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When we were in 13, Beetee told me that he remembers the entire six months between his first Games and his Victory Tour as one endless blizzard, all snow and static.
While it is true that it snowed more forty years ago (another legacy of our fucking ancestors, like the fires creeping north from 4 and the blazing heat in 2), it definitely wasn’t snowing in August when he got back, and obviously, he knew that. I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time, and honestly I thought it was just another thing with his weird memory, but it’s been over a year since I got home and I think I understand what he meant now.
I get it because unlike snow in 3, rain in 7 hasn’t slowed down at all and this club has the loudest tin roof in the world. I’ve been here a few times, and 90% of the time it’s my favorite. I love the loud music, the electric lights, the hookah pipes behind the minibar. It’s the opposite of where they held me in the Capitol, and it makes me feel like a body without a head, especially when ecstasy is involved.
But for some reason the rain tonight bothers me. It never did before, that’s just what 7 was like and if anything on the rare occasions it rained in the Capitol I was reminded of home, but now I feel trapped inside. The rain beats down and interacts with the thudding beat of the music and I know that if I left there wouldn’t be respite waiting, just a different kind of storm. I want to run out, suddenly, but I didn’t bring a jacket because I’m twenty-three and I don’t know how to be a functional adult, so it would be just me in my black bandage dress and gray motorcycle boots, in the cold lightning storm. I live in a neon world now.
I’m stuck on this image of lightning, of nightclub lights reflecting natural lights, when I see Lucas coming towards me.
“Johanna!” yells Lucas, coming up to me and guiding me back to the bar. I had purposely lost him, but I do have to admit another drink sounds like an excellent idea. I order a lemon drop, which is ridiculously expensive, like the admission to this place was.
Beetee thinks I’m spending this money, his money, on rent and groceries.
The bartender hands me my drink, and Lucas his gin and tonic. I expect him to head back to the dance floor, but he doesn’t. He sits down at the bar instead, but talking is futile because the speakers are so close.
It doesn’t mask the rain. I think of water on my forehead, the feeling of drowning.
If Finnick were here, he’d have edged his way behind the bar by now, bartending with kinetic ease. He wouldn’t drink much, because it wouldn’t fit his stupid fucking macros (Finnick, in a desperate attempt to grab some kind of control of his body, had a genuinely unhealthy obsession with his macros– unless he was eating half of an entire avocado pizza in a hotel room with me, which I realized was part of the cycle too) but he’d make me a better lemon drop than this.
Lucas weighs 130 pounds soaking wet and I don’t think he even knows what a macro is.
I’ve been fucking Lucas for about six weeks. We met at a different bar than this one, and he didn’t recognize me at first because I’ve dyed my hair cobalt and gotten all the piercings Blight used to tell me I couldn’t. He’s a scrawny, brown-haired, and dark-skinned kid a couple of years younger than me with an innocence that reminds me of Peeta, which is why he looks ridiculous in black pants and a leather jacket that I sometimes borrow just to tease him.
Because the thing is, I’m pretty sure Lucas thinks he’s in love with me. Not only that, but he’s also got this impression that I can love him back in time, that all he has to do is wait. What he doesn’t understand is that all the appointments with Dr. Taylor in the world won’t make me love him of all people, because I don’t even like him.
He’s a pretty face, that’s all.
But it’s fun as hell, having this power over him, so I like to let him know little things, details without impact, like that they’d wake me up and drag me to another room so I never really slept, and of course there’s the undeniable fact that I never take him up on his offer to shower at his house and keep an endless supply of dry shampoo in my bag. I’m not stupid enough to think he doesn’t notice, but I also think he likes it.
And he loves all of it, loves these adventures in sweaty nightclubs, loves that he’s a supporting character in the great tragedy of Johanna Mason. Loves to have his cake and eat it too. At least he doesn’t have the idea most guys (and some girls) I meet have, that a girl being fucked up in the head gives her secret sexual magic powers.
I down the drink too quickly, and look over at Lucas to see if he noticed. He has. In fact, his oatmeal-brown eyes are fixed on me. evaluating. He really thinks we’re having a moment, sitting on adjoining barstools and saying nothing.
