Work Text:
There was a goldfish belly up in its tank, there was an empty container of fish food in the trash can, and there was a woman slumped over a desk with her head in her hands. The scene was almost comforting to Haymitch as he let his hand rest against Effie Trinket's shoulder.
"I'm sorry for your loss. Have you notified the family?"
Effie groaned and lifted her head, she was chewing the inside of her cheek with her brows furrowed.
"Can we do CPR?"
"It's too late, she's gone."
"He," Effie said, defeated.
"Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn is a he? Does her husband know?"
"Don't be so close minded, Haymitch," she said.
The heart of Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was a two chambered thing that had stopped beating at some point in the night. Haymitch's own heart had four chambers, and three were closed so tightly he could hear it murmur if a room was quiet enough. But the fourth, smallest chamber was wide open and felt genuinely sorry for the woman pouting at her desk in front of him.
Haymitch and Effie both taught first grade at Panem Elementary School. Effie let her students call her by her first name because she didn't think six year olds needed to be so formal and wore skirts designed with pencils or letters of the alphabet or planets and she put rainbow clips all over her box-dyed hair. She was completely and utterly insufferable and absurd. But somehow, Haymitch always found himself accepting a sugary sweet caramel latte from her every morning with a smile.
Haymitch's own first grade students called him Mr. Abernathy and often said his neutral wardrobe was so boring it prevented them from being able to learn. They spent one half of every school day asking what Miss Effie's class was doing, and the other half actually in Miss Effie's classroom watching Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn swim in circles around her tank.
"Just get a new fish," he suggested, worried that this sudden death meant he would have to spend a full day teaching again. "The kids won't notice."
"That's actually a good idea," she said and paused. "Will you cover my class while I run to the pet store? I should be back before the bell even rings."
Last month when Effie got a goldfish for her class, Haymitch's students had reacted as though it was child abuse that he didn't get them a classroom pet of their own.
"Taking care of a fish is a big responsibility," he had told them. "You would have to feed it and clean its tank. Don't you guys just want to visit Miss Effie's pet fish and not have any of the responsibilities?"
His class had screamed and cried and protested; they mistook responsibility as a good thing to have. So the next day he stopped at the pet store and bought the cheapest goldfish with the cheapest tank and when he brought it to school and his students asked if they could name it he told them it already came with one: Fish.
But Effie on the other hand, loved her students so much she knew they craved responsibility and bought a goldfish for them before they even knew it was a possibility. She displayed it proudly on her desk with a tank full of pink rocks and plastic ornaments and asked her class what they should name it. And she loved her kids so much she let them name it Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn, even though the pet store attendant told her the fish was a male. She thought imagination was the most important thing for a child to have and didn't have the heart to tell them the fish was actually a mister, or that they had to choose only one name out of all their eagerly shouted suggestions.
Unfortunately, six year olds had no concept of how much food one fish should eat, so Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was now tragically dead after half of Effie's students all gave him a pinch from the fish food container in one afternoon.
Haymitch kept Fish's food locked in his desk drawer, mostly because he was afraid his students would eat it themselves, but it turned out to also help avoid a homicide like the one occurring in front of him. He almost opened his mouth to gloat about his hugely successful system, but the thing about teaching first grade at Panem Elementary was that Effie's mood was directly linked to how his day would go.
The last time she was in a irritable mood was earlier in the school year when her deadbeat boyfriend lost his job and hid it from her for six months. She only found out when one of her student's fathers had picked his child up and told Effie to have Seneca call him about a job application he had submitted to the restaurant he owned downtown.
For what it was worth, Effie had handled it well in the moment, promising to pass along the message with a tight smile. But once all the students were picked up and her own classroom was empty, she burst into Haymitch's room with smoke coming from her ears. Admittedly, he had overheard the interaction and was leaning back in his chair with his feet propped up on his desk while he waited for her to unleash her rage.
