"I catch frog for dinner," Dim said as they trooped along, "we eats luxury meal."
Nini let out a soft moan, hiking behind the two boys-her right eye pulsed and prickled horribly; it felt like it had severed from its optic nerves and was just floating freely in its own hellish world, and Nini had no more control over it than she had input in the evening's dinner menu.
She was starving, but her stomach would never allow a frog anywhere near it. She knew the idiosyncrasies of her digestive system, and amphibians were not on the list, no matter how desperate things got. So she moaned again.
Dim now wore a white bandana on his head in place of the black bowler hat he had lost in the flood. "Wearing the white tell spirits we mean no harm," he had told them.
Dim never elaborated on who, or what, these spirits were supposed to be, and Nini doubted that the 'spirits' were all that conservative, since they seemed to have no problem with the I-got-laid-in-Thailand T-shirt.
The sun was setting and the bulging river was smooth as glass. A slight breeze blew through the stilled jungle sundown as they skirted the grassy bank of the waterway. Dim was leading them back to where they had camped before the cruel flood scattered everyone and everything.
Nini didn't see the point.
"We couldn't be more lost if we tried," she half-mumbled to Puso ahead of her, and he turned around.
"We're in a rain forest, the lungs of the globe, so to speak. It nourishes the whole world, doesn't it? ... We'll be just fine."
'Is that supposed to be an answer?' Puso could be so irritating, especially when he started acting all leader-like. Did he envision himself as some great Prime Minister, the world's first Premier-with a bone running through his little Coney Island Dog?
She scanned the forest as they walked, but didn't recognize anything; it was as dissimilar in its sameness as swimming pool water from ocean water.
She could hear it, though-Nini could hear the water vapor slithering through the trees above. She twisted the bottom of her T-shirt, and the water poured through her little fist like a badly leaking faucet.
Dim bent down, and Nini watched him pin a long centipede with his hand. Shunning its poisonous mandibles, he nipped its head off with his thumbnail and dropped it into his pocket. Then he turned his head, listening to the forest, hearing sounds Nini couldn't hear, so she and Puso contented themselves by watched Dim's wriggling pocket.
"It's still squirming."
Puso nodded, "It doesn't know it's dead."
The trek continued, and Nini turned and walked backwards for awhile, flabbergasted at how all the wood, and the branches, and the vines, and the twigs, and the leaves, and the undergrowth, and the overgrowth-how it could all swallow you up like you were just some miniature chocolate mint.
To Nini, the jungle fiasco had become like her desert diorama catastrophe of seventh grade. She had spent weeks on the diorama, and then carefully placed it in the basket of her bicycle. But some idiot boy crashed into her on the way to school, joggling the box. When she exposed it in science class, her diorama looked anything but desert dioramic; more like sewer plant sludge-the sand dune covered the mesquite tree, and the saguaro cactus was murdering the coyote. She got a B in that class-branded for life-and because of a boy. Naturally.
That was when her current adventure took another bizarre turn-by walking backwards Nini spotted one of the most illogical things she had ever seen in her life: the strange dwarf, the one with the pith helmet and the green jacket, rustling through the foliage on the opposite bank behind them...
She stood paralyzed. It made no sense. The dwarf was malformed, yet he navigated the dense brush like one of the animals.
The dwarf glanced across the water at Nini and grimaced, as if embarrassed at being seen, before vanishing into a green clump of ferns and banana leaves.
She ran to catch up to the others, wondering what she should do. The dwarf was dangerous, she knew that; some kind of shaman, maybe-a poor one who couldn't afford cigarettes. But he had some kind of power, nonetheless.
Why would he be stalking them? ...
'Is this all some kind of experiment?'-What kind of grotesque Christmas present involved starving them all, drowning them all, blowing them all up?
It just didn't make sense.
She watched two large hornbills sweep across the river-beautiful birds with five-foot wingspans, so impressive with their authority, their majesty.
More important, hornbills were considered good luck, and a calm feeling spread over Nini.
Then a soft breeze swept her face and she caught the fragrance of the flowers on a rambutan tree. But the round fruit, with its reddish, leathery skin was largely unripe. So she followed Dim's directive to pocket as much as they could, and they would cook it over a fire, and then eat it with no danger.
They plodded along on the wandering trail that sometimes switch-backed for no discernable purpose, taking them away from the river. But she was too tired to question Dim on the navigation, and she shadowed the two boys as a soft rain began to fall.
