red, like maple leaves in the fall, and it fell down her back in long curly loops so very different than the snarled frizzy mass his sister had, or even the tiny tight curls on Daisy’s head that seemed to defy gravity. He tried to think of some kind of natural phenomenon to compare this new girl’s hair to, but came up blank.
It just looked really nice.
She was talking to two other girls. Fletcher was vaguely aware that he somehow knew them, but when the girl laughed and tossed her hair, white teeth gleaming in the sunlight, their names completely flew away. His sister, who was one of said girls, would have been particularly insulted by this fact, but Fletcher was not about to tell her, since he currently found himself incapable of speech.
“Fletcher, what are you doing?” Gideon elbowed him hard, jarring him back into some semblance of reality. He and Annika had followed him into the green. Annika looked like she was about to either cry, or scream. Probably both.
“I… uhh…” Fletcher glanced at them and then back at the girl nervously.
Gideon crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.
“You know what? I don’t even wanna know,” he laughed to himself as he walked back to the sidewalk and on towards his neighborhood.
Annika huffed and followed, tossing her hair vehemently, for once siding with the taller boy.
Unsure what to make of their behavior, Fletcher turned back to the red-headed girl.
She was laughing again, but this time her face was turned completely towards his, and he could clearly see her features. Upturned nose, dark luminous eyes, and skin that was covered in freckles.
Not that many people in District 12 had freckles, and they were usually only the scattered few that came out in the summer and sprung up on noses. But this girl was completely covered with them, gloriously splotchy across her otherwise cream-white skin, paler even than his father and sister. He’d seen a few people like this before, especially in documentaries on the subject of the switch to nuclear energy. The camera people liked to interview old power plant workers from District 5. A lot of them had red hair. But they were old, and their hair looked washed out, freckles turned into age spots on sagging cheeks.
This girl was not old.
Well, she was kinda old. As old as his sister, it seemed like, but he knew just by looking at her that there was no possible way she could be as annoying as Hope.
He steadily approached, closer and closer, trying to figure out what on earth to say when he overheard her ask if either girl knew a good place to pick flowers.
“Well,” Hope began in that way she sometimes had of acting too smart for her own good, “if you just walk straight through town and–”
“I can take you!” Fletcher interrupted in a voice that sounded two octaves higher than normal.
His sister turned and scowled darkly. At her side, her best friend Lindy Alberts giggled.
Lindy was always giggling.
“Fletcher, what are you doing here?” Hope demanded. “Don’t you have some lower school game to play or something? I’m sure the other children are waiting for you.”
He fought back the burning that rose to his cheeks at her words. Hope hated to be surprised, and she had a sharp tongue whenever that happened. It was likely that tomorrow morning Fletcher would find lavender candy or a charcoal pencil outside his bedroom door as a peace offering. She’d probably do extra work at the bakery today too, so he had less to do during his next shift.
But for the moment, his sister was the enemy.
“I was just thinking that you have to go to the bakery today, Hope, so maybe I could show your friend how to get to the flowers?” he said softly, but confidently. “I know where all the best ones are.”
“No you don’t,” Hope said so scathingly that Fletcher’s head drooped and he began to walk away. She was probably right. Hope basically hoarded flowers, trying to make them into tinctures to heal pretty much any animal in the district that so much as sneezed. There was no question she knew secret places in the woods where they grew in abundance. She had been spending time in there three whole years longer than he had.
He might as well go off and be alone with his embarrassment.
“Wait,” the red-haired girl said in a way that made him feel like she was pulling his heart out of his mouth with a string.
He turned, ignoring his sister’s glare and Lindy’s continued giggling.
“Not-the-best flowers are still better than no flowers at all,” she smiled, and as she did his ears filled with a strange buzzing sound. It was a perfect smile, not as wide and terrifying as Annika’s, but not small and smirking like his sister’s mocking one either. It made him feel scared and happy all at the same time.
“Can I take you then?” he blurted out, his voice cracking in a fine imitation of Jasper Hawthorne’s and Lindy burst into giggles again.
