They had just arrived and it was only afternoon, but shadows already engulfed fifteen-year-old Nini Read. It seemed as if the rain forest had some pressing need to turn to night quickly, like it was some old person that needed the sleep.
'What's the point of having a family if no one's here to give me Christmas presents?'
She scribbled the question into her journal, trying to make sense of why she and the other four kids in the colloquium-plus the old guy, their chaperone-had just endured three-hours on a jouncing minivan to get to this shabby ruin they were calling Cuckoo Camp.
She had taken her own walking tour of the place-past a couple of ramshackle huts, where elderly women sat on benches, splitting strands of green rattan, perhaps to be woven. And the old things didn't even look up from their labors at Nini, as if the passing Canadian tourist was insignificant to their worlds.
It didn't seem like much of a camp at all-more like a decrepit assembly of a half-dozen buildings-and buildings was a kind word: the structures stooped, as if their pathetic bodies had broken long ago, and they didn't know that standing was a command they didn't have to follow anymore.
It was December twenty-third, only four days into the colloquium, which meant Nini had to endure another ten wretched, gift-less days of what some incompetent moron at her high school had said was a mentorship program.
So where were the mentors?
The whole place was pitiable in a jungly kind of way. And the deeper Nini probed, the junglier it all seemed to get. The verdict was in on Cuckoo Camp, all right-major, mentor-less, buzz-kill. The sooner she got out, the better.
"Nothing farther upriver than Cuckoo Camp," the proprietor, a pock-marked Malaysian fellow called Fat Hus, chirped like some jungle bird, when Nini and the other five spilled out of the van, and up the scraggy trail to the lodge.
Two things about this Fat Hus guy: he wasn't fat, not really; maybe for a Malaysian, though Nini wasn't sure-she'd never met any. The second thing was his face: the poor guy's cheeks, chin, forehead, even his nose, were marred up and scarred by some marauding case of skin rot, or some such jungle disease.
And what did he mean by nothing farther upriver? - Nothing as CUT OFF, nothing as EVACUATED? ... Those were her first impressions, that Cuckoo Camp resembled less of a resort and more of an internment camp.
She was kneeling on the ground, trying to finish the day's journal entry in her little notebook when the odious American kid named Windy came crashing through the foliage toward her.
"We're lost, my Canuck friend," he squeaked in his little boy voice, "out here in Tarzan land."
He was an odd, fat kid, this Windy. And he poked out his chest and looked around, as if pondering the route of their salvation.
Nini drew in a breath: he has larger breasts than I do! Real boys were not supposed to be busty.
He tapped at some gadget in his hand, giving it a shake, and then frowning like some theater clown. "Just testing the GPS, working out the tweaks. It's brand new."
She didn't look when he waved the little blue gadget. Instead, she rolled her eyes, pointing back through the foliage to the corrugated eaves of a shack, their camp, still visible through the trees.
Windy squinted back through the flora, disappointed, like he thought they'd gone deeper.
"Jangala, jangala, jangala," he chanted, eyeing the surrounding forest. "It's the stuff of our nightmares, the heart of darkness."
Nini dismissed the boy, turning her attention back to the journal on her lap. But she could feel him hovering over her as she paused to compose her thoughts.
"Is that your secret diary?"
"I'm chronicling this inane experience ... for the record."
"So you're a chronicler, huh?"
She pursed her lips in a little pout that gave the impression she was mired in the bad news of world affairs-the real adult stuff. "Jangala is Hindu for jungle, and we're not in Africa, we're in Borneo."
"Duh, I hadn't noticed," went the juvenile response.
"And stay away from me."
Windy drew back like she had just spit on him. Then he huffed back to the lodge. "Canadians," he snorted over his shoulder, "God's little frozen people."
Americans always made stupid, ignorant jokes like that about Canadians.
"Go mammogram your boobs!" she snapped after him like an angry turtle. The kid farted like a whoopie cushion, too.
She should never have left the Rainforest Chalet, where the colloquium had spent its first few evenings with about twenty other teens. She floated in the grotto-like swimming pool drinking icy Roy Rogers, watching the scary hawks circling up in the sky looking for some poor rodent to devour. Truth be told, that was enough jungle for her.
But they came here for the river cruise. The nice clerk, the teenager with the pretty, brown eyes at the Rain Forest Chalet had promised them 'bounteous wildlife viewing'-They would be deep into the primal growth of what was called virgin forest reserve.
