“Tesoro,” Ettore said innocently, “do you think that we would associate with someone as brutish as Oskar?”
I noticed that he didn’t say no, not explicitly. He was fey-like. I was learning that I would have to be incredibly explicit and note hisexact wordsgoing forward.
“Hmm,” was all I said, and I couldn’t help but note that Jin Woo looked a little guilty.
Oskar cleared his throat from across the room.
“We should catch a sheep tomorrow. We don’t have to eat it right away, but we should catch one before we’re too hungry. We should also see if there’s anything edible anywhere else on the island. Mina, you should do that.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Why?” Because I’m a woman?”
Oskar crossed his unfairly muscled arms over his chest.
“No, because you think that sheep eyes are creepy and you don’t like looking into them, so you’re not going to be helpful at all.”
He was right. I did think that sheep’s faces, and their eyes especially, were creepy, but I hadn’t told anyone that since…oh, him. I had told him when we were ten. The fact that he had remembered that did something to me that I tried very hard not to think about. It felt like the majority of what I was doing here: being hungry and trying not to think of things.
“Ok, I’ll look for food. I think that there might be some mussels on the rocks that we could eat.”
“Oo! I love mussels, especially inhaemul jeongol, it’s like a seafish stew!” He must have calmed down a bit because he slipped me up into his lap again absentmindedly, like he had been doing it for years.
Oskar watched him move me with an impassive look on his face. Guilt pricked at the back of my mind, but I aggressivelybeat it down. He had no claim on me, plus I was just practice for Ettore and Jin Woo. This wouldn’t ever be real.
Would it?
Chapter Six
If I didn’t get to eat something substantial soon, I was going to eat one of the men on the island. Maybe Oskar or the asshole who’s name I still didn’t know. Ettore had rubbed my feet before we left the cabin, and Jin Woo had gotten up early to boil me water and brought it to me like it was coffee, so they were safe.
I tramped along the beach, scouring the rocks for mussels with one of the buckets in the crook of my elbow like it was a woven basket. It was probably for the best that I hadn’t gone on the sheep hunt; my stomach’s growls would have scared away the half-feral sheep long before we were even close to catching them.
My eyes caught on a rock with a rather pronounced overhang. I bent down and looked underneath and found a huge number of tiny mussels. I jumped, hands above my head and everything. Food! Finally food! Once I had finished wiggling my butt and trying and failing to moonwalk, I went to work putting mussels into my bucket. By the time I was done, the giant bucket had about a four-inch layer of mussels on the bottom.
The sun shone down fairly strongly and at a slant, so I guessed it was probably around ten in the morning. There was some commotion in the distance; that was probably still the boys trying to trap a sheep. I would try to forage for some food before the guys returned for lunch.
When I was little, I had been obsessed with herbalism and trying to eat from the woods. When I had come inside with my mouth stained green, I scared my parents enough that they putaside their differences to yell at me together. They had made me promise that I wouldn’t eat anything that I had found outside. Eight-year-old me had agreed, but only after saying that I had only eaten dandelion leaves, which weren’t poisonous at all. (I neglected to tell them about the swelling I had from messing around with poison sumac.) So while, sure, being shipwrecked was awful, I was excited to try my foraging skills out again and be able to see how rusty I had gotten.
Before I moved farther inland, I stripped off my shoes and rolled up my pants, then waded shivering into the water. The day before, I was sure that I had seen some sort of seaweed in the ocean, but it had seemed that the seaweed was within reach only during low tide.
It seemed that I was right. Clinging onto some rock, only about a foot deep in the water, was some bladderwrack seaweed. It was long and olive green in color with little oval pods at the ends of it. I had always been disconcerted by the pods; I had called them gross more than once, but I had seen my godmother eat them. I had smelled them being boiled and roasted, and I had even been offered some raw. Here, I didn’t have the option to be picky. Along with the mussels, the seaweed would make a good soup.
Now shivering, my toes numb but my mouth aching with a smile, I shoved my frozen feet into my shoes and dropped the seaweed in the bucket. I could have gone right back to the cabin then, but the woods that ringed the island, separating the beach from the pasture, were calling for me—and who was I, icy toes and all, to ignore the call.
It looked like a typical Norwegian forest. Sparse pine and other conifers stood tall; the leaf litter was dotted with sapling sprouts and fallen logs. Here, the life cycle of a tree was fully on display in front of me. There were some rocks covered in lichen here and there and, importantly, mushrooms!
Some were two or three inches long with yellow stems and brownish caps with the interior of the caps looking like folded paper and a little hole or funnel at the top of the cap: funnel chanterelles. Others looked like little clumps of creamy clouds, and the insides of their caps had little finger-like protrusions: bleik pigsopp, or hedgehog mushrooms! There were some brown mushrooms that looked sort of similar to the chanterelles that I left well enough alone.
Western Norway was incredibly rainy; it rained as much as 300 days a year, perfect weather for mushrooms. The year my middle school’s opening had been delayed by catastrophic flooding, and I had stayed in Norway until mid-October, my godmother had taken me mushroom hunting almost every day that fall. She had taught me which were poisonous and which were not, and while more than a decade had gone by since then, the knowledge hadn’t budged an inch in my mind.
With no more space in my bucket, I gathered some of the mushrooms into a pouch that I made out of the front of my shirt and practically skipped back to the cabin. There was no one inside when I had arrived, and that was perfect for me. I hauled water in the other bucket from the sheep trough, cleaned the mushrooms, seaweed, and mussels, sorting out the bad mussels, cutting off the not-so-fresh pieces of seaweed, and rubbing off any dirt and debris from the mushrooms.
Oskar’s pocketknife had stayed in his pocket when we had gone overboard, so I used it to cut the seaweed into strips and the mushrooms into chunks. In the stone of the fireplace, there was a flimsy grate that was just wide enough to rest the cast-iron pan on. Bemoaning the lack of olive oil and hoping that when we had the sheep, I could have some of its fat to cook with, I placed the mushroom chunks and seaweed strips in the pan.
Once they started to smell delicious and the mushrooms were turning golden brown, I poured as much water as I couldinto the pan. When the water was boiling, I placed about half of the mussels in the water and let them cook until they were done. Once the mussels were ready, I begrudgingly placed half of the mushrooms and seaweed and all of the cooked mussels into the bucket, which felt so wrong, but it wasn’t like we had bowls.
When the door swung open, the boys hurried into the cabin. They were a mess: their pants were covered in mud, they had dirt in their hair and on their faces, and the asshole had smudges of blood on his face, like he had a nosebleed and had hastily cleaned it up.
