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The irony is that Maysilee Donner has no taste for candy.
“Too sweet,” she says, screwing up her dainty nose. Ten days, Haymitch has known her – really known her, not just the sneering, straw haired viper from the schoolyard – and he knows that face best of all: it’s the face she makes when she is unimpressed with something. Maysilee is unimpressed often.
Haymitch isn’t surprised one bit that a girl with so much sour in her doesn’t like sweet things, even if she does sell candy. He thinks of his Lenore Dove and how she took her fruit almost overripe, when the juice had turned syrupy and thick, so it stuck to her lips.
“Too much foul in the world; a girl ought to take the sweet where she can get it,” she would say, then she would kiss him with the juice still in her mouth. That overripe plum taste was the best taste in the world when it was on Lenore Dove’s tongue.
Haymitch tells Maysilee this now, as they wade through lush, knee-high grass that is greener than any tree frog. “Take the sweet where you can get it.”
The part about there being too much foul in the world doesn’t need to said here. They are both of them far too aware of that.
Maysilee’s nose only wrinkles further, eying the poisonous trees and fruit and water around them to prove she is thinking the same as him. “Bit late for that, don’t you think?”
But that night, camped against an oak tree, they eat two hard candies each for dinner to ration out the remains of their food and she doesn’t complain.
Later, she keeps her eyes open when she ought to rest. He knows that face on her too, although it is a softer version of it than he ever remembers seeing: it’s the face of unsaid words sitting on the tip of her tongue.
“Better out than in, Ma always says,” he nudges her, prodding at the lingering coals of their campfire in the same way, hoping to draw the last dregs of heat out of them.
“You didn’t like me. Back in Twelve, you thought I was awful, didn’t you?”
Haymitch mulls over how to respond that won’t see her reaching for the pouch of poison darts beside her.
“Better out than in,” Maysilee echoes back at him, dripping sarcasm.
Maybe Ma was wrong about that one.
“Never seemed like you much cared who liked you and who didn’t.”
“I didn’t. I don’t.”
“Why are you asking, then?”
“I don’t know. Knowing you’re practically guaranteed to die in the next few days makes you think about things, I suppose. About whether you would’ve done things differently, if you knew the time you’ve had is all the time you were ever going to have.”
Haymitch tries and fails to suppress a grin. “Let me guess: you wouldn’t have stuck Burdock to his seat with melted candy that time? Or put coal dust in Woodbine Chance’s lunch on that trip down the mines?”
“That was some of my best work,” Maisilee says, very definitive. “What about you?”
“I never put coal in Woodbine Chance’s lunch.”
She rolls her eyes. “What would you do differently?”
He does not need to think about it. “I would’ve let Sid ride on my shoulders on the way to school every morning, rather than tell him he was too heavy the last couple years. Would’ve got up earlier to do some of Ma’s washing for her so she could sleep later. Would’ve kissed my girl every single day.”
Blue eyes blink up into the picture-perfect night sky. For once, Haymitch does not recognise this face of hers. Wistful, he thinks.
“No one ever kissed me. That’s what I’d change.”
The aforementioned coal and melted candy probably didn’t help Maysilee’s case with that, but it seems unnecessarily harsh to tell her as much now, even though if the roles were reversed, she would say it to him without a second thought.
“You might still get the chance,” he says instead. For all it sounds like an empty platitude, he means it as much as he has ever meant anything. As much as he means it when he tells Lenore Dove he loves her like all fire. If there is a way to see Maysilee out of this alive, Haymitch means to find it.
But Maysilee sounds like she means it just as much when she says, soft as she’s ever said anything, “I don’t think so.”
That kills any conversation stone dead, so he’s left to prod at the now burnt-out fire and hate what’s become of their life in pitch black silence.
Until Maysilee says, “You could.”
“Could what?”
He thinks she means he could live, but it stuns him when she says, “You could kiss me. Now.”
Of all the things to think of in this moment, Haymitch thinks of Wyatt Callow. Of what odds the oddsmaker would’ve placed on the queen of the townies, Maysilee Donner, ever saying those exact words to a boy from the Seam like Haymitch Abernathy. He would’ve bet on Lou Lou winning the games before he bet on that.
“I don’t want to die never having been kissed,” she says, far more matter-of-factly than such a sentimental sentence deserves.