Fletcher suddenly felt a great deal of empathy for the older boy he and Gideon had constantly laughed at.
***
He was walking with an older girl. A real live girl, one in the Upper School, who had hair that looked like it was spun out of fall leaves and eyes as dark as the night sky when there was no moon. An older girl who made him want to melt out of his toes and jump out of his skin.
An older girl who was not his sister or Lindy.
Fletcher was not nearly as poetic as he hoped to be.
His arms were full of the flowers she had picked in the far corner of the Meadow. He also had a small handful of dandelions for his mother, but the redheaded girl hadn’t been interested in a flower so ordinary. She'd picked red columbine, larkspur, rosemallow and especially Queen Anne’s Lace, pulling it so hard that it came out by the roots, which she had ripped off and tossed away.
His mother would be furious, someone wasting food like that, but he didn’t think the redheaded girl even knew that the roots tasted kind of like carrots and were great when your stomach hurt.
Maude. Her name was Maude. The unfamiliar name had sounded heavenly when she'd introduced herself, but it too beautiful for him to feel comfortable being all that familiar with yet. She had talked a lot about flowers, how she loved beautiful things and bright colors, and he had stood there stupidly, trying to come up with an interesting flower fact to share and finding that he didn’t have a single one.
It was especially infuriating since his father and mother had been writing a book on plants for basically their whole lives, and Hope seemed to know even more about flowers than they did. They all talked about plants almost every day. But he couldn’t remember anything a single one of them had ever said about flowers, so he had just stood there stupidly, watching her hair glimmer in the sunlight.
She was so pretty he couldn’t really think.
So he just carried her flowers as she talked about how her family had just moved to Twelve from some other district and her mother was an administrator at the medicine factory and she was going to make sure that the place got efficient. He had no idea what on earth she was talking about, and the competing perfumes from all of the flowers made him dizzy. It was hard to pay attention to anything, he felt so fuzzy and happy inside.
When he walked right into Daisy, it wasn’t all that surprising.
They both recoiled with an oof, landing on the ground at almost the same moment. He was okay, but Daisy had fallen backwards and her hands were scraped on the brick sidewalk. Fletcher could tell that it hurt her because she was biting her lip really hard, part of it catching on the gap in between her teeth. His own dandelions were secure in his fist but the other flowers scattered everywhere. Some of them were crushed and broken, but most of them were fine.
He was getting up to help Daisy when Maude exploded.
“You stupid little gap-toothed brat,” she spat venomously, face red and blotching with fury. “Don’t you have any sense?”
Normally Daisy didn’t allow anyone to talk down to her, ever, but she didn’t say anything, just gasped a little. Fletcher saw her cradle her hands closer to her body and he figured they had to really hurt.
Maude was still furious, and her pretty face had distorted itself into something horrible. She circled Daisy on the sidewalk, like a bobcat ready to attack an injured rabbit.
“But look at you,” she sneered. “I bet you’re too poor to afford glasses, so of course you can't exactly watch where you’re going.”
Daisy grit her teeth and squeezed her hands into fists.
Fletcher hadn’t really ever thought about it before, but Daisy was really poor. She lived with her grandmother, an older woman who had moved them both from District 11 years ago. No one knew why they had come to Twelve, but they didn’t question it. Mrs. Thatcher wove baskets, something she had done with tall grasses in the fields in Eleven, but people didn’t need baskets every day, so Fletcher didn’t think she made a lot of money. Daisy’s dresses were always too big or too small. A lot of them had holes in them.
But all of the Albert’s kids wore clothes with holes in them. Since there was an Alberts in almost every class, and their dad was the mayor, no one Twelve seemed to care.
Maude was new, though. And she seemed to care a lot.
She turned to Fletcher and smiled at him, her face back to how pretty it had been before. The smile was even softer and nicer than her others had been, and it made his heart flutter to see it again. He felt important and special and he tried to focus on those feelings, but it didn't feel right.
“Fletcher, will you please pick up what’s left of my flowers?” she asked in the sweetest voice she’d yet used.
