A/N: Le hwello there! It's Xander's birthday and if you're looking for some qqqquality content, please head on over to Inkitt at 'Not Good for the Heart' for some strawberry goodness! But uh, I guess you could also choose to read this first, whichever you're interested in since I did leave it at an awful cliffhanger. Heeheeeeee
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[Vanilla]
"It means what it means," was all Si Yin had to say in conclusion, leaving me in a perpetual state of confusion. "He wants to... you." For some reason, she'd filled in the unspoken word by doing something with her hands. It looked very complicated.
"Yes but," I immediately reasoned otherwise, "according to every English dictionary ever made, to rile someone is to annoy or bother them. For instance, riling water means stirring it up and causing the once settled sediment to muddy the clear water above—"
"Yes but you're making two very grave mistakes here. One, your knowledge doesn't include Urban Dictionary's definition of rile and two, he said rile up, which can be different from just rile because it maybe includes getting it up," Si Yin shrugged without blinking and returned to stuffing her mouth with local flatbread.
It was half-past-six in the morning, otherwise known as an incredibly early hour for the kind of heavy breakfast the local chefs here at the institute were preparing for us first-years. Ariq and I had been two of the few students who'd arrived at the dining hall on time and seen the Rio Negro at its finest hour, glistening and reflecting the early light in the most serene manner. Sleeping in bunk beds was honestly worth the view we had on the top floor overlooking the pier and the river itself.
"You are being very vague," I pointed out, piling grilled mushrooms onto my plate. "What does 'it' refer to and, does Urban dictionary's definition of rile differ greatly from every other English dictionary? Also, you might be reaching at this point."
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said at once, turning away to sip at her glass of acai juice. "Is 'reaching' even a word?"
By this point, I couldn't even tell if she was genuinely confused or simple pretending to be so that I couldn't point out the absence of a link between her ideas. That, and the fact that everyone was late for breakfast and we were far behind schedule, so the instructors and facilitators were shouting downstairs and it was hard to concentrate on a single thought with all that noise.
"I said bring your day bags, not your entire suitcase!" I could hear Chef Palmer from where I was seated, her voice slowly gaining clarity as she came up the stairs and didn't stop regardless. "How many times do I need to repeat myself? We're only visiting an indigenous village—not staying overnight or going to war so you won't be needing food supplies or three extra sets of clothes."
Just to be sure, I gave my day bag yet another check to ensure that I'd only brought whatever that was necessary. Truth to be told, I was running on high-risk. My A4-sized backpack had my notebook filled with outlines, my pencil case, water bottle, wallet, a packet of tissue paper and nothing else. No extra set of clothing, no medicinal ointment, face towel—nothing like that. It wasn't as though any of us had a concrete idea of what to expect at an indigenous village either way.
Learning would all come down to the best of friends and worst of enemies: curiosity.
The lot of us were split into two groups that cycled between paying the indigenous village a visit and the gathering of fresh ingredients in the rainforest for lunch, otherwise known as foraging. Something that I'd always been interested in but never had the chance to experience.
While Si Yin and Ariq had somehow ended up on the group heading to the village first, I on the other hand, ended up on a different boat cruising halfway down the Rio Negro to somewhere between our original municipality and Manaus, a city in Brazil. It was on the boat—cramped and lined with wooden benches which wasn't enough seating space for everyone so some of us had to settle on the floor instead—that our tour guide began to translate the words of an indigenous woman who was supposedly in charge of bringing us around the forest.
"You can choose four activity. One, fishing. Two, fruits. Three, vegetable and mushroom. Four, insect. Different activity different place, different person. They will give you example and teach, then you try. Two hours and they will take you to the indigenous village. There we gather and meet for next schedule. Prepare lunch and village tour."
As expected, everyone on board was all for fishing. Hands raised and scrambled for the tour guide's attention as soon as he called out for groupings and he struggled to count them all and have us seated according to our chosen activity.
