Panem High: Freshman Year

Chapter 10

The day after Katniss had decided to go to the homecoming dance with Gale (she had spent four hours on the phone with Clove and Johanna talking about it), Clove, Glimmer, Cato, Marvel and Johanna sat in Haymitch's math class with the same dumbfounded expression stretched across their faces as they stared down at the test. To think that someone as continuously shitfaced as Haymitch could form enough coherent thoughts to write a test that could stress out some of the strongest Math students in the grade made Clove officially scared of alcohol.

Haymitch pushed his chair back loudly and stood up, walking out of the classroom and thundering down the hall. When his footsteps were out of earshot, Cato pounded his fist on the table.

"WHAT THE HELL IS THE ANSWER TO NUMBER THREE?"

Clove stared him incredulously, eyebrows raised. "Twenty-six degrees, stupid," she muttered under her breath for only him to hear as to not share the answer with the whole class. She cursed Haymitch's name silently for placing her next to Cato in the seating plan. "That's the easiest question on the whole goddamn test."

"If that's easy I am freaking screwed," he replied. Clove scoffed. With a reluctant sigh, she jotted a few numbers and words on a piece of loose leaf paper and passed it to him.

"That's all the answers for the first page," she sighed.

"God bless you, Clover," he whispered. She rolled her eyes.

"Don't call me that."

Cato looked at her for a moment before returning his eyes to his paper, copying her answers down in messy scribbles. "You're a bitch," he said, "but you have your virtues."

Clove scowled and flipped over her page to work on the second side.

"Wait, did you say the first page?" he asked.

She nodded with a smirk.

"GODDAMNIT!" he yelled as Haymitch walked back into the room and sat down at his desk.

"Detention, Cato," he slurred.

"You can't give me detention!" Cato protested.

"I sure as hell can, and I just did."

"For what?! You're too damn drunk to even know it was me!"

"Detention," Haymitch repeated, more clearly this time.

Cato groaned. Clove smirked at him.

She averted her eyes back down to her paper and quickly calculated and answered the final questions. She leaned forward and tapped Glimmer's shoulder. She looked back. Clove held up the completed test and Glimmer winked.

"Last question is tricky, but look at question six to help you out," Clove whispered to her best friend. "The strategy is pretty similar." Glimmer nodded.

Clove stood up and walked to the front of the class, the first one to place a completed test on the teacher's desk.

"Thank you, Clove," he said. "Nice to see someone is putting in the effort." He glared at Cato.

"Yeah, well, some of us actually care about our grades," she replied casually. "Some people are just so immature, you know?"

"Oh, trust me, sweetheart, I know," he answered.

"So irresponsible," Clove sighed, turning and walking back to her desk, grinning sarcastically at Cato.

He made a face at her and stood up, smirking and gesturing to indicate the height difference. She held up her middle finger as she sat down. He rolled his eyes. "Keep doing that," she whispered, taking the line Glimmer's brother had used against her a few weeks earlier. "Maybe you'll find a brain back there."