"He lost his job in April," she said as soon as she got through the door.
"Well, it's currently October," Haymitch said, helpfully pointing to the calendar she had hung up on his board after his students kept going to her room to see what the date was.
"Who lies like that?" she asked, sitting at one of the tiny student desks directly in front of his. "That's a huge lie. I can't be with someone who lies, right?"
He knew more than anyone that she deserved to be with someone far better than a man like Seneca Crane, who chose to be bold and surprising with his facial hair instead of the usual simple consistency Haymitch thought a grown man should crave.
Effie and Seneca had been dating for three years and Haymitch had felt like he was right there in the weeds with them the entire time from the way she happily told him every detail of her life. He hated Seneca, and Haymitch would be confident the feeling was mutual if Seneca wasn't as dumb as rocks, unable to pick up on the slightest social cue.
Before he could even respond to her question, Effie spoke again.
"I can't leave him. I love him," she said and put her head in her hands. She immediately shot back up, eyes wide. "But what if we have kids together and he teaches them to lie?"
"Your kids could never be liars," he told her.
When Effie's students made a mistake or got in trouble, they were always painfully honest because she taught them to be. Last week when a boy came up to her at recess and asked if the berries growing on the bushes just outside the fence were poisonous, she didn't laugh the way Haymitch had. She just frowned and said, "Peeta did you eat some of those berries?" and when he nodded she held his hand and took him to the nurse.
Effie just wanted her kids to be happy and kind and live forever, which is why she demanded the truth.
Haymitch was born a liar. He woke up a liar and went to bed a liar and when one of his students came to him and said she witnessed a fight between fourth graders on the playground, Haymitch told her to say she didn't see anything if someone asked.
"I just don't think I can keep doing this with him," Effie said. "Lying about something for months is crazy. Only a crazy person would do that."
She looked at Haymitch for a long moment, because it was clear she knew he was crazy too. And he wanted to deny it, but the look in her eye was making each breathe of air choke in his lungs.
The next morning Effie showed up to school five minutes late and with no makeup on. Nothing had changed, and Haymitch suffered weeks of silence and picking up her slack while she went home after school and fought with Seneca every night.
One afternoon during this time, she had come into his classroom to return the stapler she had borrowed earlier that day.
"Thanks," he said.
Things had felt slightly awkward. She hovered in the doorway and asked how he was doing. He told her that he thought he was developing a heart murmur, that he could hear his heart skipping beats lately. The confession made Effie raise her eyebrows.
"You developed a murmur?" she asked, and it sounded exactly like an accusation. "Do you think maybe you've always had a heart murmur, Haymitch? And this is just the first time it's been quiet enough for you to notice it?"
That hadn't been a possibility that occurred to him, and he wasn't entirely sure where the hostility was coming from. Sometimes, when it was just him and her alone in a classroom, Effie was able to make him feel like he was incapable of saying the right thing.
"Maybe you're right," he said. "I can't hear it right now."
She huffed and turned on her heel, and after that conversation, he began paying too much attention to his own heartbeat while Effie slowly became herself again.
Needless to say, things were infinitely better and he had much less work to do when Effie was happy and excited and not pissed at her boyfriend or mourning a dead fish, so Haymitch agreed to cover her class this morning while she went to get a replacement.
"You're a doll, thank you," she said and jumped up to grab her purse. "I'll be back in no time with the new Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn."
"Why would you need a new Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn?" a young blonde boy said, startling Haymitch with his abrupt presence.
"How long have you been there, kid?" Haymitch asked.
The boy walked up to the fish tank and leaned towards the glass. "Is she still sleeping?"
"Yes," Haymitch said at the same time Effie said, "No."
She gave him a dirty look while she knelt in front of the child. "I'm so sorry Peeta, Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn died last night."
"She died while sleeping?"
This time, Haymitch stayed silent until Effie looked up at him for help. He shrugged.
"Sure."
