We Dine With Cannibals (17 page)

FOR THOSE OF YOU
who have never gotten lost in the Amazon rain forest, you should know a few things.

First, it is boring. One thick patch of green looks like the next, on and on for thousands of miles. It is very easy to become lost. It is even easier to become bored.

Second, it is also dark. The darkness is not like night, but like an endless twilight, sticky and green and dim. Massive trees fight for sunlight up above, filling every bit of air and making a dense canopy of leaves over the forest floor. Vines and plants hang from tree to tree like buttresses in a medieval church, and very little light can make it through. On the ground, little appears to move.

But for those who look closely, the entire forest is moving. Millions of bugs crawl on the ground and in the trees. Plants strangle each other in a battle for sunlight. Birds and small animals scurry from place to place to find food or some dark tangle of tree roots in which to hide from predators—pythons and jaguars and, deadliest of all, man.

Of course, Oliver and Celia were not watching closely and saw none of this.

They were tired and bored. The Amazon rain forest was dull, dull, dull.

Corey Brandt was loving it. It was like he had never had an adventure before. He raced from tree to tree. He held his little digital camera in front of him and spoke dramatically into it.

“I'm here in the Amazon at last, walking in the footsteps of the doomed explorer Percy Fawcett and the daring president Teddy Roosevelt. The distant cry of the monkeys shatters the great quiet of this emerald world. What is in store for us? Only nature knows for sure.”

“Didn't we see a movie about Percy Fawcett and his son?” Oliver whispered to his sister.

“Yeah,” she said glumly. “They vanished without a trace. Probably got eaten.”

Oliver groaned. Sixth grade looked much more appealing now.

“We can give ourselves an advantage by masking our smells from predators,” Corey continued into the camera with more enthusiasm than the moment seemed to require. “Watch!”

He set the camera down on some fallen leaves and dove down onto the damp ground, rolling around in the dirt.

“What are you doing?” Celia cried out. The teen star stood. He was filthy.

“I'm masking my scent like a hunter. Animals that track by smell won't know I'm here.”

“Oh,” said Celia, still not sure she understood why he would want to cover himself with mud. Sometimes the Celebrity Adventurist did things that made absolutely no sense.

“Um, Corey?” Oliver said. “I know you're the survival expert and all, but you … well … now you're covered in fire ants.”

Corey Brandt looked down and saw that he was indeed crawling with hundreds of agitated fire ants. They were running up his legs and his torso, crawling toward his neck. He looked at his camera on the ground, still pointing up at him, filming.

“Eeep,” he squeaked before turning on his heels and running toward the river as fast as his legs would carry him. A trail of ants followed on the ground.

“Don't jump in the water! That'll make them bite,” Oliver yelled as Corey ran.

The twins gave chase. They caught up with the panicked TV star at the water's edge. He was frozen and still swarming with ants. They hadn't bitten him yet. He didn't move.

“What are you doing?” Oliver panted.

“I can't decide which is worse.” Corey stared at the brown water of the river. “The ants or the piranha. What do I do?”

“You faced this before,” Oliver said. “Remember? In the first season of
Agent Zero
you were taken prisoner by the Assassins' Guild and tied to a stake in the deserts of Kazakhstan. They smeared you with honey and sent the ants after you!”

“Oh … right … I … that was a while ago. … I've done a lot of shows since then. Could you, uh, remind me what I did to escape?”

“You took your clothes off,” Celia answered. Oliver looked sideways at her. “What? He did. I remember that episode.”

“You have to flick the ants off,” Oliver said. “And, yeah, get out of your clothes and get away from them. Once you start flicking, they are going to get mad and bite, so you've got to move fast.”

“I'm really glad you guys are fans.” Corey took a deep breath. “And I'm glad I wore clean underwear.”

Oliver and Celia stepped back. They didn't want the ants to turn on them. Fire ants could bite you a dozen times in a few seconds. “Ahh!” Corey screamed as he started flicking and tearing off his shirt and trousers. The ants started biting.

“Ow!” he yelled. “Ow!”

“Now run!” Oliver called.

Stripped down to his boxer shorts, Corey Brandt ran screaming into the jungle.

Oliver and Celia looked at each other, sighed, and gave chase.

“Slow down!” Oliver called out. “You don't need to run that far!” But Corey Brandt wasn't stopping for anything. One bite from a fire ant was enough for him for a lifetime.

They caught up to him back where he'd left his camera. He was standing in his boxer shorts, filthy, watching the playback on the tiny screen.

“With the right editing this could be pretty sweet,” he said as the twins were catching their breath. Oliver set their backpack down and rested his head between his knees. He was not a fan of all this running.

“Sorry I lost my cool there,” Corey said. “You guys were great. I'm really glad you pay such close attention to my shows. I'd be in real trouble out here without you.”

“Uh … yeah. Corey …,” Celia said, catching her breath.

“Yeah?” He looked up at her.

“You probably … don't want … to stand … on the same anthill … again.”

Corey looked down and saw that he'd gone right back to the spot he'd rolled in before and once again, fire ants were racing up his legs.

“Ahh!” he yelled and bolted back toward the river, holding the camera this time. He didn't stop at the water's edge when he got there. He just jumped in.

And so Celia and Oliver chased after the nearly naked celebrity through the jungle once more, leaping over fallen logs and tangled roots and branches that were bent and broken in strange patterns.
They had never done so much sprinting in their lives.

This day, like so many of their days, was not going at all as expected, not for Oliver and Celia Navel, and not for the men watching them from the bushes, holding spears and blowguns at the ready.