The lemon drop is my fourth drink in two hours, and the alcohol is starting to hit. Usually, this is my sweet spot, where I forget myself, but all I can do after I finish is look into the bottom of the glass, the grain of the marble underneath its clarity. I can’t meet Lucas’s eyes right now.
The rain fucking pours. I feel like I did when I failed my swim test in 13, a deep and blooming shame that makes me want to immediately run back to the dance floor and lose myself.
And that’s where I think Lucas is leading me when he stands up suddenly and motions for me to follow. But instead, he takes me to the door.
“You wanna leave?” he says, the intimacy ruined by how loudly he has to speak in order to be heard. I want to make a bitchy comment about how he’s fucked up his order of operations but instead I just nod.
The train that will take us back to the suburbs is a block away, and I’m glad for my flat boots as we dash through the storm, his jacket over our heads. The thunder screams and I’m all motion, all arena Johanna, just trying to get where I need to go and I’m drowning and I’m drowning and I’m drowning until we get to the station and just barely make it, Lucas paying for both of us because he thinks, maybe correctly, that fishing out my CascadeRail pass would be too much for me right now.
I should turn the next seat around so I’m facing Lucas, or even sit far away but I let him sit next to me in the same one instead. He’s warm, somehow, even though he’s as drenched as me. I can’t help but think of Finnick again, how once he kissed me because he needed to be touched by someone who wasn’t trying to possess him and didn’t know another way to go about it. Resting my head on his shoulder in a weak moment, I watch the neon fade into the parts of 7 that haven’t been rebuilt as well– the vacant storefronts, the burnt-out road signs. We’ve done very well because we weren’t bombed that much to begin with. but once you leave Seattle city limits (7 is under the impression that changing the place names will change the whole district along with it) you can see the real damage.
We stay silent through the ride home until he asks me “your place or mine?” when we’re a stop away.
“Mine,” I answer, reluctantly removing my head from his shoulder. I feel drunker than I know I am.
“Won’t Charlotte get mad?”
“Charlotte can get over it,” I answer, louder and snappier than I intended because several people glance over at us.
The truth is that I’m not sure Charlotte will get over it. I’m not sure how many strikes I have left, with the screaming and the drugs and the coming home at all hours with strangers, but I know it’s not many. It’s just that when you never thought you’d make it past eighteen, you can’t really think about the future.
The train stops and we disembark. It’s merely raining heavily, not pouring, and we huddle under a shelter stop while we wait for our car share. Lucas uses his phone again, because if drivers saw my name on the account, they’d never pick us up.
Lucas decides he can’t handle the silence and starts talking about nothing– his friends of friends, the pizza joint he wants to try. I just want to go home and dry off and sleep all this off, so I don’t even acknowledge him.
But I don’t tell him to stop talking, either.
The car shows up, and it’s a five-minute ride back to the little clapboard house I share with Charlotte. I get nauseous as we drive, and I don’t know why or how to fix it. I should have taken some Special K, let go of my body, but I’m too aware of my own senses and I can’t shut it off. If I’d brought a jacket, I’d use it as a makeshift towel to dry my hair. In the window, I catch my reflection. I look about how I feel.
The car pulls up and we get out. Charlotte is reading in the living room, and she knows better to say anything as I grab Lucas’s arm and take him upstairs to my room, which is painted a mocking pale blue that contrasts nicely with the badly taped-up band posters and heaps of dirty laundry.
I need to stop thinking rightfuckingnow, so I pull Lucas close and kiss him like I’m dying, push him against the wall, and start to grind down roughly. He’s so self-righteous in his own decency that I half-expect him to pull back, but maybe he sees how much I need this, sees that any more substances would fuck me up more tonight but I still need to forget who I am.
I break the kiss to get his shirt off, and once I’ve done that and moved us to my unmade bed, he looks at me for a second and I can’t read his eyes.
“Jo,” he says, and there’s so much sadness in his voice that I want to strangle him. I hate it when he calls me that, and I’ve told him so, but that doesn’t stop him. He looks so pathetic that I think he’s trying to manipulate me into opening up.
But I see the hunger in his eyes as I unclasp the zipper on my dress, and I know I have him. And so I get back on top of him and take back something that isn’t quite power, but will have to be close enough.
Outside, thunder claps.
The storm has followed me home.