The words knot all his insides and not in a nice way. He has never had a girl profess a dying wish to him before. It feels like the sort of thing a man ought to say yes to, no matter whether he wants to or not.
She would probably taste of the hard candies they ate for dinner. Sweeter than she had any right to be, although he has learned of Maysilee that nearly all of her is sweeter than it seems at first.
But the last lips to touch his were Lenore Dove’s, the morning of his birthday. A fortnight ago and already it is too long; already, the taste has faded too much. If he is to die in this place, far from home and far from her, he will at least do it with his lost Lenore and her sugarplum sweetness as the last memory on his mouth.
“I can’t,” he says, refusing to apologise with his words, even though the apology creeps into his voice. “Ask something else, I’ll do it.”
“Alright,” she says stiffly, rolling over to face away from him. “Shut up so I can go to sleep, then.”
They don’t speak of this conversation again and, two days later, Maysilee Donner is dead without ever receiving that kiss.
Maysilee’s kiss is the first, but not the last wish a not-yet-dead girl makes of him on her way to the grave.
That is what being a victor buys him: not just a nice house filled with cutlery he does not know the names of or fresh bread and pies from the Mellark bakery. Not just bad dreams and cold sweats. It buys him an endless supply of not-yet-dead girls, one after another, year after year, blinking at him in well-lit train carriages like they do not know they are dead already.
The second wish he cannot grant is Lenore Dove’s fault, for begging impossible things from him in her beautiful, songbird whisper, with blood bubbling at the corner of her mouth.
The third is his own fault for asking.
“What do you want?” he asks this year’s tribute: a thirteen-year-old Callow girl – Wyatt’s cousin, of all people to torment him with - with wrists like twigs and cracked glasses. It had felt powerful, when Mags asked him the question a year ago to the day, but Haymitch isn’t Mags and growing less like her every day. He practically barks it at the child and she shrinks back, nearly in tears.
“I want to go home,” she whimpers.
"No, not that.” It is not meant to go like this. Maybe the glass of purple liquor he downed over breakfast, much to Drusilla's scowling disapproval, doesn't help with his tone, but there are too many ghosts in this city for him to navigate it clear headed. “How about something realistic, like you don’t want to die screaming.”
That really does make her cry.
She’s probably thinking of Lou Lou in last year’s arena, the same size as this girl is, with blood pouring out her ears and eyes and mouth. Or maybe he’s the one thinking of that: he thinks about it often and wakes clutching at his own eyes.
Not even a week later, he watches through a tiny television screen in the Capitol apartments as the Callow girl burns in an acid puddle, screaming. Even the wish he offered her was too much for him make good on.
The next year, Haymitch convinces himself he will do better. He will drink less and talk more. Find sponsors. Show them all how to strike a flint and gather clean burning wood. Then Effie, escorting her first ever Reaping, draws the tributes and he swears he has never seen two children so small as the ones who climb on stage. The girl turned twelve that very morning: a Reaping baby, just like he is. The unluckiest kid in all of Panem.
“My sister,” she pleads, at him as much as the peacekeepers, like he is one of them now. “I just want to say goodbye to my little sister!”
They haul her to the carriage without so much as a wave of farewell.
He starts drinking when they board the train and does not stop until he has walked back through the door to his house in the victor’s village weeks later. It surprises no one that no new neighbours accompany him.
Under the looming shadow of another Reaping, and another not-yet-dead girl for him to disappoint, Haymitch tries to fix his first wrong.
The townie kids – the ones who are too old, at last, for the next morning’s reaping – sneak down to the field under the old willow tree to toast their freedom with the same white liquor Hattie had refused to sell to him that morning.
“Smell too much of it on you already,” she grizzled. “Always do now.”
Doesn’t matter, though, because Merrilee brings a bottle right to him. Her skirts swish as she sits down.
Merrilee Donner watches him a lot. He sees it, because he watches her too. Even goes into the candy shop sometimes just to see her face. Well, not her face. It’s a ghost Haymitch is searching for in the Donner sweet shop, and Merrilee knows it, but doesn’t seem to mind: it’s a ghost she’s looking for in his face, too.