"Can I die while sleeping?" the boy asked.
"Yes," Haymitch said once again at the same time Effie said, "No!"
And if looks could kill, Haymitch would have been dead under Effie's gaze a long time ago, so he only widened his eyes in innocence in response to her glare.
She consoled the kid a few minutes longer, reminding him of how much fun they all had with Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn and promising she wouldn't actually get a replacement, before sending him out in the hall to wait until the bell rang and the school day started.
Once alone, she swatted Haymitch's arm."You can't tell a child they can die in their sleep."
"Isn't honesty like your whole thing? Are you encouraging lying now?"
"I can't believe people put their children's futures in your hands," Effie said and went back to sitting behind her desk and staring at Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn's floating body. "Can you please get her out of the bowl for me, I don't like touching fish."
He rolled his eyes in disbelief and reached into the tank to grab the fish. In a crazed moment, he decided to push his luck, shoving its slimy body in her face while she screamed and covered her eyes.
"Miss Effie, why did you let me die?" Haymitch said, pitching his voice. "All I wanted was a long and happy life in your classroom, and you killed me."
She uncovered her eyes, offended and about to justify herself to the dead fish when another student barged in. This time, it was one of Haymitch's first graders, Katniss Everdeen.
Katniss was six going on sixteen, always in the back of the classroom observing her peers like there was something to be learned from the back of someone's head. She didn't speak unless spoken to, and even then an answer wasn't guaranteed.
During parent-teacher conferences, he told Mrs. Everdeen that Katniss was extremely smart but extremely shy.
She did not seem to be shocked or concerned by this statement and responded, "Is her shyness hindering her smartness?"
"No, but sometimes teachers hold students back if they aren't developing enough socially," he said.
Mrs. Everdeen asked if he was the type to teacher that did that. He assured her that he wasn't, that the woman down the hall definitely was that type of teacher, but he was happily going to send Katniss off to second grade at the end of the year.
"Good," Mrs. Everdeen said, and left the room without letting him say another word.
Even after the parent teacher conferences, Katniss continued to sit silently in the back of class with her gaze averted. She ignored other kids when they tried to talk to her and chose to sit alone during lunch. The soft spot, it seemed, was the blonde boy from Effie's class who loved a goldfish.
"Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn is dead," Katniss announced to the room, like she was the adult having to break the news to her children.
"I'm sorry, honey," Effie said, reaching out her hand to the girl, but she ignored the gesture and walked up to Haymitch instead.
Haymitch held out his hand and showed Katniss the fish's lifeless body. She touched its face and sighed, like seeing death in the palm of a hand was exactly what she expected to happen when she woke up this morning.
"What are we going to do?" she asked them, as if she was not unlike Haymitch and Effie, like they were all the same person taking charge of the situation.
Effie suddenly straightened at her desk. "I know what we can do. We'll have a funeral for her at lunch," she said.
Planning events gave Effie purpose in life. Every child's birthday needed a half day celebration, every holiday required a party (even the ridiculous, definitely made up holidays like National Talk Like a Pirate Day where Effie wore a bandana and held plastic sword and Haymitch was in an eye-patch and tricorn hat trying not to laugh as she made their students say, "Booty!"), every last day of school was filled with home made cookies and hugs and personalized gifts.
There was nothing more thrilling to Effie than being able to create a schedule and open her craft closet.
"Are we sure that's a good idea, Miss Effie?" Haymitch asked. What he really wanted to ask was, Can we please just have a simple day today?
But it seemed Miss Effie was determined to make his life as complicated as could be; not even a beloved fish's death was going to stop her.
"It's perfect, don't you think, Katniss? How else would we honor the life of a fish we loved so dearly." Effie ushered Katniss from the room. "Go tell Peeta about the funeral. Our classes will have memorial on the playground at lunch, spread the word."
"Why does my class have to be involved?" he asked once they were alone again.
