Princess for Hire (11 page)

Cultural Traditions: I have remained in this jungle since birth. We have followed the fatherly traditions for a very long time.

Anything Else We Should Know: I became a woman a few months before, and thence began my isolation period to study our traditions. Except, I snuck out, which you must not tell unless you want me to come for you with a blow dart.

Before I left for the isolation I had great fight with my father because I fear this change and because I have to marry soon and I desire that I had a selection, but I do not. At the ceremony a husband will select me. So when I sneak away, I was on walk and utter wondering, what if I could leave for some time before I make all these big selections? Then I saw an auspicious bird—and confessed to the bird the desires of my heart. It was a good thing, because an orb appeared and disgorged a woman who told me I can enjoy a holiday because I have magic inside me. (This I knew already. The chief’s daughter encloses the village’s magic.) Thus I will have a turn of the world outside my own. Hope I packed in the best way. And good fortune to you during your employment.

Okay, that was an
awful
translation—maybe the very first English translation of the tribe’s language—but I got the basics. Ama was a Level One princess who probably wouldn’t even know about the agency if she didn’t have some MP herself. She wanted to get out of the jungle for a while and needed help with this ceremony, whatever it was. Not something Lilith would be impressed with, but so what? How often do you get to visit the Amazon? The most exotic place I’d been before subbing was the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake. They didn’t even have a three-toed sloth there.

My rouge compact beeped, and the twenty-minute countdown began. While I waited, I searched the manual for “Ticuna tribe,” and nothing came up. I broadened my search to “Amazon” and found a couple of uh-oh tidbits: some tribes had been observed to communicate telepathically. Fantastic. The rouge couldn’t help me there. And worse, many tribes had never been observed AT ALL. So no one knew what kind of reactions they might have to, say, a fake princess.

To calm my nerves I put a search in on Prince Barrett and flipped through some of his latest pictures. I wondered if I could cut out Floressa Chase and Photoshop myself in her place. Wait, forget Photoshop. Try princess swap. I was so fixated on the idea that I didn’t notice we’d landed until Meredith clucked her tongue.

“Is this assignment totally normal?” I asked, focusing my attention back to the task at hand and shutting off the manual. “I mean, the agency doesn’t seem to have much info on this one. Have you met Ama?”

“No, that was Genevieve. Found her so charming, she took this assignment pro bono and delegated it to me. She’s experimental like that,” Meredith said distractedly, then grumbled something about cloning herself. “Oh drat! Look, I have to go. I can’t help you with everything. That info is plenty—one little ceremony and then I’ll be back to get you later today, tomorrow tops. After that you can take some time to rest. Now scoot.”

I stepped through the bubble onto the mossy jungle floor. A thin stream of sunlight seeped through the trees, but the forest was so dense it was hard to guess the time. The loud mix of birdcalls and insect hums was overwhelming, but the humidity was worse—I couldn’t tell where my sweat ended and the jungle mist began.

I waited under the cover of the jungle while I transformed. In the sweltering heat I hardly felt more than a twinge as I shrunk a good eight inches and my skin color darkened. I went to shove my hands into my pockets, but felt only skin. I was wearing nothing but a yellow beaded necklace, some paint, and, I guessed, a look of pure mortification.

Which meant I didn’t have a pocket or purse to hide the rouge and manual in. If I got caught with these, there’d be some questions to answer. I shot a few mean voodoo thoughts in Meredith’s direction, then hid my things under a red-flowered bush, and stepped back. Hm. There were
tons
of bushes with red flowers. I grabbed some stones and made a big arrow on the jungle floor, pointing to my treasures, and backed slowly into a clearing.

About a hundred feet ahead of me lay a vast circle of tree-leaf huts: Ama’s village. Drums pounded in the distance, accompanied by the occasional whoop or shout. Gradually the words began to make sense.
Ceremony
,
fire
, and
spirit
.

