Page 3 of Wandering Wild

The soulful lyrics of Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” wake me from the dead of sleep, the chorus growing incessantly louder until I roll over and fumble around on my bedside table for my phone. I don’t have to look at the screen to know who’s calling—that ringtone is only allocated to one person.

With my heart in my throat, I connect the call.

“Em?” I croak out. “Are you?—”

Her high-pitched scream causes me to wince, though it also makes my unease vanish. Screaming is good. It’s Ember’s silence that I’ve learned to dread, rare as it is from my best friend these days—thank God. But despite my relief, when I glance blearily at the clock and see it reading past two a.m., I groan loud enough to interrupt her shrieks.

“It’s the middle of the night,” I rasp, my voice thick with sleep. “What the hell, Ember?”

“It’s not in LA!” she cries nonsensically, her tone still pitched high enough for dogs in neighboring countries to hear. “Now get your butt over here—we need to submit our entries!”

She disconnects the call, leaving me blinking into the dark of my room. All I know is that I’ve been summoned, and if I don’t crawl through her window within minutes, she’ll attempt the reverse journey herself. So with another groan—this one resigned—I heave myself out of bed and use my phone’s flashlight to search for my beloved pair of pink Uggs.

Cursing the day Ember Ashley moved in next door—and then cursing myself for such an uncharitable thought—I stumble toward my window and shove it open. The chill of the early September air hits me and I shiver, looking longingly back at my bed. But then I see Ember poke her head out of her own window, gesturing for me to hurry.

Grumbling about sleep-stealing best friends, I ease out over the ledge until I’m balanced on a thick gum-tree branch that offers a bridge between our two houses. The smell of eucalyptus provides a sensory kick to help energize me—combined with the two-story drop beneath my feet—and I spider-crawl my way from my window to Ember’s, swinging into her warmly lit room.

“I hate you a little more each day,” I tell her as I move straight to her bed and collapse on top of it.

“Thankfully, you also love me a lot, so it’ll take you a while before you hate me completely,” she returns, plonking down beside me.

I scowl at her, but I can’t maintain my grumpy act for long in the face of her contagious happiness. I’ve never known anyone like Ember, someone who always manages to see the bright side of things regardless of what life brings. It’s beautiful—and exhausting.

“There had better be a good reason for you dragging me over here at this hour,” I warn, my glare bouncing off her like oil on water.

“Not just a good reason,” she says, reaching for her laptop and opening the web browser. “The best reason.”

While she waits for the page to load, I glance around her bedroom that is as familiar as my own, with very few differences between them. Her walls are painted light pink while mine are pale yellow, but both are plastered with photos of the ten years of memories we’ve shared.

The Ashleys relocated from New Zealand to Australia when Ember was a toddler, but they didn’t move in next door until just before my eighth birthday, with them trading their big-city lives in Sydney for the peace and quiet of our small coastal town. I will never be able to thank them enough for that decision, since I can’t imagine my life without Ember in it. The things we’ve been through together... I know neither of us would have survived this far, if not for each other.

Looking at my friend now, I ignore the dark memories trying to force their way into my thoughts, and instead focus on the excited gleam in her brown eyes. There’s a rosy flush to her cheeks, and her short black hair is spiking out from beneath her hot-pink beanie, the sight of which warms me—the color is so perfectly Ember—while at the same time it brings a coil of remembered dread to my stomach. But I banish my fears, knowing they are nothing more than ghosts.

Shifting into a more comfortable position, I jolt slightly when I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror across from Ember’s bed. It’s not my sensible flannel pajamas that surprise me, nor my skin that’s on the pale side from winter. No, the shock I get is something that has happened frequently over the last few days whenever I’ve seen myself—or rather, whenever I’ve seen my hair. “Galaxy,” they call it: a mixture of blue, purple, and magenta. I thought I would hate it, but even if I did, it wouldn’t matter, since I made a deal with Ember three years ago saying she could choose my hair color every time it’s due for a trim. I’ve long since learned to relinquish my trepidation, especially given how much our deal meant to her at the time. And despite some truly outrageous hair adventures, she always manages to find something that flatters me. While my current look is painfully attention-grabbing, I can admit that it works magic on my eyes, making the dusky blue-gray shade appear almost ethereally violet.

Even so, it’s going to take time for me to get used to it.

