The Hunger Games Summary & ending explained

I'm up before the sun, alone. Prim has slipped across to sleep curled against our mother, as she always does when the bad dreams find her. I don't blame her. Today is the reaping.

I pull on my father's hunting jacket, listen for the hum of current, hear nothing, slip under the fence, and dig my bow out of the hollow log where I keep it. Out here District 12 falls away: no coal dust, no Peacekeepers, just the woods and the quiet. Gale is waiting on our ledge with a loaf of real bread and a grin.

"We could just go," he says, tearing it in two. "Live out here. Nobody would find us."

"And leave our families to starve?" I ask. He has his own brothers and sister to feed. I have Prim and a mother who stopped living when the mine took my father. We both know the answer, so we hunt, we trade, we sell strawberries at the back door of the mayor's house, and then we go home and scrub up.

The rules are simple. Every child from twelve to eighteen goes into the reaping bowl. Your name goes in once at twelve, twice at thirteen, and once more for every extra ration of grain and oil you take to keep your family alive. My name is in that bowl many times over. Gale's is in even more. Prim's is in once. She's twelve. I made sure she never took a ration.

In the square, the cameras wait. The mayor reads the history: the rebellion, the district that was wiped off the map, the Games that remind us all what happens when you defy the Capitol. Haymitch Abernathy, our only living winner, staggers onto the stage drunk.

Then Effie Trinket, in her pink Capitol wig, crosses to the girls' bowl, fishes out a single slip, and reads the name.

It isn't mine.

It's Prim's.

I watch her walk toward the stage, small and stiff. Then I'm shoving through the crowd, and my voice is so loud it hurts.

"I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!"