That’s when his cellphone lights up.
“Ah, crap, I think this is my boss. I’ve got to take this, okay? Just hold on! Hello?”
A shrill voice emanates from the receiver, loud enough for us to hear.
“Yeah, hi. This is Scar’s mom. I'm watching from home and I’d really love to know what the hell you think you're doing.”
“Uh, excuse me?” asks the Gamemaker.
“You know exactly what I'm talking about, bub! I’m talking about putting a bear in the arena!”
The Gamemaker tenses up.
“Yeah, that's right!” Scar’s mom continues. “A bear in the arena! Do you really expect a child to be able to kill a bear? Killing some pasty-faced starvation victim is one thing. Killing a bear is another! You're liable here! You know that, don’t you? Oh, you’re liable out the ass! Putting a child in harm’s way! It boggles the mind!”
The Gamemaker looks at me in a silent plea for help. I shrug my shoulders apologetically.
“HELLO? ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME!” she screams.
“I’m here, ma’am. We’re working hard to getting this situation under control as I speak, but you’re gonna have to let me put you on hold for a sec, so I can—”
“HOLD? What, so you can go to the bear store and buy another bear to throw on top of my son? I don’t think so! You're going to tell me exactly how you plan to make this right!”
He pulls a weighted net out of a box and starts fumbling around with it, trying to untangle it so he can use it on Bear. “Ma’am, I'm trying to make things right as we speak,” he says. “I understand your concern, but I assure you, we're on top of it.”
“I want to speak to whoever's in charge immediately. And it clearly isn't you! So run along and go get your boss!”
“Ah, well, see, right now he's sort of busy setting up this radioactive waste trap thing that the kids are going to walk into later this afternoon, so—”
“This afternoon? No way is that gonna fly. Scar is going to be at soccer practice.”
The Gamemaker’s face drops, and he begins to stammer.
“Do you mean to tell me...” Scar’s mom begins, slowly and pointedly, before bursting into a shriek, “THAT THERE HASN’T BEEN ANY SPORTS PRACTICE HERE AT ALL? AND HOW DO YOU THINK MY SON IS GOING TO MAKE THE U-17 TRAVEL TEAM WITHOUT PRACTICING?”
The Gamemaker looks ill. “Listen, we've been doing our best with the resources we have. Your son has been getting all kinds of exercise here. There's lots of fighting and scrambling around, and, you know, another thing is, he's got to win this entire thing to even be able to go back to soccer—”
“And you think he's not going to win? Look at him! He's a cyborg-warrior-demon, of course he's going to win! Take a look at the title page of this book if you don’t believe me. It says By Scar, doesn't it? Idiot! You're an utter moron idiot! And to think, you work with children!”
At that moment, we all hear a rustling, and Forkface emerges from the woods, holding her stomach and moaning.
“What is that?” Scar’s mom asks. “What is that!”
Forkface stumbles forward, her skin bright red and neck oddly swollen. She reaches the Gamemaker’s feet, and then drops down to her knees. Her mouth is smeared with something.
“Take fork out...put fork in...that’s how me me Forkface....................................................................................win.” and crumples into a heap, dead.
The Gamesmaker looks down in horror, and a pries a food wrapper out of her hands.
“Oh, my God,” he whispers, beginning to read it. “‘This product was manufactured in a facility that also processes peanuts.’” He shakes his head. “Makes sense, that the only person who could beat her...was herself.”
“YOU’RE LETTING THE CHILDREN IN THIS ARENA COME INTO CONTACT WITH PEANUTS OR PEANUT PRODUCTS?” Scar’s mom screams from the phone.
“MA! Shut the hell up!” shouts Scar. “You're knocking me out of the zone.”
“Scar? Is that you? Scar!” she calls out. “Come over here!” Scar rolls his eyes, but trudges over.
“Yes, Ma?” he asks sullenly.
“Scar, I want you to kill this man! Right now! Painfully!”
“MA! I'm busy!”
“Very well, Scar! But don't be surprised if I let your little brother play with your Playstation!”