Practically speaking, fishing was a useful skill. In terms of leisure, fishing sounded fun and engaging, very much unlike, well, fruits and vegetable picking. Most importantly, no one was here to not have fun—after all, it was an orientation camp and not some training camp meant to drill the necessary fundamentals into our minds.
I, free of peer pressure and the will to have any fun thanks to my stubbornly academic personality and hunger for knowledge, refused to choose anything I could possibly find in books or on the internet. The travel guide I'd been devouring was already filled with information about Amazonian fish, fruits and mushrooms and documented each and every characteristic in vivid detail. Accompanying pictures were provided and some of them, even the gastronomic chemicals I was familiar with so that I was able to come up with rough flavour profiles and food pairings.
"Okay, insect who want?"
I raised my hand.
At once, all eyes were on me and that included Violet Birchwood's, who'd ended up on the same foraging boat as myself—currently seated at the front where the fishing group was gathered.
A quick calculation was enough to inform me that out of approximately forty students, no one else was interested in delving into the unknown world of Amazonian insects, how they were prepared and their cooking methods. Even better: experts say natives have been consuming insects 'from time immemorial,' so this was a huge learning opportunity they were missing. And I wasn't going to let it slip by.
"Is one person enough?" I directed the question to the tour guide, who then turned to the indigenous woman beside him and translated it. He soon turned back to me with a nod.
"She say okay because they used to it. Also you maybe have people from your school joining from other level so is okay."
Relieved, I thanked him and the nice lady before remaining seated at the back of the boat, listening to everyone else's buzz of excitement about the activities they'd chosen. Mainly fishing. I would have joined the buzz. Quite honestly, I would have. But there wasn't anyone else who'd chosen the same activity as myself so I was left bottling the excitement up in my own head, already fantasizing over new knowledge cooked (or raw) insects.
*
After dropping off the first three groups at their respective locations, the tour guide accompanied me to our final destination, where I would meet someone he called Doña Brazi, a Baré Indian. The ride was a mere three to five minutes away from the previous drop-off point and wasn't long enough for him to fill me in on her origins or how she'd become 'legendary,' which he said was what many people were calling her nowadays. He helped me out of the boat and onto the roots of a mangrove. I nearly slipped and fell into the river.
"Okay. From here you go straight this way she waiting with your friends. Ya, straight. Yes, correct. Ya, just straight," he repeated upon noting my general confusion and finger-compass. I'd pointed three times to confirm. "Use this." He seemed to spot something amidst the mass of undergrowth and reached down to pick it up, dusting it down before handing it to me. It was a long, thick branch that could double up as a cane. "Okay go!"
Spurred by his excitement and unknown source of confidence in my navigating abilities, I started in the direction he'd pointed me in, using the makeshift cane to part the undergrowth and, um, steer clear of poisonous snakes.
The tour guide wasn't wrong—within minutes, I could hear voices and spot tiny specks of red and blue in the distance, a stark difference compared to the general explosion of green all around me. Amongst them was a woman clad in muted colours; her hair held together by a pink bandana with tribal designs. She was the first to spot me, waving and calling out before anyone else did.
I was at once the instant subject of scrutiny. The entire group that consisted of sophomores, juniors and seniors had their eyes fixed on me within a second and it took me a lot not to freeze on the spot. Also, I was all-too-familiar with the dark shade of wine hinted on someone's head as I neared the clearing. The light filtering through the canopy only emphasized the fierce streak of colour that often had its way with my heart.
"Hey! It's your playmate."
I turned, almost immediately associating that nickname with one of Leroy's lodge mates. Had I remembered correctly, his name was—
"Shut up Raul, you're scaring the poor boy," said a girl before flashing a comforting smile in my direction. "You must be Julian. I've seen you around school." She was the only green in the group of seven, including myself.