"Your kids loved Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn, too. We would expect an invite to Fish's funeral. Plus, it'll be a good lesson for them about grief and their emotions."
"My students already know about grief and their emotions. We talk about it all the time," he said.
Effie was rummaging through her closet as the spoke. She handed him an empty shoe box to put Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn's body in.
"I feel like the administration should pay closer attention to your lesson plans," she said.
Haymitch dropped the fish into the box. "You're the one making our kids throw a funeral for a fish. This can't be on any curriculum."
"It's a learning experience. We'll have them write eulogies, share memories, it's healthy for children to explore these feelings. It'll help them when they're older." She looked at him pointedly as she took the shoe box from his hands. "I'll bring my students to your classroom before lunch, we'll do the funeral procession together."
He dismissed himself from her room and tried not to internalize her comment about healthy ways to grieve.
When Effie first started teaching at Panem Elementary, Haymitch had already been teaching there for a year. A few months into the school year, his mother had unexpectedly died.
He hadn't even been planning to tell anyone, but when he asked Effie to cover his class for the afternoon she had asked why.
"I have to go to my mother's funeral," he said.
Effie covered her mouth and hugged him. She was so sorry for his loss, said he should take all the time he needed. When her great-aunt died she was inconsolable for months and took two weeks off from her job.
"I just need the afternoon, thanks," he told her. "The kids have a worksheet to work on, you can collect it at the end of the day."
She had hugged him again before he left, which only made him feel embarrassed for her. Haymitch knew he was past the age of crying at funerals and he didn't understand how she didn't understand that herself. But then, as he was listening to his little brother cry while delivering their mother's eulogy, it dawned on him that this was exactly the loss everyone was sorry for.
Effie was right to be inconsolable, and he was naive to think he was so untouchable. But still, he couldn't get himself to cry over his mother. Until eventually it was months later and he was standing in front of his class trying not to hyperventilate while they colored Mother's Day cards for the upcoming Sunday.
And it was quick and unspoken, the way Effie swooped into save him. She took over his class and told him to go home, that she'd see him on Monday. She smiled as she waved him off, and when he crawled out of the hole he dug for himself and showed up to school the next week, there was a pink card signed by all of his students waiting for him.
At the bottom, she had written, There is no timeline for grief, and signed her name with a big heart. Opening the card was exactly the moment he knew his life was not going to be the same now that she had entered it.
—
In the classroom next door, Effie was talking about grief and having her students cut ties and flowers out of construction paper. Haymitch didn't have a craft closet so he stood at the chalkboard and wrote OUROBOROS on it in capital letters.
He explained to the class that everything is a circle. There is no new life without death, no death without new life.
"So Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn isn't really dead?" a student asked.
"She's dead," Haymitch said and drew a circle on the board. "But try think of it like this circle. We're going to bury her outside today at lunch, and I bet tomorrow morning you'll see a new bug on the sidewalk on your way into school."
"Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn is going to turn into a bug?"
"Close, but no. Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn is dead, and she isn't going to come back to life as something new. But because she died, it is now time for something new to be formed."
The more he tried to explain, the more confused his students became. They thought life and death was an equal transaction; they were misinterpreting the circle of life as reincarnation, rebirth. After ten minutes of trying to explain the difference, Haymitch accepted his defeat and let the lesson derail into what they wanted to come back as after death: domestic cats, a newt, the president.
By lunch they had exhausted all possible options for reincarnation. It was settled, Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was going to come back to life as a ladybug that would sit on their classroom window and when Haymitch died he was going to come back to life as Miss Trunchbull.
He was in the middle of trying to explain that it was impossible for him to come back to life as a fictional character from a book he read to them last week when Effie showed up at his door with her students in tow. She looked at his board, still covered in drawings of circles and snakes and chocolate cake, and raised an eyebrow.
"What are you guys talking about?" she asked, handing him a stack of cut out paper ties and flowers. "I knew you wouldn't get your students prepared with proper funeral attire so my students made them some."