"We got a new flavour in at the shop,” she tells him, producing a brown paper bag from her pocket. It’s lucky he is already totally numb with drink or he would feel some sort of way about sitting in this field, watching a pretty girl slipping candy into her mouth. “You want one?”
“What is it?” He hopes for something spiced with chili or cracked pepper or pickle juice, like Maysilee would’ve concocted.
“Lemon.”
So dull he’d probably fall asleep if he ate one. Haymitch swigs her liquor instead. In the dark, the girls really do have the same face.
She’s looking back at him, and even through a liquor haze, he knows that look on that face. He’s seen it before, one time.
When he kisses her, she melts straight into him and for a moment, with soft hair on his face and hard candy on her lips, it is Maysilee Donner he’s kissing. He has finally made good on one singular parting request.
But none of it’s right. She tastes of liquor underneath the lemon, and Merrilee kisses soft, where he knows her sister would kiss hard. Maysilee would be the sort of girl to bite, while this gentler Donner with her edges worn smoother still by grief feels pliable as a gumdrop under his hands.
The noise she makes in the back of her throat could be a sob as easily as an endorsement. The feel of wetness on his cheeks from her tears confirms it.
“Stop.” He lies down in the grass and wishes he had never kissed her at all. All it’s done is dilute Lenore Dove and make another poor girl cry. And, still, he is no closer to granting Maysilee’s last wish. He realises only now that he never will be.
“Why?” she sniffs. “Didn't you like it?”
“ You didn’t like it. Go and kiss someone you actually want."
“I could want you.”
“No, you couldn’t.” It is a warning and a prediction and a fear all rolled into one. It’s only the warning that makes him follow it up with, “Besides, who says I want you?”
Merrilee scrubs her nose with the back of her sleeve. Her voice is even more watery than usual when she says, “I know you don’t. But you’re the only person I think still thinks about her even half as much as I do.”
“Maybe that’s our trouble. Maybe it’d be easier if we spent more time on forgetting.”
Haymitch takes another good, long swig of her liquor to help him along on the forgetting. He knows even before the burn kicks in that it won’t work: it never does.
The year Effie dyes her hair silver, the name she picks from the girls’ bowl is a Covey one.
Delilah Pearl is sixteen and fine-boned with dark hair and darker eyes. Haymitch cannot bring himself to even sit in the carriage with her, but he still hears her singing herself to sleep through the walls. It is a better punishment for him than President Snow himself could have ever dreamed up.
Haymitch drinks himself sick. Drinks himself to blackness. But even in the blackness, the singing reaches him, albeit in Lenore Dove’s raspier, lower register.
Effie does not share his distaste for this year’s tributes. She is enamored of beautiful Delilah Pearl with her too pretty melodies and her even prettier smile from the moment the train sets off. He hears them chatting away through the open windows, and Effie laughing her windchime laugh, like the girl is one of her Capitol friends she has met for lunch. The sound is almost worse than the singing.
“She’s simply delightful, Haymitch,” Effie informs him from the door, because she has resolutely announced her refusal to venture further into his room until he bathes. “I’m sure you’d like her too, if you’d only bother to come out of your cave, now and again.”
“That's why I’m staying in here,” he agrees, but his face is buried in a pillow to ward off the light and the words are slurred together anyway. Perhaps she does not hear him.
“They’re different this year, you know.” There is something he does not like at all in Effie’s voice. “They’re older than the others have been. I mean, Arlo’s seventeen. And a girl like Delilah Pearl, well, she’ll have no trouble getting sponsors.”
Haymitch removes his face from the pillow, braving the light to make sure Effie hears. “Watch yourself, sweetheart. Covey girls are easy to fall in love with, but a song never killed a career.”
In the dim light of his room, her silver hair has lost its sparkle. It looks dove grey.
“Things would be easier on all of us if you had a little hope.”
“Not on me,” he corrects, as he burrows back beneath the pillows.
There is no satisfaction in being proven right when, a week later, they watch the District 1 tribute press a bloody kiss to the mouth of Delilah Pearl’s severed head. Effie screams as it happens and then crumples, eyes rolling back in her head. He barely catches her in time.
She cries for two days. He doesn’t see it, because she refuses to leave her room, but he hears it through the walls, just like he heard Delilah Pearl’s singing.