"Oh. Yes, your face does look very familiar," I admitted, then cursed myself for forgetting my manners. Turning to Doña Brazi, I greeted her with a smile and she pointed at the stick I had in hand.
"Good." She laughed, then started firmly in the direction of nothing as though she was following a path. "Come."
We trailed after her, in ones and twos and due to obvious narrative purposes, I somehow ended up walking alongside the very person who had the gall to occupy my thoughts all night until this morning at breakfast.
"Please tell me this is just a coincidence."
He nearly laughed. "No. I wanted so much to see you again that I mapped out the possibility of you being assigned to foraging and then predicted that you would avoid the three more attractive choices and go for this activity out of the four."
Good god, to think he had this much to say when he was sarcastic.
"Well, the funny thing is. That almost sounds a hundred percent accurate," I pointed out, parting the undergrowth with my walking stick and scaring away some sort of lizard by accident. "Oh, and, um. Do you know the name of the person walking in front of us? He's had twelve mosquitoes on his ankles for the past two minutes."
"Wheeler."
He turned. "Yes?" Leroy turned to me, then nodded in his direction. I stammered out a couple of words to the person with an intimidating physique walking in front of us, hoping that he somehow got my message. Surprisingly, he smiled—and when he did, it almost seemed as though an angel had descended from the skies.
"Yeah, mosquitoes seem to like me a lot... I'm Douglas by the way. You are?"
Taken aback by his disarming smile and ordinary introduction (everyone else seemed to automatically know my name by this point), I was, again, reduced to some stammering mess. "U-um. Va—White. Julian? White. Yes, that's my name. Hi Wheeler, nice to meet you."
"Douglas is fine," he laughed, turning up the ends of his red track pants and pouring water over the mosquito bites. "You must be some sort of magician. I offered Leroy a pillow during AB so that his neck wouldn't hurt while he was dozing off and to think he rejected that kind of offer... he must really like you a lot to agree to that interview."
"Yeah I do."
Both of us turned to Leroy at once. One of us, wide-eyed and confused; the other, terribly amused. Thankfully, someone up front called for the group to gather around Doña Brazi and we were saved from more awkward silences and ever stranger replies from a certain person.
"Look." Our guide had her stick pointed at what seemed to us like every other ordinary plant in the undergrowth. There was, however, what looked like a pair of critters nesting harmlessly on top of a leaf. Without a second of hesitation, Doña Brazi picked them up and stuffed them into a flask that had been somewhere in the belt around her hips. "Taste good." She said something else in her native tongue before finally clapping her hands as though a sudden thought had hit her. "Stinkbug."
"Weren't they mating?" I heard Raul whisper to Leroy but the fact that I could hear him therefore meant that other people could as well. The girl who had spoken to me earlier pinched his arm.
"Come smell," Doña Brazi uncapped her flask and placed her thumb over the opening before beckoning to her nearest target—a third-year critic who certainly did not look very willing.
"Um, it's okay. I've had stinkbugs at home too, so uh..."
"Come!" She repeated, snappy this time and almost at once, he found himself giving in to her command. "No scared."
The seven of us gathered closer, awaiting the junior's reaction as he stepped forth and leaned toward our guide, hovering his nose an inch or so above the flask she was holding. It was the moment she slid her thumb aside and let what I assumed was an unbearable stench erupt in his nose, leaving our group mate in a coughing, groaning mess. The rest of us could only imagine how absolutely hellish it was.
"Smell bad?" Doña Brazi laughed, capping her flask and returning it to her hip. "Very. But taste? Apple." She winked and at once, I was enraptured by her personality.
Bossy, playful, daring, and borderline provocative, she exuded an aura of particular dominance that would have made it hard for anyone not to listen to her. All of a sudden, I was dying to see her in the kitchen and watch what she had in store for her guests.
"Apple?" I confirmed, raising a curved hand to my lips and pretending to bite into one. "The fruit? So it's sour and sweet? A-and what plant is this? Can stinkbugs be found in every part of the forest or at specific plants? And is there a difference between the stinkbugs at home and the ones out here in the forest?"