Haymitch looked at her own students, the boys all had ties paper clipped to the front of their shirts and the girls had flowers behind their ears. Effie was wearing a wide-brimmed hat with lace hanging over her face. It was surprisingly well made considering it was put together with paper and glue and whatever scrap materials she hoarded in her classroom.
Once he distributed the outfits to his students, Effie clipped a tie to his own shirt. "Now, don't we all look so beautiful?" she asked the room.
"Black suits you," he told her while the kids adjusted their outfits. "Have you ever though of being a funeral director?"
"No, never," she said with a grin and began corralling all of the students to line up at the door. "Did you assign any of you kids to be the pallbearers?"
He made a face in response and Effie sighed, taking matters into her own hands. She pulled two of his students to the front of the line and had them hold corners of the shoe box.
Her students had decorated the box to look like a colorful casket with rhinestones and drawings of fish all over it. He was genuinely impressed by Effie's ability to keep first graders on task while organizing a funeral all morning.
People like Effie were supposed to become teachers, preparing young children to grow into smart and respectable adults. People like Haymitch were supposed to spend their life on a barstool with as little influence on the youth as possible.
But Effie said it was fate that they ended up at Panem Elementary together. After her first year teaching there, she told him, "You'd die without me," and he worried she was right. Because when Haymitch had to sit in a blindingly bright rainbow themed room and listen to Effie complain that Seneca still hadn't proposed, the string of fate that connected them sometimes felt more like a noose.
But, when she was walking next to him, forcing him to hum Amazing Grace with her as they marched their students to the playground, the bond between them was the closest thing to intimacy he had felt in a long time.
When Haymitch opened the front door to lead the line of students outside, it was clear that spring was approaching. The leaves were changing from brown to green, the grass was sprouting weeds and flower buds, the sun no longer felt out of place so high in the clouds.
Some of Effie's students were becoming upset as the gravity of the situation hit them. Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was dead in a shoe box, and they would never be able to see her again. Effie had to keep bending over to hold a kid's hand and tell them it would be okay.
"She was a really good fish," one of her students cried as they stopped by a tree along the fence encasing the playground.
"You're right," Effie told the girl. "She was a very good fish."
One of Haymitch's students said, "Don't worry, she's not really dead, she'll be back tomorrow."
"What?" Effie said and looked at Haymitch, horrified.
He was trying to hold back a laugh while her mouth dropped in shock at the sudden enthusiasm his students were giving.
Effie's students got excited as his told them about their interpretations of his lesson from earlier. Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn wasn't actually dead because life was a circle, she was going to be reincarnated tomorrow. They could all hardly wait.
Effie stood against the fence with Haymitch as their students comforted each other with discussions about the circle of life. One student's grandmother wasn't actually dead, but instead was probably the pet kitten his family got the week after the funeral. When their fathers killed spiders in the bathroom, they were most likely just the reincarnation of the mosquitoes that bit them on summer nights. It was never ending.
"What did you teach your students this morning?" Effie asked Haymitch.
"Oh, you know, just a little discussion about ouroboros. The usual stuff to teach kids when another class's pet fish dies."
"I really should report you to the school board," she said.
"You should. I'm clearly a shit teacher since I couldn't even explain ouroboros to six year olds. They didn't really understand what I was trying to say, obviously. They think it's all about reincarnation."
"So, you believe in reincarnation?"
Haymitch didn't, but apparently Effie did thanks to Seneca's stoner, philosophical influence. How could she not, she said, when there were so many stories about young children having memories of people and places and past lives they shouldn't have any reason to know. Children who were inexplicably born fluent in a language spoken in a country across the world that they had no prior exposure to.
"I'm sure there's reasonable explanations for all those cases," he said. Their students were huddled around the shoe box casket, still discussing the afterlife.
