May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor

My mind was racing and I was considering the possibility that there was another James Viero in District 1. I even waited a second for the other James Viero to step up. All hopes of this happening vanished when one of the people from my class pushed me out of the crowd. After shooting him a vicious look, I started for the stage. I tried to procure a relatively confident posture as I stepped towards that stage. I felt tremendously awkward and the short walk seemed to have tripled in size.

When the interminable walk ended, I stepped up next to Sophia. She shot me a nasty look. I’m not sure whether it was because she considered me a threat or because she thought I would make a horrible ally. I agreed with the latter. This was mostly because I already made up my mind that I was not going to make friends or allies. I couldn’t stand the idea of losing someone that I had just grown close to.

“Give it up for your tributes of the 28th annual Hunger Games!” Ariel yelled. The crowd roared and cheered. I assumed that Sophia was the only one that didn’t think I had a chance. Unless they were cheering for Sophia, which I realized was a bit more likely.
As the crowd died down, Sophia and I were escorted to the train terminal. Once there, Sophia and I were split up. I was brought to a six foot by six foot chamber. After sitting there for a minute, a past winner of the games walked into the chamber and sat across from me. His name was Grap. Although he won twenty-two years ago, he was still hugely muscular but he was starting to get gray streaks on his dark brown hair above his ears.

After looking me over he spoke up, “Not too shabby. What weapons are you good with?” I could see why he assumed that I would end up being one of those tributes that would be able to kill anybody without any concern of taking a human’s life. I mean, everybody from District One is.

I decided to be blunt about it so I quickly said, “I hate fighting.” Grap Immediately put his head in his hand and shook his head back and forth.

I supposed he was considering how to proceed because after a few seconds, he said, “Ok, as soon as possible, we need to get you fighting.” I couldn’t think of anything wrong with that because I was going to die if I didn’t fight.

“Sounds good,” I replied thinking if there was any weapon I might want to try.

“Are there any weapons that you’ve used before?”

“I went to some camping convention before and I threw knifes at a tree.” I had a flashback to when that happened. I went with my friend, Jonah, to the convention and when I tried to throw the knives, I missed the tree completely all three times. It really annoyed me.

“Were you any good?”

“Not in the slightest.” Just to annoy him a bit, I gave a content smile. He did the face palm again.

“We’re going to have to get you some really wealthy sponsors.” He was right so we went right to work on how he wanted me to act during the interview.

After a minute of MORE evaluation, he said, “Try giving off a threatening air.” He started to give interview questions that were used in the past. I tried to act as threatening as I could, but I think my voice sounded like a dog being shot. “No, no, no. Try humble.” He did the same thing and I tried to sound as humble as possible. I sounded overly nice and he tried telling me to act like “One of those braniacs.” I had no idea what he meant so I just used a lot of big words but I had no idea what the words meant. “How about overly confident?” I tried to sound overly confident and this time, I really got into it. I sat back and talked in a really disrespectful manner. I was acting like one of those cliché bullies from movies.
After a few minutes of this, Grap almost screamed “PERFECT.” I guessed that meant that that was the image we were going to project of me. He went over how to perfect the over confident image. By the time the train went through all the Districts and collected all of the tributes, I had the confident image perfected.

I saw almost all of the tributes as they came on and seeing them actually made me more confident. There were only a few that appeared to be a challenge. The majority of them looked like they couldn’t survive without three squares a day. There were only two people that did appear to be a threat, the boy from District 3 and the Girl from District 2. The boy seemed to be six foot and his muscles were bigger than I thought an eighteen-year-old’s could get. The girl seemed like she could beat the crap out of any guy that I knew. All six of the tributes from Districts Ten, Eleven, and Twelve looked like they would be killed off on the first day.

When we arrived at the Capitol, I was immediately brought back by the beauty of the place. The buildings looked like they were made of diamonds and the skyscrapers seemed to have been able to reach space. There was one building that seemed to tower above any other. It was not only tall but it took up the land that would normally take six buildings to fill. I knew immediately that it could only be one place, the house of President Farley.

When I got off the train, I saw a man who I easily recognized. It was the man that interviewed the contestants. His name was Octavian and he welcomed all of the tributes with a smile and a statement that looked over rehearsed. “Welcome to the Capitol.”