Free The New Wild by Holly Brasher

and there;
a lot of them are stuck in my scratchy, wool blanket. Xander moves like
molasses.
    “I’m leaving without you,” I say. I
grab the axe and throw it over my shoulder, Paul Bunyan-style, and start
walking. The pin in my compass wobbles for a bit, but soon enough, it’s
pointing firmly north. I head west, away from the sun.
    For a minute or two, I’m worried
Xander won’t follow me. As much as I hate him, I’d rather be stuck in a tiny
cell with him than on my own. That’s how people go insane: the loneliness.
Everywhere birds are shrieking, trees rustling. It’s a recipe for lunacy. Just
as I’m starting to ponder where the expression “losing your marbles” came from,
Xander barrels from the woods behind me. He knows he has to get home.
    Xander walks ahead sometimes, but
mostly, I lead. The undergrowth is so thick I have to hack it away with the axe
before we can get anywhere. My arms are getting so sore from swinging this
thing. Every once in a while, we have to scramble up a boulder or even a whole
wall of them. Before long I’m going to look like a professional body builder.
    We keep on this way for days.
Without music or T.V. to entertain us, we talk endlessly about anything and
everything, from our life stories to how much we both miss French fries dipped
in mayonnaise. It’s not long before I know more about Xander than I ever wanted
to know about anyone. I know little, disturbing things, like how often he goes
to the bathroom (way, way too much). How he got the jagged scar that runs up
his right shin (car accident right after he got his license, his fault). Why he
has a recycling symbol tattooed on his calf (he started a recycle/salvage
program at his high school, the first of its kind). Why he was at Camp Astor
(caught smoking dope, he was sent away for a summer of, as his dad put it,
“wholesome teen fun”). Regrettably, I even know how many girls he’s slept with.
Two. The last one broke his heart by hooking up with his best friend, and made
him hate all teenage girls (“until now,” he says, which is a nice save). For
some reason, when we talk about her, I get a knot in my chest.
    I tell Xander everything he needs
to know about me but leave out the stories that might make me cry in front of
him. I don’t mention details when it comes to my dad and his cancer, or how my
heart is gnawed with worry when I think about Mom and Bernard. I don’t want to
go there. I’m also worried that I’d get emotional and he wouldn’t hug me or try
to make me feel better, which might piss me off worse than the things he did at
camp.
    We try to find a source of water
every night to camp near, then go about finding dinner from our surroundings. A
floppy-eared hare was the most disturbing thing to kill. I made Xander do it,
and he winced the whole time. He even scraped out the furry gray hide and
hooked it on a belt loop “to dry for winter, when it gets cold.” He’s so weird.
     
    * * *
     
    We’re in central
Pennsylvania now, according to the rare etched-stone town sign we’ve come
across: HYDESPORT,
INCORPORATED 1731; SHARON TOWN, INCORPORATED
1790. We’ve still seen more of them than
people, of which we’ve met a few, including a fourteen-year-old Asian boy
headed for New York City, where he figured he could find some of his friends,
and a sixty-seven-year-old black lady who wanted to stay right where she was in
an old, charred school bus. No crazies, no zombies. And it is nice to know
we’re not completely alone out here.
    I am a little surprised by how few
humans we see. If Deb’s theory is correct, Mother Nature was really picky about
who she let live. Everyone seems to think they’re still here because they’re
The Best Friend Earth Could Ever Have Ever , but I know that isn’t the
case with me. It’s certainly not the case with Xander. But we are both “granola”
in our own way, and there must be something in us that made her want to keep us
alive, something she thought we’d add