i’d suffer through hell if you’d tell me

It takes about three seconds of watching Emily shaking and huddled in her sister’s hand-me-down cardigan before the attendant finally calls for volunteers. Lauren knows this because she counts the seconds in her head, just as she counted the amount of time between when her mother last took a breath. She doesn’t give herself time to think about what she’s doing, or consider what consequences this will bring. She puts her hand up as though she were in school, stepping out from amongst the crowd of eighteen year old girls as she has seen what seems like a hundred girls in District Two do before her and says “I volunteer.”Or: Lauren Shiba enters the arena, and never quite comes out.