"I thought so too at first, but Seneca had an answer for every question. Like there are kids who tell elaborate stories about how they died in a past life, and there are real corpses with scars to validate their stories."
"What Reddit thread did he read that from?" Haymitch asked.
"Actually, he…" she started to say but trailed off. Seneca had been a point of contention as of late, ever since Haymitch snapped while they were getting drinks after work last week.
She had been droning on about a weekend getaway she had planned for her and Seneca, and after an hour of her acting like he was a decent boyfriend, Haymitch finally decided he'd had enough.
"Effie, I'm sorry but I don't want to keep hearing about this."
"I didn't realize my vacation was so hard for you to listen to," she said. Her voice lifted like it was a joke, but everything began to feel stiff.
He had wanted to tell her for years now that he could not keep handling hearing about her and Seneca's relationship, but was always afraid of ruining their friendship. That night, though, enough was enough. The alcohol was making a line easier to draw, a bridge easier to burn.
"You know what I mean," he said.
"I'm not sure I do," she said and sucked in her cheek.
He knew she was lying. He could almost taste the blood from inside her mouth
"Are you really going to make me say it?"
"I'm not making you say anything," she said and exhaled. She took another sip of her drink.
It was tinted so neon blue Haymitch was afraid it was radioactive. If it was, at least then there would be an explanation for the burning in his chest.
"Listen," he said. He wasn't going to say it, it wasn't like him to do the hard thing. "I applied to teach at another school next year."
She dropped the straw back into her glass. "Why would you do that?"
Why wouldn't he do that, he wanted to ask, when he had spent years in a disgusting unrequited limbo with a woman in the classroom next to his. A woman who called her students friends and used puppets to teach basic addition and said things like, "I just ran into Seneca Crane at the pharmacy and he asked me out. Should I say yes?" And when Haymitch responded, "I don't know," she said, "Fine," and pulled her cell phone out to call Seneca right in front of him.
But admittedly, to Haymitch, it didn't always feel unrequited, which is why he had even stayed this long. There were times when they were both single and fooled around during holiday break. Times where the heat in her apartment was broken so she stayed at his place for three weeks. The time where she was clearly asking him to stop her from going on a date with Seneca Crane and he ignored her.
Most notably, there was the time last month when Effie accidentally got blackout drunk when she had come over for wine night— the excuse they had come up with years ago to get drunk on Fridays while complaining about their weeks.
Somehow, their one bottle had turned into two and a half, and Effie turned out to be a lightweight. She had been slumped on his couch, graciously accepting the glass of water he was handing her.
"Ugh," she groaned. "I don't want to go home."
"Why?" he asked. Seneca had just called her phone to say he was on his way to pick her up.
"I want to stay here. Don't you want me to stay?"
"You're wasted, kid. It's probably best for you to go home."
She was offended by this, sitting up point her finger at him.
"I'm laying on your couch, I'm drinking your water. You look at me all day with those 'Effie, I'm in love with you' eyes and now you're gonna send me off with Seneca Crane? Who you hate?"
"Effie, relax," he said, because he really didn't know what else to say.
"You relax," she said. "You're so stupid. You think I don't know, but I know. You're the one who doesn't know."
"Do you want another glass of water?"
"No," she said. "I want you to say it."
He almost asked her what she wanted him to say, but it was pointless. He knew it, she knew it. He was sure even Seneca knew it. But he was stupid, he didn't do the hard thing. He barely ever said anything worth his own breath, so he stayed silent and listened to his heart skip beats.
Headlights flashed across the living room, Seneca's car pulled into the driveway.
"Don't make me say it," Haymitch said. "If you already know, then don't ask me to say it."
"I knew it," Effie said, stumbling as she stood. He held onto her arm as they walked to the front door. "I'm going to go home with Seneca and he's going to tell me he loves me. Doesn't that make you crazy? It makes me crazy."
Haymitch was crazy. He was crazy, and stupid, and a liar. If there was an easy way out, he was always going to take it.