I knew there was simply no way she was going to understand each and every one of my questions and already, we were walking away from where we had stopped to somewhere else. Doing my best to catch and guess the approximate spellings of the nouns she used, I had pages filled within seconds plus rough sketches of both the plant and the stinkbug just in case Google didn't understand my gibberish Portuguese put together.
Soon enough, we stopped by what seemed like an uncompromising patch of the forest—one that looked just like every other patch next to it and those miles away. There simply wasn't a single distinguishing feature of the location. Yet, Doña Brazi tore a waxy leaf from a nearby tree I couldn't quite identify. Its leaves were big enough to arch over our heads and drooped over the forest floor due to its weight. Shaking off the dirt, she handed it to Raul.
"Water," she pointed in a general direction, folding the leaf into a conical shape. "River."
Admittedly, I wasn't all too great with directions but my (possibly faulty) built-in-compass sort of understood that she was directing Raul to the Rio Negro.
"Isn't that kinda far?" He had the mark of uncertainty written all over his face.
"Should be a few hundred feet," said a bespectacled senior staring at her watch. "About three-hundred and ninety steps, according to me step counter." Oh. It's a step counter.
"Okay? Go." Doña Brazi shooed him towards the river and Leroy's lodge mate had no choice but to oblige. His female friend assured him that they'd fill him in on whatever he would miss. Which, I assumed, was going to be a lot.
Our guide used her stick to direct our eyes, pointing at what appeared to be a natural pattern occurring in the muddy soil—stripes. Then, she poked around in the ground as though testing its durability or searching for some weak point. All I noticed were small, miniscule holes littered here and there which, in a rainforest full of insects, was probably just commonplace. At this, she bent over and picked up a fallen branch; a twig that was quite unlike the one in her arms that could double up as a walking stick. This twig, she stuck into the patch of soil before looking up at us with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"Follow!" She said as though we lacked the common sense to do so and were standing around idly, waiting for miracles to happen. This got everyone scrambling for twigs and sticks of the same size, parting the undergrowth and searching for ones similar to hers. This was followed by the drilling of tiny holes in the ground.
Within a minute, the patch of forest was covered in twigs sticking up from the ground and a timely, panting Raul balancing a cone filled with river water in his arms.
"Wow, you ran all the way back here?" Douglas handed him a handkerchief of his own, taking the cone from him and relieving the poor boy of his balancing burden. Raul himself looked severely out of shape; bent over and supporting the top half of his body by placing his hands on his knees.
"Afraid you guys would, ha, leave me, ha, behind."
"I know we're mean but we're not that mean," said the girl who had promised to keep him updated on whatever it was that he had missed. "You literally missed branch-picking and drilling holes into the ground. That's it."
Raul was given a rewarding pat on the shoulder by Doña Brazi (any bit of praise was praise nevertheless) before she took the leaf cone filled with river water and poured a good measure of it into one of the small, miniscule holes that we'd spotted before we were told to make them ourselves.
A couple of ants crawled out.
I was able to identify them at once: leaf-cutter ants. These were relatively large ants that were rusty red or brown in colour and had a spiny bodies and long legs. They weren't very hard to identify, once out of their nests. So that's what the marks in the ground were—to identify a nest.
As soon as our guide spotted more and more ants starting to make their way out of their flooded nest, she instructed the rest of us to begin pulling out the twigs we'd stuck in the ground. Naturally, this was not going to end well and already, I was expecting to see the stick covered with furious ants ready to leave my fingers red and swollen.
I was right.
Almost at once, someone behind me screamed and stomped all over the ground, shouting and cursing in a language I wasn't familiar with. Turning, I saw poor Raul attempt to brush the ants crawling all over his arm and spotted his abandoned stick on the ground that had at least thirty or so leaf-cutters around it, skittering about.