“Okay, so, don’t freak out,” Ember says, reclaiming my attention as the web page finally loads. Those five words are enough to have me sighing inwardly—and that sigh becomes audible when she shoves her laptop in my face and points to the screen.

On it is an image of someone who is all too familiar to me—and to the rest of the world. Impossibly blue eyes in a too-perfect face, frosted silver hair styled messily enough to look as if it’s not styled, golden tanned skin, and a body that clearly has the benefit of numerous personal trainers.

Zander Rune: actor extraordinaire and unfairly gorgeous Hollywood bad boy.

I haven’t seen a photo of him in three months, but those three months have only made him more attractive—as unfathomable as that is. Instead of acknowledging it, I repress my slowly simmering anger and say the first thing that comes to mind: “He always did look like an anime character, but now it’s becoming ridiculous.”

Ember was about to scroll down the page, but she’s startled enough to choke on a laugh and halt her movement. “He looks like what ?”

“Oh, please, as if you don’t see it. His hair, his eyes, his”—I gesture to his face and body, not wanting to compliment him aloud—“ everything . He doesn’t look real.”

Still laughing, Ember says, “You don’t even watch anime.”

“Doesn’t matter. Google it,” I challenge. I pull her laptop closer and open a new tab, typing silver hair blue eyes anime male into the search bar, letting out a triumphant sound when the results load. Zander could be likened to any one of them, but the perfect example jumps straight out at me. “There. Him. Satoru Gojo. I told you so.”

Ember cocks her head to the side. “Why’s he wearing a blindfold?”

“Just look at the images without the blindfold.” I click on one to enlarge it. “He’s the spitting image of Zander Rune.”

“He’s also extremely hot.”

This time it’s me who chokes. “He’s an animated character.”

Ember rolls her eyes. “As if you’ve never crushed on someone from Disney. Robin Hood? Simba? They weren’t even human but you can’t deny their hotness.”

“It was their personality ?—”

“And don’t get me started on Flynn Rider and Li Shang.” She utters a dreamy sigh. “Total babes.”

I send her a deadpan look. “I worry about you sometimes.”

She grins and blows me a kiss, before scrolling through more of the images as she murmurs, “I really need to start watching anime, if the guys look like this.” But then she sits up straight and frowns. “No, I won’t be distracted. This is important .”

Ember returns to the page that has the photo of Zander on it, but this time she scrolls far enough for me to see why . The text is in bold, a blaring declaration heralded across the entertainment website:

WIN AN ADVENTURE WITH ZANDER RUNE!

“You woke me up for this ?”

Despite my annoyance, I’m not surprised. When it comes to Zander Rune, Ember is like most girls our age—and girls younger... and older... and many boys and genderqueer persons as well, for that matter. Zander is a Hollywood icon. Once upon a time, I was among the number who idolized him. I vividly recall being twelve years old and watching the first Lost Heirs movie at the cinema with Ember, and as soon as the credits began rolling, we sprinted back to the box office to purchase two more tickets so we could watch it all over again. Five years later, I can still remember every minute of that day—and the movie that left the world infatuated with the American heartthrob.

Until three months ago, I was one of Zander’s biggest fans. But then he turned eighteen and made a series of choices that, in my mind, tarnished his image beyond repair. All the usual media scandals could be affixed to his name, but whether they were true or not, those weren’t the things that turned me from my starstruck naivety. He was barely four months older than me, so I could easily relate to his teenage antics and had no grounds to cast judgment.

But then he wrapped his fancy car around a tree, and while he escaped miraculously unscathed, a routine test resulted in a DUI charge—and that was something I couldn’t forgive. His actions had put others at risk, and yet, because of his celebrity, he was sentenced to only a few hours of community service and a short stint in rehab. Ever since that day, any infatuation I’d felt toward Zander Rune was gone. Forever.

Ember understood—more than anyone. And until tonight, she’d respected my unspoken wish to never talk about him again, even if she remained a not-so-secret fan. She’s free to admire whoever she wants—of course she is—but this competition... This I don’t understand. And my lack of understanding only grows as I begin reading the terms and conditions.

“You can’t be serious,” I say, my voice flat. She’s practically bouncing beside me, her features aglow with excitement.