Seneca rang the doorbell as they made their way to the door.
"Seneca, baby!" Effie said, and launched herself into his arms. She kissed his cheek but was looking at Haymitch while she did it. "I love you so much, I'm so happy to see you."
"Woah, bit too much to drink?" Seneca asked, holding Effie by the waist.
"Yeah, sorry man," he said. "Wine night got a little out of hand."
Seneca walked Effie to his car, the entire time she looked back at Haymitch standing in the doorframe. And when he woke up the next morning, she had texted him saying she didn't remember anything from the night before, and she was happy to come over and clean anything that she puked on.
Effie was never going to remember what she said, and Haymitch was going to be burdened with the knowledge, and it all felt like too much to bear. All of a sudden it seemed obvious that she had always known how he felt and that he was just the coward for never saying anything. He was sick of being crazy, so he opened his laptop and applied to every teaching job he could find and pretended it was the right thing to do and not the easy way out.
Standing next to Effie on Panem Elementary’s playground, waiting for their students to settle down enough to start a funeral for a fish, Haymitch waited to see if he was doing the right thing.
It was silent until she spoke again. "Okay. What do you want to come back as after you die?" she asked.
"A fence," he said and looked around. "A tree, the sun." Most pathetically, he thought, Seneca Crane.
"Be serious, Haymitch."
"To be serious, I don't think we come back."
She took this personally, offended that he would even suggest such a thing. "Don't say that. You have to come back."
"Well, I'm not coming back."
"Yes you are. I'm going to come back as a something beautiful and elegant like a swan or a ballerina. You're coming back as something lazy and unfashionable like a toad."
It was a joke, so he looked at her and smiled weakly. She sucked in her cheek.
"I've decided I want to sing something at the funeral," Katniss said, interrupting them.
"That's great," Haymitch said. "Effie will work it into the schedule."
Katniss went back to talking to Peeta with their classmates and Effie was pulling a pink pen from behind her ear and a piece of paper from her pocket.
"Christ, Haymitch. You really know how to keep a girl on her toes, expecting me to just fit a musical number into a schedule we're already fifteen minutes behind on." She tapped her chin with the pen before scribbling on the page and looking up. "How many of your kids have eulogies?"
"I don't know, I didn't ask."
He was afraid Effie was really going to kill him and he'd be joining Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn, so he quickly backed away.
"I'll go dig a hole for the shoe box," he said. "Are you thinking the standard six feet, or do you think we can go a little shallower given the circumstances?"
Her look told him exactly who she'd prefer to be in a hole six feet under.
—
Katniss kicked the funeral services off with a surprisingly haunting song she learned from her father. Her classmates were getting freaked out, so Effie had to rush in to stop her after the second verse.
"Thank you, Katniss. That was beautiful," she said, guiding her back to standing beside the makeshift grave site with the rest of the students. Haymitch gave her a thumbs up as she sat down.
Effie opened up the floor to anyone who had a eulogy or memory to share about Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn. She said she'd start, folding her hands in front of her and looking down at the shoe box.
"We have all gathered here to say goodbye to Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn, the best goldfish any of us have ever known," she said and bowed her head. Students sniffled. "I loved coming to school every morning and seeing her swimming so happily on my desk. She was always so excited to learn with us, and I really appreciated that. And I also appreciated that she brought us together with Mr. Abernathy's class, so Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was able to spread her love to as many people as possible."
She ended her speech and invited one of her students to stand up and give the eulogy he prepared. Effie went back to standing with Haymitch at the fence as a little boy talked about how Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was so happy for him whenever he got a good grade on his worksheets.
"You really know how to plan a funeral," he said to her. The little boy had already finished speaking and another one of Effie's students was taking their turn.
"I know, right? Sometimes I surprise even myself. Can you believe I pulled this off in less three hours?"
"I can," he said. He knew she could plan a five-star wedding for a pair of rocks if she had thirty minutes and pile of white construction paper.