Dim suddenly announced that they had returned to the spot on the riverbank where the separations had occurred-Kind of the same spot, with the wee difference of being on the opposite bank from the previous spot. Nini looked down at the now rampaging surge of river: They were supposed to cross that?
Nini was too tired to argue anything, and she sat, watching Puso help Dim light a fire, wishing that one of them had found the hammock washed up on the bank, so she'd be able to sleep without all the disgusting jungle bugs crawling over her.
"We got to eats," Dim said, slipping into the forest as if there were a kitchen back there with a refrigerator in it.
Nini looked at Puso, sitting across from the little fire, ready to toss in another branch. It wasn't a cold night, but she welcomed the fire's heat, anyway.
A stirring came from the canopy above, followed by a shrill, unseen squeal that sounded like some agonized animal in a death throe. Then there was nothing.
"Something just ate," she said, gaping up at the world over her head.
"Here, too." Puso slapped at his neck, and the blood burst from a mosquito and dribbled over to his throat. "It's the mosquito bites you've got to watch."
"If a spider ever got into my hair, it'd be game over," she admitted, "I'd spend the rest of my life suing the pants off of Cuckoo Camp and the whole Borneo eco-system if a spider ever tried that."
Then she pressed her palm into her right eye. "Do you know what Encephalitis is?"
Puso grinned. "I'm not the one with the fat head."
She sneered at him from across the fire. "It's a swelling of the brain, not the head, I've studied diseases ... Or Schistasomiasis?-It's another little bug, burrows through the skin, takes up house in the gut, causes hives, bloody stools..."
"You're obsessed with parasites."
"...The flies, they lay eggs in your sinuses so that the larvae has a food source-your brain."
"My whole body, everything seems puffed up, I have the shits, I think my skin is starting to come loose ... See, those are ripples!" Puso held out his arm as if expecting Nini to peer in through all his black hairs. "It's like I'm shrinking within my own skin."
They eyed each other warily like swordfighters who had both taken their swings, and had then reached some kind of understanding.
"Why did you say you loved me?"
Silence. Puso shoved his glasses back up onto his nose. "Why-why did you squeeze my Coney Island Dog?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
"I thought you were dead, that's why." Nini looked away, distracted by another sound in the darkness, and Puso stared at her as if hearing something too fantastical to believe.
"So?"
She shrugged. "It was kind of a goodbye hug, I don't know." Then she turned and peered into the forest, wondering what revolting thing Dim would bring back, and if she could possibly consider eating it.
"You squeeze my Coney Island Dog to say goodbye? Is that some kind of Canadian custom-squeezing the genitals of the dead?"
Nini flicked her hair and rolled her eyes. "You boys, your thoughts are so random, how does anyone understand what you're trying to say?"
"The feeling's mutual. You're so pretentious. Even your name-you spell it R-E-A-D, not R-E-E-D. And do you always have to talk like an encyclopedia?"
Nini drew back, stung. "What do you mean?"
"It's like you're fingering through some set of index cards in your head every time you open your mouth."
"It's called a Rolodex, and nobody uses that anymore."
Her eyes fell to the fire. They had kissed at the longhouse, and now there was this senseless bile between them. Why was that? Their discussions inevitably degenerated into nothing but a mobilization of arguments in which details were recruited, and then exploited, for more battles of conflicting opinions. It was so stupid!
... So, why was she always doing it?
Nini would admit to being a tad on the demanding side. She needed a little say-so in things, and she usually got this say-so, too. Others found it a good idea to share their influence with her-friends, neighbors, parents, teachers-it was in everyone's interest to allow Nini some amount of say-so in whatever was going on. Nini could be gracious, forgiving-as long as she was allowed a little say-so.
Dim came back from the kitchen refrigerator in about the time it would take to nuke a frozen pizza.
"Dim catch two frogs," he boasted.
He cooked them, and the two frogs were bent and black and apportioned to one side of the smoldering fire. And when Dim passed her a stick, she took it, frowning down at her piece of frog. She didn't want this amphibian aberration to touch her lips, but she wasn't in charge-Her stomach screamed at her: give it, give it, give it!
Puso was tearing at his piece, and she smelled it ... In a way, it did smell like chicken.
But she made a mistake and watched Dim, who, with mechanical indifference, was sucking the brains, or whatever a frog has in there, out of the head.
That didn't help.
"Frogs are a French delicacy," Puso offered, drifting into the fleshy flanks of his portion.
That decided it-Nini passed the stick back to Puso and walked away from the fire, then turned around when she was in the dark shadows. "The French are insolent and vulgar!"