“Can you imagine ?” she cries, flopping back onto her pillows. “Four days on vacation with Zander Rune.”

“Vacation?” I point toward the fine print. “Did you read any of this?”

She ignores me and continues wistfully, “Him and me, alone, for ninety-six whole hours.”

I snap my fingers in front of her glazed eyes. “Earth to Ember. Tell me you read this?”

She blinks herself back into the room and sits up again, nodding eagerly. “Every word.”

Gathering my patience, I say, “Then you’ll know that the winner won’t be alone with Zander. And it’s not promising a relaxing time—quite the opposite.”

The competition grants not just an adventure with the actor, but also with Rykon Hawke, star of the reality survival show Hawke’s Wild World . The man is a legend, having started his career as a park ranger in the Canadian Rockies before founding the first of many wilderness survival camps across the globe, most for rehabilitation programs, though plenty of schools and organizations use them as well. From there, he made the jump to television, where he quickly became a household name thanks to his ability to captivate audiences through various adventures—whether they be him climbing vertical cliffs with his bare hands, digging wind shelters into icy tundras, sprinting down volcanoes, staggering through deserts, or being stranded in the middle of the ocean. Each new episode sees Hawke taking viewers to an off-the-grid destination and surviving anything from a few days to weeks at a time. Hawke’s Wild World is beyond extreme, and while I enjoy watching it, I can’t help thinking that the man himself must be a little unhinged to dance with death so eagerly.

... And my best friend apparently wants to go on a trip with him and Zander freaking Rune.

“Not to point out the obvious here, but you and nature don’t mix well,” I say, subtlety be damned. “You couldn’t even last the night camping in your own backyard for your thirteenth birthday party.”

“There was a mosquito in the tent,” she defends. “It had a vendetta against me.”

Unless the winner of the competition is being sent to some ice-barren land, then they’ll likely have to face millions of mosquitoes. But I don’t bother saying that, instead continuing, “And this prize—if it can be called that—will send you out to the middle of nowhere for four days. Do you know what that means?”

Ember smiles widely. “Four days of Zander’s entire focus, since there’ll be no distractions?”

I shake my head, unsure if she’s being deliberately obtuse or trying to rile me for the fun of it. “It means no indoor plumbing—no toilets, or showers, or running water. It means sleeping out in the open with all kinds of bugs crawling over you, rain, hail, or shine, and eating whatever Hawke says will keep your strength up—most likely something disgusting, like wriggling worms or dead birds or rabbit guts. Depending on the destination, you might even have to drink your own pee. And no matter where you end up, there’ll be hours of hiking and climbing and living like you’re lost in the wilderness, because that’s exactly what you’ll be: Lost. In. The. Wilderness .”

This time it’s Ember who shakes her head. “Not lost . Just... wandering. With purpose.” Her eyes glaze again. “And none of that matters because I’ll be with Zander Rune.”

God help me, I’m about to kill my best friend. “Snap out of it, Em, and think for a second. You can’t possibly be considering this.”

Finally, Ember comes back to herself. “Of course I’m not considering it.”

The tightness eases from my shoulders. Until?—

“I don’t need to consider, because I’ve already entered. Now it’s your turn. And after that, you can help me sign up for hundreds of fake new email addresses so we have more chances of winning.”

I gape at her, then say, weakly, “Please tell me you’re joking.”

She pats me on the cheek. “Don’t worry, Charlie Bear—if you win, I’ll take your place, okay?”

Not okay. None of this is okay . And while I know Ember would skin me alive if I uttered my real argument against her taking off on some intrepid adventure—an argument that doesn’t involve Zander at all, though he’s definitely a good reason not to go—I still wish there was a way I could gently pull her back to reality. But looking at my friend and the light shining out of her, I just don’t have it in me to remind her about all the reasons why she won’t be able to go, even if she does miraculously win.

Instead, I dutifully fill out the online competition form, entering my personal details while making a mental note to unsubscribe from the spam that will flood my inbox later.

I then spend the next few hours yawning my way through the creation of fake email accounts, refilling the competition form over and over until neither Ember nor I can keep our eyes open a second longer.

As dawn touches the horizon, I crawl back to my own bedroom, barely having the energy to close the window before I topple into bed and fall soundly asleep. My last thought is to hope that when I wake up, the whole night will have been a dream, and one that I never have to think about again.