"Ayee!" Doña Brazi was laughing, helping the boy with his mini crisis but aggressively sweeping the back of his shirt. "Just ants." She proceeded to bend over and pick up his abandoned twig of ants without the bat of an eyelash, using her bare hands to brush them off into the cone of river water. Our guide then held up her palm for us to see.
No bites.
While her demonstration had certainly restored a decent level of confidence in our hardly-forest-ranger-selves, there still remained a trepid fear of being unsuspectingly bitten. I devised a method—taking a waxy leaf I'd found lying on the ground and using it to wipe down the ant-covered twig. It worked well; the leaf-cutters fell into the water and struggled in the makeshift pool, unable to climb out of the cone.
"Saúva ants." Doña Brazi gave the cone a shake, brushing through the lot and picking out a live, agitated crawly whose legs would not stop moving. She popped it in her mouth before holding out the cone. "Try."
By this point, the cone was nearly full of reddish brown ants either doing their best to stay afloat or drowning in the water. Nevertheless, it seemed almost foolish to back out now. If edible insects were a thing (which I was sure they were), ants were most likely the easiest bet of all. They were basically the lowest tier; higher up would've been beetles and roaches and above those were spiders and scorpions.
I was about to reach into the cone for a tiny bite when someone else's hand beat me to it, brushing mine aside. I turned.
"Show her your tongue," he instructed, crushing the live ant before tasting it on his fingers. Then, he reached for another. "Pretty sure you don't want something else biting it when it's not even fully recovered."
"W-well, I... I mean," was all I had been reduced to. Leroy seemed rather intrigued by the taste of saúva ants, frowning in thought whilst listening to my tongue-tied rambles. "I could do what you did and crush it before putting it in my mouth but I'm sure it tastes different. My tongue's alright now. The chances of an ant biting it shouldn't be too high either."
Leroy didn't seem to buy my side of the argument, reaching over for the usual forehead flick. "You shouldn't be taking any chances." He crushed another leaf-cutter between his thumb and index finger before holding it out to me.
The gesture was vague and disarming, leaving reasoning in the dust and myself with a huge dilemma. My mind would not settle on what it was that Leroy wanted me to do—gather and scoop the crushed and delicate remains from his fingers or, well, lick it off his finger. The latter was clearly odd and quite the reach but the former seemed almost unlikely since I would assume that the juices left on his skin had more of the original taste than anything else.
"I don't quite... I think I'll just," I reached for the cone of ants. "I'll do that myself."
He nearly laughed. "Scared?"
More ambiguity. Needless to say, I had no idea what exactly it was that he could be referring to. Licking ant bits off his finger; or the ants themselves. The answer was a resounding 'yes' to both but I hadn't the will to answer and be teased so I simply picked out a purposefully dead ant and popped it into my mouth.
I felt it at once: the explosion of flavour. Lemongrass. Ginger. Or like biting into a small piece of lime with some of its peel left on. It was practically an herb.
"A vinaigrette." Unconsciously, I had turned to Leroy with flavours in my head and a flurry of words on the tip of my tongue. "It's tart, sweet, fragrant, it's—there's so many things you can do with it. Sweet, savoury... I can barely decide."
To think this was what insects could taste like. Speechless, I was about to search for another drowned ant in the cone when what seemed like a waterfall seemed to come within our periphery, nearing us at every second. Sweeping a glance to give our surroundings a quick assessment, I found myself terribly mistaken.
What had sounded to me like a waterfall was, in fact, a wall of rain hitting the forest canopy and heading our way fast. It resembled the roar of a jetliner—penetrating the canopy at increasing speeds and taking over what was left of the sky while the rest of us watched and began to realize that we were about to learn how the rainforest got its name in the worst way possible.
All at once, someone had the sense to call out the obvious and our guide, busy draining the river water out of the leaf cone and looking completely unfazed by the roar of an imminent storm, ordered each of us to pluck two to three large, waxy leaves from a nearby tree. These, we used as umbrellas.
