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There are bloodstains in her mother's dress, and Lucy Gray isn't sure she will ever be able to wear it again.
She wears it when they take it, she wears it while her and all those other tributes are sick and cold and starving, she wears it when the explosions rock the arena and when she runs for her life. When she screams and when she cries and when against all odds, she survives.
She wears it on the train ride home. The platform is empty when she arrives.
Lucy Gray knows how to get home without being seen and she does just that. She steps through the gate in that same old rainbow dress and walks the dirt path she never thought she would again. When she walks in the door, Barb Azure startles so hard she drops a plate on the floor and Maude Ivory screams, "Lucy Gray!"
That night, when Lucy Gray can't sleep, she sits over the washbasin and weeps while she tries to wash the bloodstains out. The water goes cold fast and she's shaky with her knuckles feeling like they're ground to the bone. Maybe it doesn't matter, 'cause Lucy Gray doesn't want to ever wear it again, she doesn't think. Nobody should, even though Maude Ivory gets near all Lucy Gray's hand-me-downs. No, wearing it again would be asking for hauntings. It would be putting on the skin of a killer.
The basin runs brown more than red, blood mixed in with the dirt, and the dress is too old for the colors to run anyways. Lucy Gray leaves it a wet heap on the floor and crawls into bed next to Maude Ivory. It's gone in the morning and she doesn't even see it hanging on the drying line so either Tam Amber or Barb Azure went and did something with it for her and that's alright. Lucy Gray doesn't want to look at it.
It's hard to leave the four walls of their house, but the Covey still need to eat and for that they need Lucy Gray's voice. Not that Maude Ivory isn't good enough to replace her, not that they couldn't play without her (even though Lucy Gray had told them to not think about it, she had a bad feeling while sitting in those dark tunnels that they'd never sing again if they had to watch her die), but for the meager amounts of coin that can be traded in District 12, wouldn't anybody spend their last to see the girl who won the Hunger Games?
The first time back out at the Hob, Lucy Gray feels like she's behind those bars again, paraded in front of those shiny lights. The hands reaching towards her, offering flowers and coin, may as well be those callus-less hands with those shiny cuticles who haven't ever seen a day's hard work shaking food in her front of her face like she'll dance for it. Lucy Gray stares straight ahead and smiles, because the smile is easy to slip on, but every hand that brushes against her is electric and she's sure one of them will grab her, by the hair or collar or skirt, and try to kill her.
She gets offstage that night and shoves herself in the corner of the room and barely keeps from crying. Maude Ivory tries to come over and comfort her and Lucy Gray can only keep saying "don't touch me" until they back away and eventually she can breath again.
In the hollow faces of the district's children, Lucy Gray sees all those other children and their blood. It coats her hands and her heart and while it gets easier to smile, that's only because she practices in the mirror until no one could tell that she's been gone at all. Nobody has to know that Lucy Gray Baird really went and died in the Capitol and the girl who came back might have her face but is somebody else altogether.
Alone in the woods, Lucy Gray screams, and the mockingjays pick up the sound and twist it into a song. The words to it are carved into Lucy Gray's heart and no one else can quite read them, though everybody who cares for her tries. She tells them she's alright, that they're doing a good job, makes it all seem okay and that it's all in the past. But Maude Ivory's name goes in the reaping next year, Lucy Gray knows, and those hungry eyes will be back for her. She's a fool to think otherwise. Maybe Covey will be their new fashion, something else to devour alive.
It's after that Capitol boy follows her home that Lucy Gray finds her mother's rainbow dress tucked into the back of a drawer, clean and pressed and as new as it could possibly be made. She leaves it there. A dead girl wore it. It doesn't fit her anymore.
When she sinks into the waters of the lake is the only time she really feels free of it, naked as the day she was born, and for just as long as she can hold her breath, she can strip the blood off herself.
But she needs to surface eventually, starving for that air. There is blood on her, under her nails and staining her teeth, behind her eyes and in her heart. It puts a new tune to her songs and an edge to her words and when people touch her wrong she has to bite back a scream every time.
The first snake that finds her in the grass paralyzes her, and it makes Lucy Gray want to weep. It takes all her strength to lift it up, to let it slither over her hands and arms. She was born unafraid of them, and even that she could not keep. When she lets it go she has to resist the urge to throw it.
She finds a bloodstain in the collar of her dress that didn't come out. She knew there had to be one somewhere, and it's just as good a reason to never wear it again as all the blood only she can see. She puts it in a box and buries it in the meadow. Her arms burn from the exertion, dirt under her nails, sweat pouring down her back. Her hair sticks to her forehead and neck from where she has it hastily pulled back.
When she covers it back up, puts it in the ground next to the little girl she once was, it's the best Lucy Gray has felt since the day they called her name in the town square.