“UGH, FINE,” says Scar, pressing a button that turns his rocket launcher arm into a razor sharp egg-beater, which he proceeds to push through the Gamemaker’s face. “But keep Jeremy away from my videogames!” he says, as the man falls into a heap on the ground. “Those are frikkin’ mine! I got them because I got stars on my star chart! And if you're going to let Jeremy play with them even though he didn't read nearly as many stupid books as me, then why do we even have a star chart, mom? MA? MA!!!”
“Sorry, lovey, I’m on the freeway right now, and I can see some ‘Peace’keeper cars up ahead. Don’t want to get a ticket for talking on my cellie. I love you, Scar. Now go kill that disgusting Crapshit, or whatever her name is. Mwah!” The line goes dead, and Scar turns toward me.
“You’re going down. All the way down to Dead-person Town.”
“Not so fast,” comes a voice from behind me. I whip around. To my astonishment, it’s Bear. He lumbers up and stands in front of me.
“If you want the girl, you’ll have to go through me first.”
“How are you talking?” I whisper to him.
“I’m not talking,” he whispers back. “This is all in your head.”
Scar laughs maniacally.
“You think this bear can stand up to my heatseeker missiles? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Bear curls his lip, revealing a set of razor-sharp teeth. “Let’s see how you like my karate.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You know karate?” I say. “Come on.”
“No time to explain, Bratniss,” Bear says. “You need to get to safety.”
I run all the way back to the cave. And, damnit, forgot the medicine.
I run back and grab the medicine from the table, then head straight back to the cave. “I got the medicine, Pita,” I say. “And you were right. Somehow, it's going to be able to piece your leg back together. All you need to do is take it twice a day.”
“Thanks, Bratniss! I owe you! But are you sure that’s all I have to do? There aren’t any other directions are there?”
“Well, no, I—”
And then I see that he’s right. The directions continue on the other side.
I slowly rotate the bottle. “Medicine must be taken twice a day...and administered under the guise of a full-fledged, loving relationship.”
I feel lightheaded. How can this be?
Then, in a flash, it hits me: this is a novel for young adults. Think about it: as a young adult reader, you must run into books that talk about “the power of love” all the time. Like, the main character suddenly realizes, “Oh, the only way to defeat that evil monster and save the world is through love.” And you're sitting there going, “No, it isn’t! What the hell are you talking about! The way to save the world is to do something cool and unexpected and satisfying! For the love of God, there’s a nuclear missile bazooka sitting right next to you!”
And that must be the explanation for why Pita’s medicine requires a loving relationship to work.
Ha, ha, listen to me, making fun of “the power of love,” and then resorting to it myself as an explanation. The vicious cycle continues, I guess. Maybe you'll break out of it one day when you write your own book. Good for you.
When I look up from the bottle, I see Pita’s beaming face. He looks...handsomer, I try to tell myself. “What were those extra directions, Bratniss?”
I have to do it. I know that. I have to be a nice, comforting girlfriend to Pita. Do everything he wants me to. Make him my life. Talk about a terrible message, but what choice do I have? The message I got from the sponsor was all too clear that if Pita dies, I die. I take a deep
breath.
“Don’t you worry about that, dear...I have something I want to ask you. Pita, will you be my boyfriend?”
Pita reacts the way I assume most boys do when they are asked by a girl to be in a relationship. He flaps his hands around all Oprah-like and politely shrieks yes, again and again. And with that, and his high Rockette-kicking around the cave, my fate is sealed.
I've never had a relationship before, so it's all new to me. There are phone calls. Long ones. Even though we don't have any phones and live one foot away from each other, he insists that talking on the phone is one of the most important parts of a relationship. So, we do it for several hours, every day.
“Brrring-brrrring!” he goes, “Brrrrring-brrrring!” Then I have to ‘pick up’ and act excited to hear his voice. He has us talk about our days first, which, in his case, means narrating out every thought and every movement he’s had, right up until, “And now, I’m talking to you. And now I’m still talking to you. I’m having so much fun talking to you because I love you so, unbelievably much.”
