Page 3 of Wandering Wild
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. “Thebestreason.”
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’snotstyled, 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 likewhat?”
“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, typingsilver hair blue eyes anime maleinto 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.”