This crying woman is not his fault, but somehow Haymitch still feels the whole weight of it. Still blames himself when, the next year, Effie is polite and positive and achingly professional with the tributes, and he can see there is a part of her that’s dead too.
After Delilah Pearl, Haymitch returns to District 12 less and less. The Capitol has better liquor and fewer people who look at him sideways for drinking it.
The girls here do not have the dark Seam look of his Lenore Dove, or the fair Merchant look of the Donner twins, so he does not have to see faces of not-yet-dead girls everywhere he looks. Girls in the Capitol do not even think about being dead: to them it is a distant, unrelatable thing that happens to other people’s great aunts and feral district children on TV screens. Haymitch is glad of the distance, even as he hates them for it.
They love him here, too, especially the girls, looking to collect victors the way Maysilee collected necklaces.
He lets himself be collected by a few of them, now and again, although he never enjoys it nearly as much as he thinks he’s meant to. Mostly, he does it in the hopes he will feel something, and mostly it does not work.
The only time he feels – really feels - something is when Effie happens on him in the shimmering rooftop bar he has taken up residence in for the night and he mistakes her polite kiss on the cheek in greeting for another collection attempt. In his defence he is drunk and stupid always these days.
“I’ve got a room downstairs,” he tells her.
And she just looks at him. An awful, pitying look and says quietly, “You used to be so charming, when you wanted to be.”
“There’s a very pretty red headed teacher from the Academy who’ll tell you I still am,” he drawls, dripping sarcasm.
She only sighs.
“You didn’t like that one?”
“I don’t like you when you’re like this.”
It’s the pity that stings, rather than the rejection: Effie Trinket looks at him like he is a disappointment, and there are many, many girls who deserve to be disappointed in Haymitch, but he will not have it from Effie, who smiles as she draws names from bowls and then cries as she watches those same children die.
“And who do you think made me this way, sweetheart?” He raises a glass of mandarin liqueur, sloshing it over his hand as he toasts her and then the room at large.
For the first time he remembers, she has the decency to flush with shame.
“I know,” she says. He does not expect what she says next, or the strange note of defiance with which she says it that makes him wonder if the hope in Effie is as dead as he thought. “But for whatever it’s worth, I think you’re still in there, somewhere.”
They do not see each other again before he and Effie return once more to District 12 for a Reaping.
This one is worse than usual. He drinks to stave off the awkwardness, which only makes it more awkward when he falls off stage and knocks himself out cold. Before that, though, he watches Burdock’s daughter volunteer for her sister and feels the familiar bubbling of dread, deep in his gut, over the thought of adding his poor, dead friend’s daughter to the list of people he cannot do anything for.
“You have to at least say hello to them,” Effie tells him, all prim and professional, when he tries to hide out in his room.
“Why? So I can remember their names better when I tell their parents I’m sorry they’re dead?”
“Hush. They can probably hear you.”
“Better for them they know it now. Then maybe it won’t be such a disappointment when it happens.”
Effie opens her mouth. Closes it. Something is on the tip of her tongue, but she does not say it. She only gives him a stern look and says, “Just say hello, please.”
The girl in the dining carriage has brown hair and light eyes and an Everdeen nose. These are the first things he notices. Haymitch intends they will be the only things.
But the second thing, gleaned over what he plans to be a quick and silent breakfast the next morning, is that everything about this girl is sharp . Not just the sharpness of Maysilee with her quick tongue, or of Lenore Dove with her whip smart mind. It is the sharpness of an arrowhead, honed to a razor fine tip. Haymitch has not seen that sort of sharpness in her seat before.
A distant memory flickers through the liquor-soaked mess of his mind. A memory of Wyatt Callow. The girl's got long legs, strong arms, quick hands. Can shoot a rabbit through the eye at twenty paces, or so the boy says. That’s good odds, Wyatt would say. Maybe the best odds District 12 has seen in 24 years.
The flicker of hope comes from nowhere, foolish and unbidden, but irrepressible now is it is there. This same hope was what was on the tip of Effie’s tongue earlier, he knows it.
Because Katniss Everdeen is the first girl Haymitch has seen sit on this train with the grim expression that says she knows she's already dead.
And maybe that is exactly why, for all he knows better and for all he does not want to let himself hope, Haymitch cannot help but think that, just maybe, this girl is not dead yet.