And he wanted to. Daisy was mean, she pushed him all of the time, and made kids laugh at him, too. She was the worst friend he had, if he could even call her that. But seeing her on the sidewalk, little streams of blood running down her wrists from the cracks in her fists, biting her lip so hard he thought that was going to bleed too, made his heart hurt more than anything. Maude’s sweet voice felt wrong, like the candy Effie had brought once. It was supposed be sweet without making you get fat, but it tasted wrong.
Fake.
Maude smiled even softer and put her hand on his shoulder.
Fake.
“Let’s go, Fletcher.”
He pulled away from her, not hard, but hard enough, and then crouched next to Daisy.
“Are you… um… okay?” he asked, a little nervous that the girl on the ground was going to sock him in the jaw.
At his snub, Maude’s face turned uglier than it had been before. She was so angry she shook as she shouted.
“Fine! I only went with you because I knew you’d do all the work. You’re just a shrimpy kid, anyway. I bet you’re the shortest kid in your class!”
Crouching down, she gathered the flowers into her skirt, then stormed off. Fletcher watched her as she went, feeling embarrassed and angry and sad and disgusted all at once. He wanted her to like him, had felt so good when she was paying attention to him, and now it was all ruined.
“Well isn’t she lovely?” Daisy finally said through her gritted teeth. “New girlfriend?”
Fletcher ignored her, “I’m sorry I knocked you down. Are you okay?” He reached out to take a look at her hand but Daisy yanked it away and stood up, shaking her dress out as she stood.
“I’m fine, dough boy, just give me some space.”
Fletcher took a giant step back, feeling relieved to escape this encounter without milk in his hair or ink on his neck. He was still holding the bouquet of dandelions, and without thinking he thrust them into Daisy’s face.
“Here.”
Daisy, who couldn’t even see them, they were so close to her eyes, grabbed them and pulled them away to a more visible distance. She looked at the dandelions for a long second, made a weird face, and then threw them down.
“I don’t want your stupid flowers,” she muttered. “Now can you leave me alone?”
Fletcher shrugged. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Get OUT of here,” Daisy bellowed.
He obliged her.
***
“She picked them up after you left, you know,” Hope’s voice at his shoulder seemed to come out of nowhere, shocking him into dropping his knife. He was helping his mother by skinning squirrels in the backyard, a task Hope refused to do. It was easy to stop paying attention to much of anything and get lost in the work, but it meant that Hope could easily sneak up on him. She could sneak up on pretty much anyone, even their mother, but it was still kind of annoying.
“What?” In addition to being kind of embarrased at being suprised, Fletcher had no idea what his sister was talking about.
Hope sighed, as though he was really stupid. She did that a lot, acted like she was smarter than he was, and he wished she wouldn’t. She hadn’t always been like this, so certain that she was better than him. Actually, she’d only been like this for a little while.
Since Haymitch…
Hope suddenly seemed a lot less annoying.
“That girl with the gap in her teeth. She picked up all the flowers you gave her as soon as you were gone. I could see from the bakery window.”
Fletcher dropped the squirrel as well.
Hope turned up her nose and continued, “Maude was really mean to Lindy after she blew up at you. I was trying to be her friend, but I don’t trust her now.”
She was still really pretty, and thinking about her still made his heart jump, even knowing how rotten she could be. He wanted to defend her, even though he had seen firsthand that Maude was not a very nice person. It was extremely confusing.
“Look, Fletcher," Hope began, sounding a lot less full of herself and a lot more concerned than usual. "There are a lot of girls in the world. And we're complicated people. Sometimes we’re confusing.”
“Really?” he burst out in a rare moment of sarcasm, knowing full well that girls made absolutely no sense.
Hope rolled her eyes.
“I'm pretty certain girls aren't the only confusing people on earth. But since we seem to be particularly confusing to you I’m just saying, sometimes the good ones aren’t only the ones who seem perfect at first glance. Sometimes you've gotta dig a little deeper.”
He looked up at her, waiting for her to finish.
His sister shook her head, chuckling and sounding frustrated all at the same time.
“Guess you’re gonna need a few more years to figure that one out.”