She watched the two boys from the safety of the darkness-Puso sat there, puzzled, holding her stick with the frog on it, while Dim whittled at a spear with his small pocketknife, but then jumped up and loped off into the jungle like some lunatic huntsman.
"I saved your life today!"
He jumped, her voice bellowing at him from the black night. She continued to study him from the darkness as he hunched there as if under attack. She couldn't figure the boy out: At first, he had came on like an onion-real strong-and kissed her at the longhouse. Then he had freaked out in the tall grass and complained about 'iron cruelty'-over what? Some bugs? He was a pretentious hypochondriac, a penis-piercing extremist with delusions of greatness.
Puso was a twirp with a vocabulary.
"I'm going to eat yours." He made a big show of nonchalance, still holding both frogs on the sticks.
So what if she had tugged on his Coney Island Dog when they were on the log? - She needed to chronicle everything that had transpired, EVERYTHING, if they had any chance of taking the island of Borneo to court, and that included confirmation of this pelang piercing through his thingie.
'Why are boys so intimidated by me?'... Why do they have to snap at each other like lions and hyenas? Nini was the lion, naturally. So why couldn't boys just accept being hyenas?
She wiped the thought away and walked further into the forest. Being alone in the dark was kind of relaxing as long as she stayed within sight of the fire; it gave her some time to think ... The colloquium was lost and splintered, and she was growing weaker by the hour.
"Here lies the corpse of Nini Read, who held out until the end, who wouldn't eat the frog. And she's a champion..."
She gave a small snort, "...the champion of Noobs."
She had liked French food-right up to the frog. And why hadn't she said anything about the little man with the black teeth following them? At first, she didn't tell them because she was just so mad, mad at everything, mad at everyone. Then she didn't say anything because it was too late, and they'd laugh at her, call it a hallucination. And now she doubted she'd seen the dwarf at all, that it was merely the onset of delirium brought on by starvation, or some illusion caused by her bad eye.
She glanced back and could still see the fire, though the foliage had become much thicker, and she walked guardedly among the tall trees, daring herself to go just a little bit further.
'But what if the dwarf is following me, and he suddenly jumps out and yells, "Surprise!" just before murdering me? ... Or pointing to some leafy spot and saying, "Smile for the camera!"'
A new thought flashed through her: What if this was something like that Jim Carrey movie, where his world is all fake, and if Nini, too, just traveled a little bit outside her confined area, she'd reach the back-lot of the set, one with lights, cameras, a bunch of bored stage hands standing around eating pizza...
Nini plowed forward with determination. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense-that this whole setup was some kind of Jim Carrey movie. But this version of the show was about how teens overcame diversity in the jungle and learned self-reliance... Yes! And this scene with the revolting frog meat was just one chapter in The Nini Read Reality Show! ... But it was now time for the show to end, time for the wrap party, time to get the girls and boys all home to prepare for the show's international debut...
Nini had walked a good way without realizing how deep she had gone ... until she felt the filaments. She had gotten herself entangled in some vile spider web that ensnared her all the way down to her knees! It was thick and silky, made by something rather considerable, because Nini couldn't break free of it.
"Help me, please!" she called, mostly for the director, or the stagehands of The Nini Read Reality Show-who just had to be within earshot.
She was tired, of course, and she lacked muscle when her body needed sleep. But she couldn't believe the tenacity of the tightly spun web-It was as if she were caught in the netting part of the hammock. She wriggled there under the finger-like branches of some creeping tree, more stunned, so she thought, than overpowered.
"Please help me now..."
But of course no one came-the only show people were in Nini's enfeebled mind.
She turned her head and saw it-a big, dark spider the size of her shoe, running down one of the finger branches, then changing its mind and running back up again. It probably had never captured something as large as Nini, and it ran down again, blinking its eight eyes in astonishment, debating the effort.
Oh, she hated spiders! She dreaded their approach worse than that of ants, worse than parasites, worse than the stupidest boys. It was bigger than her shoe-it was purse-sized! ...
Having decided its course of action, it glided down the web, landing on her head with a rude thud.
A crawly thing! - And in her hair, too! Things did not get worse than that! - The little Canadian screamed harder than she had ever done in her life...
"SOMEONE HELP ME! ... PLEASE! ... PUSO!"
Nini did something she had not done since the desert diorama debacle of seventh grade, and it went on for some time-the mew-like sobbing of a fifteen-year-old girl in despair.
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