“Ama!” An old woman emerged from one of the huts and wagged her finger at me, making me grateful I’d already stashed my stuff. Her graying hair was cut long with blunt bangs across her forehead. The red in her simple wrap-style skirt matched the paint on her face and stomach. She wasn’t wearing a shirt. And by the looks of things, she’d never worn a bra either. “The sun is almost directly overhead. We must prepare you before the ceremony begins. Thoughtless girl.” She shuffled into a conical, thatched-roof hut, and I followed her inside. A few rope hammocks hung from load-bearing logs, and the dirt floor was hard and smooth.

“Sorry I wasn’t here,” I said, eyeing a pile of furry fabric spread across a dark wood table. “Are those my clothes, um…” Ama had mentioned a name. What was it? “Ma’am?”

“Ma’am? Why are you being so formal? I don’t understand.”

“Oh, instead of your name, I thought I’d call you that. Uh, for respect.”

She laughed. “I think your isolation may have jumbled your brain. You’ve called me Kopenawa your entire life. Now lie down and I’ll get the scissors.”

I gulped. “Scissors?”

“Unless you want me to do it the ancient way and pull out all of your hair strand by strand. You might want to rest during it too. Store up some energy for what’s to come.”

What’s to come? Scissors and nudity. Here’s a philosophical question: If a sub yells in a rain forest and there’s no agent around to hear her, does she really make a sound?

My mom was the beauty queen, my dad was the hardworking lawyer, Gracie was the living baby doll, and I…I was the perseverer. I didn’t quit. Even when I got the muckiest of muck jobs. Even when I didn’t make the school play in sixth grade, I thought, what the heck, I’ll try out again. It was for a role in
Cats
, so part of the audition was a feline gymnastics routine. I fell down in the middle of a simple cartwheel. Not a round off or a back handspring. A cartwheel. Everyone laughed, and I think the director even snorted. And at that moment, the moment where my body was twisted in all sorts of unflattering angles—my shirt flipped up and my ponytail barely hanging on—I was at least reassured with the knowledge that I could never again experience humiliation so awful.

Of course, I hadn’t foreseen a workaholic princess agent sending me ALONE to the Amazon rain forest to have all my hair removed, my body covered in black paint and eagle feathers, and a whole village of expectant, indigenous people waiting for me to make my passage into adulthood by performing some sort of dance I didn’t know.

Kopenawa led me to a crowded hut about half the size of my school cafeteria. A pit of fire blazed in the middle, with two half-naked men (more like three-quarters naked. Grass skirts don’t hide much) standing next to it. Even more men set up drums at the edge of the hut. They were talking about me—apparently neighboring villagers had traveled here just for this ceremony, to see if the chief’s daughter would make a good wife.

Great. This girl’s whole future rested on whatever was going to happen next. If I messed this up, no guy would choose her for a wife. This was the kind of impact I was-n’t sure I wanted to be involved in. I turned to Kopenawa. “I can’t do this.”

“You can, and you will make Chief Yakinomi proud. Do the dance well, and you can have any man out there as your husband.”

“Really?” I asked, confused.

“Oh, your father was just angry before. Once he sees how hard you try, he will give you a say. You’ll see.”

“Right. But I’m still not clear what this dance is.”

Kopenawa laughed again. “Really, you are too funny. You can do this dance in your sleep. You’ve had four months to prepare. Think of the traditions you’ve learned, the ancestors you follow. You dance for them as well. Make it memorable.”

A guy a few years older than me, with nice biceps, broke free of the crowd and grabbed my hand. “Good luck, Ama,” he said, giving my hand a gentle squeeze. When we touched I got a tingling, warm, happy feeling, and wondered if it was my MP telling me something about this guy. Could he be the one for Ama?

“Uh, thank you,” I said. Behind him, a muscled, middle-aged man with a stern expression and lots and lots of feathers frowned at me. The feathers gave him an air of importance, like he was the chief or something. Ama’s dad? Yikes. I shot him a peace-making “Hi, Dad” sort of smile, figuring it couldn’t hurt to ease the tension a little. A look of surprise crossed his hard face, and his eyes softened for a second. Then he pounded the ground with his staff, nearly scaring the MP out of me, and the drums began to beat. The next thing I knew, two men grabbed my arms and carried me into a circle, chanting in a soft hum. They led me to the fire and took a step back. I looked to Kopenawa for a hint.

“Jump,” she whispered.