Talking about how much we love each other: that’s the second half of the conversation. You have to come up with things you love the other person more than, and you’re not allowed to repeat items. “I love you more than...afternoons with grandma and grandpa,” he’ll say. I’ll reply, “I love you more than...uh...uh,” and when he fills in the blank for me—generally something along the lines of “all the stars in the sky” or “any boy in the world”—and he’ll do it with this downright unbearable ‘Oh, you’re learning’ wink. Did I mention that he makes us do phone shapes with our fingers the entire time?
After that, it’s time for an endless handholding session. An hour of clockwise stroking, followed by an hour of counterclockwise. Fifteen minute break to de-sweatify, then five more sets. The de-sweatifying period does little good. Our cave is so small and tight that the sweat never fully evaporates away, instead condensing into tiny clouds that sprinkle us with tiny drops.
“Isn’t it romantic, holding hands in the rain?” Pita asks.
There are also the pointless fights, which, according to Pita, are another necessary part of any relationship. Maybe it’s that I forgot our nineteen and a half-day anniversary. Maybe I didn’t compliment him enough on the new shape he’s pushed his increasingly oily mass of hair into. The only consistent thing about our fights is that there’s always another one around the corner.
After a hunt one afternoon, I come back into the cave and he whips around and glares at me.
“Hello, Bratniss,” he says icily.
“Uh…hi?” I respond.
“I KNOW YOU WERE FLIRTING WITH THAT ROCK!” he screams.
And, every day, the kissing. Pages and pages of it. (“Page,” by the way, is a length of time that we use in Pandumb. It’s equal to “roughly one billions years.”) The amount of kissing I have to absorb is hard enough. What’s worse is that Pita is disastrously bad at it. I’ll admit it: I hadn’t kissed all that many guys before this. I’ve never had a boyfriend, and the first time I played spin the bottle, I accidentally spun too hard and the bottle flew into this kid’s neck and shattered. That sort of put me off kissing for a while.
Even so, I get the feeling that Pita is one of the worst kissers in history. Like, when we first started doing it, he was under the impression that kissing mainly involved the teeth, and mainly pressing your teeth against the other person’s and slowly rubbing them back and forth. It took a long time before he’d instinctively put his lips against mine, and there are still a lot of times when he shrieks, “Eww, slugs crawling over each other! Back to teeth-on-teeth! Back to teeth-on-teeth!”
And all of it—all of it—is unbearably boring. The days roll by, all of them the same. For a while, I hold out hope that something interesting will happen again. But, eventually, the grim truth begins to dawn on me: there will be no relief from this boredom. The Gamemakers have either forgotten about us, or decided they've seen a lot of kids die already, so why not see some kids get driven insane by boredom?
I watch the seasons pass. The leaves fall, and a chill sets in. The mockstriches begin their long walk north, to an even colder place, because they are stupid. How long have we been here? No way of knowing. Days blend into weeks and months. We kiss and we kiss but nothing more, because, luckily, Pita still doesn't exactly know where babies come from.
Winter arrives. Our breath is visible inside the cave. Not because of the temperature, but because we haven't brushed our teeth in so unbelievably long. I hope that it will slow down Pita’s kiss-drive, but he pays as little attention to our breath as he does our hideously chapped lips, or my scruffy beard.
One day, Pita turns to me. “I feel like I haven't seen you in forever, you know?”
“We spend every second of every day together, Pita. What could you possibly mean?”
“Yeah, but sometimes you're off in the shadows and I can't really see you, and it makes me worried that you're hiding in there on purpose because you've stopped loving me!”
“Pita, this cave is one big shadow.”
“I know, and it's tearing us apart!” he hollers. “I'm sorry I said that, Bratniss. I love you so much. So, so much. Let's go out to a nice dinner tonight. You know, on the other side of the cave, the one where there’s not so much bat poop. And you can catch some kind of delicious animal and cook it, and use the fat to make some candles, and, I don't know, maybe make a table from a tree you chop down? Thanks, sweetheart.”
“Pita, are you not the least bit tired of sitting in this cave?”