WHEN HE CLIMBED
out of the pool at the base of the waterfall, Corey Brandt had a few angry welts on his skin where the ants had bitten him, and his perfect hair was wet, tangled, and dirty. The humid rain forest made drying his clothes impossible, so he was forced to put his shirt and pants back on wet, but at least there were no more ants crawling in them. Overall, it could have been a lot worse.

“I dove into a pool of piranhas!” Corey Brandt said. He was smiling. “This is so awesome!”

Oliver and Celia looked at him like he was crazy. If they were bitten by fire ants and jumped into a pool of piranhas and forced to wear soaking-wet clothes, they wouldn't find anything about it
awesome. Hollywood must do weird things to a person's mind, thought Oliver.

“Exploring is so …
real
, you know? Well, you two know.” He picked his camera off the ground and handed it to Celia. “Can you film for a second, Celia? I want to get some footage of my run-in with the fire ants.”

“Sure,” Celia said, hesitant, but happy to help. She liked hearing Corey Brandt say her name. He straightened his hair again. She hit the record button.

“Fire ants,” Corey said loudly, his brow furrowed. His voice dropped deeper. This was his serious voice and it actually didn't sound much like him. Celia preferred when he just talked normally.

“They may look harmless, but as I've learned, they can swarm by the thousands and devour a human body in seconds. The pain of their bites is enough to drive a person mad.” He smirked a little and the twins wondered if the bites had indeed driven him mad. He continued.

“Luckily, I remembered Corey Brandt's First Rule of Adventuring: Stay cool.”

Oliver crossed his arms and frowned. Corey
Brandt didn't stay cool. Corey Brandt ran nearly naked through the jungle and jumped into a pool filled with piranhas.

It was Oliver and Celia who stayed cool.

“I also remembered that the proper response to a swarm of fire ants is full immersion in water. Even though the nearest pool was thick with piranha, I had no choice. I had to—” He looked over at Oliver. “What? What is it? Cut!”

Celia stopped filming. “What's wrong?” she said. She thought he'd been doing a great job.

“Your brother,” Corey said. “He rolled his eyes.”

“I did?” Oliver didn't even know he'd rolled his eyes.

“You did. You rolled them. What was it?” Corey Brandt scratched at the bites on his legs. “Was I too dramatic? Not dramatic enough? My acting coach always told me I needed to work my face more. Was there not enough face?”

“No, no,” Oliver stammered. He had no idea how someone could not have enough face. What did that mean? “It's just that …,” he tried. “Well … you aren't supposed to jump into a pool of water when you're being attacked by ants. That makes them bite. I learned that from
your
show. I
was just wondering why you didn't know it now when you knew it on TV? And, like, with the motorcycles. How come you don't know how to ride a motorcycle? On
Agent Zero
you got your learner's permit on a motorcycle.”

“Well …” Corey didn't have an answer. He scratched at a bite on the back of his neck.

“You don't understand,” Celia snapped at Oliver. “Hollywood isn't like school. You don't have to remember things after they're done, right, Corey?”

“Right,” the star said. “Let's try that shot again,” he suggested with a smile.

Celia held the camera up and Corey furrowed his brow again. He cleared his throat.

“Action,” Celia said. She liked the sound of it. Maybe she was meant to be a TV director. It felt good to direct someone who wasn't her brother for a change. She hoped Corey would pull it together. She zoomed in on his face. He didn't have a freckle under his eye like a teardrop. Did he have a doctor remove it? Maybe he never had it to begin with; maybe he just had makeup artists put it on him so that little girls would get all mushy for him, just like Celia had.
She started to feel angry at him. She started to feel betrayed. She had really liked that freckle.

“Fire ants. They may look harmless, but as I've learned, the pain of their bites is enough to drive a person mad. In my own madness, I jumped into piranha-infested waters to escape the pain. I forgot Corey Brandt's First Rule of Adventuring: Don't jump into piranha-infested waters. It nearly cost me my life. Thankfully …” His voice choked up a little. “Thankfully, my friends were here to save me from myself.” He stared at the camera for a moment in silence, like he was trying to think of something else to say. “Cut.”

Celia lowered the camera.

She blew the hair out of her face. He called Oliver and Celia his friends. He said they'd saved him. Corey Brandt looked at them with tears in his eyes. Who needed a teardrop freckle, anyway? He was so—Celia searched for the word—vulnerable. Just like on
Sunset High
.

“How was that?” Corey asked Oliver.

Why was he asking what Oliver thought? Celia was the one who had been a fan of Corey Brandt's since he first appeared on TV with his sparkling
eyes and vampire fangs. What did Oliver know about the art of cinema that Celia didn't?

“I think we should get a different angle,” Celia said. “The, um, lighting wasn't good over here.”

“The lighting's not good anywhere,” said Oliver. “We're in the jungle.”

“I know that!” Celia shouted. “I am just trying to make sure Corey gets the best show possible out of this. It'd be terrible if all our adventures were for nothing.”

“Oh, so now you're an expert in reality television?” Oliver got right up in his sister's face. “Whenever I want to watch reality television, you tell me it lacks emotional depth.”

“I never said emotional depth.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Uh, guys?” Corey Brandt stepped between them and pointed up with one finger.

The three of them looked straight up to see a black jaguar pacing back and forth on the branch above them, staring down with hungry cat eyes.

“Why don't we … uh … keep moving,” Celia suggested, dropping her voice to a whisper.

“Good idea,” Oliver agreed.

Corey took the camera from Celia and filmed the panther as they backed away from it. Once they couldn't see it anymore, they turned and walked to where they'd left their backpack. Except it wasn't there.