He liked her, too, the clerk. She could always tell when guys liked her-their eyes bugged out, or started glowing like radiation fallout. Nini Read magnetized the opposite sex; there was no other way to say it. For five long years now, ever since fourth grade, boys had been trailing after her like lovesick puppies.
She'd made out with a few boys, but Nini was no fan of transplanting all those gooey mouth juices. The guy would really have to red-light the hot scale for Nini to let him suck on her tongue ...
Maybe Puso, the dark-skinned boy from Zanzibar... He rode with them on the minivan and spoke in a nameless, continental accent that didn't sound African-where he was born; didn't sound British-where he went to school; didn't sound anything. Nini liked that. And Puso was cute all right, though maybe not tongue-sucking cute; not quite hot scale red-light cute, but almost ... More important, he seemed smart-Nini liked that a whole lot. So few boys could hold their own with her in an intelligent conversation.
But romance would just have to wait. Academics came first, and calling Nini an over-achiever was an understatement: she won the science projects, and the spelling bees; she was class president; she was the smartest girl in class; she was the one to beat; she had brains and beauty.
Nini also had a master plan-after university she was going to law school. Litigation-it was her reason for being; her essence, no denying it. Nini Read was a promising, young litigator with no time for bumbling boys-even the cute ones-who usually reeked of something revolting, anyway, when you got close, like hot sauce or corn nuts.
She went back to what she'd been doing before the fat kid barged in on her-lambasting the living daylights out of their present location, this Cuckoo Camp, in her journal.
Why 'Cuckoo'? Was it a camp for crazy people? And how was she supposed to post her journal photos if there was no Internet? She couldn't believe the ineptitude! Someone was going to pay for this in court, all right.
Her father once told her, "You've got the temperament of a Molotov Cocktail, honey, just like your mom."
Her parents were divorced. How her mother hated that man, her biological father. But Nini knew he was right, that she did have her mom's hothead genes-and when she got going, people had best stay out of her way. There were a few kids in this jungle farce that were already making it onto Nini's list -and that was not a place you wanted to be.
She heard a slight rustle, and then saw him standing there, a dwarf, dressed in green gabardine rags, something that could have been a suit before she was even born. He wore a chipped pith helmet, misshapen, possibly melted in its many years under the nonstop jungle sun.
"Did you know there's no wifi anywhere in this lodge?" She shook her head at the inexplicability of it, instantly enlisting the dwarf as her confidant. "The website said there's wifi, but it's a lie."
For a smallish frame, Nini had a raspy, blues singer voice. As far back as the sixth grade she spoke in a throaty, commanding register while the kids around her squealed like frightened animals.
"And what about that welcome drink-that gluey extract that's been out for hours. Can you believe they actually expected us to drink it?"
When she got excited, however, Nini's voice rose in pitch, and then she had all the resonance of some hysterical rodent. "Dead bugs lined the insides of the glasses -poisoned by the pus-like toxicity they're calling 'mango juice'..."
"Rokok, rokok, rokok..." He was drooling and mumbling in some jungle language, but Nini didn't really register his presence-her tantrum had taken the driver's seat, even though she knew that any say-so as a straight A-student, as class president, as school representative, it all dissolved to nothingness when her voice betrayed the enraged feelings inside of her.
"Not one glimmer of comfort, nothing resembling hygienic conditions!"
"Rokok, rokok, rokok..."
The strange, little man stepped closer and her alarm bells finally rang. But was it too late? ... No digits on the extended hand; she saw that, all right-the fingers and thumb amputated, the stump worn down like an old hill. And the grinning, or snarling -black, dead teeth. This intruder was creeped out in no small way-the ghastly stump inches from her now, as if Nini didn't have enough nightmares of her own to contend with.
Where had he come from? - Was he going to strangle her?
Still on her knees, she tilted away from her new jungle tormentor like the Tower of Pisa (which now listed at 3.99 degrees). And the hand-what was left of it-looked like either the head of some gruesome serpent or her mother's kitchen spatula...
If that stump touches me, I'm a goner!
She squeezed her eyes shut, knowing it would be like hitting the pavement in one of her falling dreams (and she had a lot of those). If that hellish stub of a hand even brushed her cheek, Nini would have a full-blown coronary thrombosis-and she knew the term because Nini Read NEVER FORGOT ANYTHING! ...
"...Rokok, rokok, rokok..."