I jumped over the flames, the heat licking my heels. The crowd picked up the chanting, which evolved into a song peppered with animal calls.

Animal calls. That’s right. We watched an Amazon tribal ceremony video in World History last spring. We had to bring permission slips to watch it because of the revealing clothes. The video said animal calls were a good thing. Then again, some of the traditions involved guys sticking their hands in gloves filled with fire ants, and women piercing their faces. This ceremony had better stop with the fire jumping.

“Jump again,” Kopenawa mouthed.

So I jumped again. And again. And again. The noises grew louder and wilder, filling the hut, filling the forest. I jumped for what must have been hours, and as I did, villagers came and went, like it was halftime at a college football game. I saw the hand-squeeze guy having a solemn conversation with Ama’s dad.

My feet blistered from the heat. Faces appeared in the flames. Meredith, my parents, Celeste, Hayden, Kylee. It’s not like they spoke or gave me wisdom. They just stared with these blank expressions, like they weren’t sure if I’d succeed.

A whole village watched, yet my motivation came from those faces. If those people were here—if they could see me now—well, first of all, they’d flip. But once they got over the shock of Desi Bascomb performing a tribal ritual on behalf of the chief’s daughter, they’d see I was made of something more solid than the smoke rising toward the jungle sky.

Finally the drums stopped and a leathered elder, also painted black, extinguished the flames. You’d think things couldn’t get much worse than a fire dance, but then two masked figures appeared, circling around me and hissing.

Kopenawa shook her head. “Dance.”

I was desperate to rest, but I closed my eyes.

Dance.

The oldest dance I knew was the Pony, and that was only from the 1960s. Eyes still closed, I started with that, throwing in a few twists and twirls. I picked up the rhythm from the drums and coiled my body in ways it’d never gone before. I rolled my stomach like a belly dancer, then lifted up my knees like I’d seen on my mom’s kickboxing videos. Energy exploded from every pore. I WAS an Amazon prin-cess.

Until I opened my eyes and saw the alarmed expressions on the villagers’ faces. The drums stopped and someone coughed, which even in the depths of the rain forest meant I’d bombed the ceremony. The chief started toward me, carrying his stick, which had a spearhead…made of some kind of bone. I didn’t know what the punishment was for failing a Becoming a Woman Dance, but I wasn’t going to stick around and find out if the tribe resorted to cannibalism.

So I ran.

Chapter
12

T
here’s a reason sports bras are made out of tight-fitting Lycra and not eagle feathers. My chest hurt. My feet throbbed. But most of all, my head felt like it was going to explode.

What was I doing? I’d just ruined this poor girl’s life—the only husband she was going to get now would be some foul-smelling reject who got kicked off hunting duty because he couldn’t handle a blow dart. Or worse, she’d be shunned and left to the dangers of the Amazon.

But then again, if this was such a big deal for the girl, why’d she leave? Why leave some random substitute to perform a life-defining ceremony while you tour the world bubble-style? That wasn’t how a princess should act. She should face the problem, chin up. How could these girls not realize what an awesome responsibility they had? They couldn’t just run away from their problems like…well, like I just did.

I stopped running and doubled over, gasping for air. Vapor was better than this. As my breathing slowed, it occurred to me that I was a scapegoat. The reason the princesses didn’t have to face these scary moments was because they had me. But I didn’t have anyone who could jump in and change everything for me. I was still alone.

A startled bird squawked at me from a tree, reminding me that I was perfectly visible. I needed to hide until Meredith showed up, however long that was.

The rouge! I had to find my stuff or I wouldn’t have a clue when the princess was on her way back. Scratch that. I had to
make
her come back. No way was I going to just wait here with bugs and jungle creatures eyeing me for lunch. But my hiding place could be anywhere. Everything looked the same.

I sat down on a mossy log and pulled my knees to my chest. The black paint was already smearing where I’d sweat. I gave my armpit a quick sniff.
Ew
.

“What are you doing?”

A girl about my age, dressed in a short skirt and a
HITCHING A RIDE
T-shirt, stood beside me, holding a woven bag. “Aren’t you my sub?”

“I am. Well, I was.” I rose from the log and towered over her.