He looks nervous and starts wringing his hands. “Oh my God, oh my God, I hope this doesn't mean we're going to get divorced after our kids go to college. Do you think it means that? Do you think this is a relationship where the love won’t last? DO YOU?”
Before I can respond, the loudspeaker booms out: “WILL YOU PLEASE DO SOMETHING! ANYTHING! YOU'VE BEEN SITTING AROUND FOR MONTHS.”
“Hey, it's not our job to make this exciting!” I yell back. “We don't like the Games! We think they suck!”
“Okay, kid, I guess I'm the one who's wrong. Me, the Gamemaker, who's been doing this since you were in electric shock-diapers.”
“Believe me, I don't mean this to be insulting, but I'm pretty sure that you are the one who's wrong, here.”
He sighs derisively. “I'm going to look in the Hunger But Mainly Death Games rule book, but only to humor you.”
There's a long silence.
“Ah, shit, I’m not finding anything about entertainment responsibilities in here. Tell you what. Come down to the fun party we’re throwing at the TeenZone, and we’ll call it even.”
“No way!” I say, “The last time it was a horrible trap!”
“This time it’s not, I promise! DJ Evilmonsters will be spinning the swankest new jams...at the Happyfungoodnicedance Party! ”
“We’re not going!” I scream.
“Does DJ Evilmonsters have Nelly?” asks Pita. “I bet he has Nelly!”
“If you’re not going to willingly walk into this trap—party, I mean party—then I guess I’ll have to force you to go. You do realize that we have control of the entire arena. You’re not going to like what happens to people who disobey us…” his voice trails off as we hear hands shuffling around on a keyboard.
“Ah ha! HERE!”
There is the groan of a lever being pulled. Far off in the distance, we see an anvil drop from the sky into some pines.
“Nope, nope. Okay, hold on. How about…THIS one!”
The click of a switch, followed by a beep. A laser shoots through the sky and roasts a flock of violinbirds, even further than the pines.
“Damnit! Why didn’t anybody label these controls!”
And now, the sounds of hands clattering on a keyboard, pressing as many keys as possible. In the distance a plane firebombs a wheat field. Elsewhere, a cow with grenades in its mouth floating down in a parachute. A silo full of acid tumbles gently down a hill. Man, this guy
really has no idea what he’s—oh, damn—now the cave is on fire!
“There! Got it!” the announcer yells triumphantly.
“We’ve got to run!” Pita screams, shooting up to his feet as the pulled pork falls off his lap and the bottle of ketchup he was using for blood falls out of his pocket.
“Pita, your leg…it’s…”
“I said RUN!”
We move as swiftly as our TeenZone pogo sticks will take us. The fusillade of deadly items continues—poisonous cannonballs and vats of piping hot chili and snakes with saws dangerously taped to their heads and, well, it all kind of makes me wonder, isn’t this kind of wasteful? All of this, just to kill a couple of kids?
“Hurry Bratniss!” Pita says. “There’s no time to think about whether or not this is kind of wasteful. All of this, just to kill a couple of kids.”
And he’s right. This internal debate can probably wait until after I’ve ducked that cannon-launched exploding baboon—OOHOOHOOHOO—that just sailed over my head. It’s good to know though that at least Pita is thinking similarly. No, not similarly, but the exact same. Word for word. Wait a second.
I stop running. “Pita, how did you know I was thinking that stuff?”
“No time to talk! We’re in mortal danger! Watch out! A deadly gust of wind!” he says, whooshing air with his hand.
“I thought something, and then you said it out loud, verbatim, immediately after I thought it.”
“Who knows what those dastardly Gamemakers will think of next! There’s no time to ask questions! Good heavens, an incendiary grenade! Take cover!” he yells, making explosion sounds with his mouth.
“Pita Malarkey, if I run my hand through my hair and find a mind-reader chip, I am going to kill you.”
He pauses.
“Come on,” he laughs nervously, as he reaches over and begins vigorously combing his fingers through my scalp. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound right now?”
I duck out of Pita’s grip and roll backwards between his legs, simultaneously ripping the earpiece out of his ear, ninja-style, or whatever style means gymnastics, and picking at ears.
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