"Thanks," she smiled before reverting her attention back to the next student that was speaking.
It was the blonde boy, Peeta, who first started this entire thing.
"Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was so good at being a fish," he said. "She was always nice to me."
Haymitch looked over at Effie who was nodding along with her lips pressed tightly together. Even her strength in keeping a straight face during a funeral for a fish named Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn had a limit. She caught his eye.
"Keep it together," he warned.
"I am," she said. "I just think you're so good at being a teacher, Haymitch," she told him.
"I don't tell you enough, but you are always so nice to me."
She laughed but quickly covered her mouth when her students with tear stained faces turned back to see who was laughing in such a dire time.
"Sorry, there was a bug" she said. "Please continue, Peeta."
"Katniss told me she would be born into something new tomorrow, and I really just hope she comes back as a fish. Because that is the only thing she knows how to be."
Haymitch prided himself on his ambivalence, but even he was not immune to this pathetic display.
"You have to get a new fish tomorrow," Haymitch leaned over and whispered to Effie.
"I know, this is breaking my heart," she said and winced. "But then won't we just have to have another funeral? And Fish is going to die and so there will have to be another funeral, and then another and another and another. It's going to be a never ending cycle."
He knew she had a point, plus he was supposed to be leaving at the end of the year, anyway. But still, this statement surprised Haymitch. He had always thought she was different than him, it wasn't unlike her to do the hard thing.
"Okay," he said. "Don't get a new fish."
"Thank you," she said, and it seemed neither of them knew if it was a joke anymore.
They stood in silence the rest of the funeral, which was becoming a little repetitive. All their students would stand up and publicly proclaim their love for the fish, and their wishes for her in the afterlife. When every kid had said their piece, Effie went back to stand in front of the shoe box and said they would now be burying the casket.
She put the box in the hole Haymitch had dug and pulled out a handmade gravestone her class must have made. She stuck it in the dirt at the head of grave.
Here Lies Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn - Fish, Wife, Friend
The students began dropping the arrangements of clovers and dandelions and grass they had collected over the box. Effie instructed them to push dirt to fill in the grave and say their final goodbyes to Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn. She tried to remind them this was a happy farewell, that even if Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was gone, they would always have their memories with her.
"Plus, as Mr. Abernathy so helpfully taught us, she will probably be reincarnated into something new tomorrow," she added before stepping back to stand with Haymitch.
"I'll be fielding phone calls for parents all week about the ouroboros misunderstanding," he said. "No need for you to keep punishing me too."
Effie didn't laugh or smile, her face grew serious. He hoped it was because she was finally grieving Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn, not because things were still tense between them.
"Haymitch, I know you think you're not going to come back, but you will," she said.
"Sure," he said. "Hopefully as something I already know how to be."
Admittedly, this would greatly limit the options for his reincarnation— he barely knew how to be anything. There were days when he avoided looking in the mirror the entire day, afraid he wouldn't recognize the reflection.
"Well, you have plenty of time to worry about that," Effie said.
She moved forward and crouched down with the students, helping push dirt over the shallow grave. Her more sensitive students clung to her sides and she rubbed their backs while they softly cried.
"Should we try to find Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn's brother or sister and give them a home here?" she asked.
The students perked up at this brilliant idea. Haymitch wasn't surprised by this change in decision. Effie loved her students and she was always going to do the hard thing. The heart thing. She looked up at him, a helpless smile on her face.
Spring was coming, and there was nothing Haymitch could do to prevent it. The flowers would bloom and the geese would migrate back North and Mrs. Goldie Rainbow Bubbles Unicorn was going to have a sibling in the classroom next door. Life really was a circle, there was never going to be life without death and even when he so desperately wanted to never come back, he knew he would. It was the only way for there to be a new life.
And so he smiled back at Effie with her sheepish grin, and realized, there might actually be one thing he knew how to be.