In seconds, I was more blind than I could ever be without my glasses: unable to see the people in front of me or even make out their vague colours and shapes in the blur of green and grey. Amidst the blast of sound in my ears and shouts attempting to cut through the loud, angry drumming of nature, I was somehow able to register Leroy's presence in the general direction I was heading in. He, too, had held a leaf over his head to no avail.
Someone farther up front was shouting over the rain but his words were muffled by the heavy rustling of leaves in the wind and the sky cracking open and spilling its contents all over everything. With the entirety of my being focused primarily on walking, I couldn't afford to be spending my time piecing together words like a jigsaw puzzle.
The rain; it was so thoroughly drenching of clothes, shoes and earth that every step felt heavier by the minute, weighing down not just my feet but a huge part of my head as though there was something sitting on my shoulders and causing quite the headache.
Distracted, I'd missed a large root snaking about in the undergrowth and stumbled, nearly falling face-first into the wet, muddy earth had I not grabbed onto something within arm's reach. This also meant that I was no longer holding on to my makeshift umbrella since, well, I'd decided in that instant to prioritize my walking stick over the fairly useless leaf. Whether or not this decision was my best or worst in the past fourteen years of my life, I wasn't aware until I realized what I'd been holding on to.
It was warm; that, I knew. And amidst the blur of green and grey and droplets of rain clinging to my glasses was a shade of red in a shape I could not quite make out.
Silhouettes. A great mystery to the world—a seemingly unidentifiable shadow to the unacquainted and yet, was all the acquainted needed to know in order to put a name to the dark. How was it that human beings became acquainted to one another? That they came to establish a connection and the point of contact, the point of silhouettes, came to be?
I felt him stop and shift, presumably turning to face whatever it was that had held on to the back of his shirt and prevented him from going forth. And backs—known and familiar only when one dwelled behind for far too long. It was hard. Like it had always been; looking at his back.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to—"
Something warm wrapped around my wrist and the shape of red soon turned into a blur of white. And then it was a brief, soothing moment of being enveloped by something over my head and upper body, accompanied by a scent so strong that amidst the rain, it was all that I could breathe. The jacket of his tracksuit.
I had to decide, then: between holding on to the branch that had been my navigating tool in what was otherwise the unknown, or leaving that behind but holding on to the jacket over my head that would slip and fall should I choose the former. Good god. To be blind, or not?
Oh god. Oh god what a decision. Good god.
Good god.
God, they were right all along;
I let the stick fall and my fingers dig into the cloth that was warm while he led me along; through the rain and the storm and the thunder and the roar of the above that had been inside all along—a thundering. A loud, heavy beat so strong that it reached the ears and messed with the mind that I'd kept clear and cloudless and filled with the comfort of books and words.
Blind but
I stopped tripping. The hand he held, it had the strength of an anchor that refused to let its ship get lost in the sea but the gentleness of a candle flame, still and unmoving despite the raging winds and violent storms.
To be led in this manner was both unprecedented and unsurprising at the same time. His directions—although non-verbal—were easy to register and follow in the sense that whenever there was something to cross ahead, he'd hold it hard and whenever it was left or right he'd tug, gently so that I could be pre-empted by the change.
To be led in this manner was change. It was the leaving behind of bearings and making the decision of allowing someone else to make them and it was a terrible, fearful feeling that I'd been so afraid of.
To be led in this manner was to be vulnerable. It was completely unreasonable; the least rational thing to do.
To be led in this manner was to place in someone else, your trust. Your complete faith; undivided and good god was that not something I'd like to do and yet it was, at the very same time, all up to one's self.
It was up to me—my conscious decision—to let go. To loosen my grip and release that hand; to take it back and to remove all leadings and regain control and the compass and all that I'd lost to the holding of a hand.
God but why has no one ever written about not wanting to do so?