Page 7 of Wild About You

He turns and walks off toward the spot where he left his stuff earlier, presumably to start transferring it to his new pack. I stay where I am, marveling at his ability to use five one-syllable words in a row to say nothing at all.

My irritation from earlier returns. I wish it was only anger that I felt. Anger I can deal with. But the buzzing in my body and mind intensifies, leaning more toward the anxious kind than the excited. It’s like a stage light that won’t stop flickering, growing harder to ignore the longer I try to pretend nothing is wrong. No matter what I do, I can’t shake it off completely.

The anxiety is not new to me, but the label is. I’d felt almost cheated when I finally worked up the nerve to go to student health services to get checked out. The physical symptoms had been building up bit by bit since shortly after I started at Oliver—hands shaking too much to take notes with pen and paper, migraines and stomachaches taking me out of commission for entire days. I didn’t connect them to the racing thoughts, these worries and fears and what-ifs on constant loop in my mind, up until the doctor was handing me a brochure about generalized anxiety disorder and advising me on finding a therapist. You mean this is all in my head? I’d wanted to shout. I didn’t have time to deal with it, not with classes, homework, my part-time job at Body Wonderland that seemed to take up every free hour but that I desperately needed for money. I’m independent, strong, and capable, and have always handled my own shit. So I taught myself meditation and yoga with YouTube videos in my cramped dorm room, loaded up on essential oils for relieving stress and helping sleep with my Body Wonderland employee discount, and mainlined romance novels like they’re water to get me out of my own head.

Sometimes it even worked.

School didn’t get any better, to the point that I lost my biggest merit scholarship when I didn’t make the GPA requirement, but that doesn’t mean it never will. I haven’t told anyone about my biggest reason for being here—my dire financial straits and how they got that way in the first place. As far as Reese and our other best friend, Clara, know, this is cool, fun Natalie, embarking on a cool, fun adventure to cap off an easy-breezy freshman year. To my parents, it’s just another dumb decision in a long line of them on my part.

I still have hope that I can figure this condition out, master the never-ending buzzing and quiet the thought spirals, become kick-ass, in-control Natalie again. And I absolutely have to do it while I’m on Wild Adventures.

I don’t know what the alternative is.

“Co-EdVenturers!” Burke Forrester’s voice calls out, and I jump at the intrusion on my wandering thoughts. “Have we all found our teammates?”

Blowing out a shaky breath, I walk toward my day pack, knowing at least what I need to do in this moment. I unzip the top pocket and reach for my makeup bag, dipping both my hands inside so I can discreetly rub a lavender rollerball onto my wrists before closing it back up and transferring it to my new pack, starting to do the same with the rest of my belongings. While I’m at it, I bring one wrist up as if to scratch my nose, but really, I’m taking a deep inhale, followed by a long exhale and repeat. I’m calm. I’m unflappable. I’m in control.

Not of other people and how they’ll treat me, of course, but I can control how I react to them. I don’t have to get upset or hurt or let Finn or Enemi ruin my experience before it’s even started. I’ve got this.

“Co-EdVenturers!” Burke Forrester calls out, nearly making me drop the pile of my clean, unfolded underwear I’m repacking. “If all the teams want to circle up over here, you’ll each receive a map that will take you to your first challenge!”

I hurriedly finish the repacking job and swing my now even heavier new pack onto my shoulders before making my way to the group. I sidle up to Finn and bump him with my hip, my effort at a gesture of “Yeah, you’re being a dick to me, but I can be the bigger, friendlier person, bitch.” Unfortunately, he is the literal bigger person, so my hip hits him in the thigh. And since he was looking straight ahead and trying to pretend I don’t exist, it catches him off guard and he jumps away as if dodging a fatal blow. Is he a theater major too? Because the drama is unmatched.

“Seriously? It was a hip bump, not a crotch grope,” I whisper through clenched teeth as the other teams start to fill in around us. Cameras are capturing the whole thing, but I hope there’s enough other activity and chatter going on for us to avoid drawing much notice.

Not for his lack of trying.

He gives me a withering look, but his cheeks seem a shade pinker as he inches back toward his spot beside me. Is this a step in the right direction? Flustering him into speechlessness?

I don’t have time to consider it further before Burke Forrester is clapping his hands and speaking again. “All right, great job, everyone! So good to see our new teams find each other and really get this adventure going. Meena, it appears that you were unable to find a pack before they were all taken, meaning you and Cammie are working with half the supplies as everyone else tonight. But by no means should you count yourselves out! Today’s challenge will test all of your abilities to work with your new teammate, relying solely on each other to survive your first night in the wild.”

He scans our group with the cool self-assuredness of someone who knows he’s spending the night with a bed and indoor plumbing. “One of the most exciting parts of Wild Co-EdVentures is its unpredictability. Having all the right supplies tonight doesn’t mean anything, for example, if neither teammate knows how to use them. We’ve brought you all together as strangers, so I now urge you to do everything you can to get to know your partner, their strengths and weaknesses, and how those mesh with your own, in order to be most successful going forward. There’s no time to waste. With that said, are we ready for your first team challenge?”

There’s a chorus of woos and yeahs, and I cheer with them. At my side, Finn nods silently.

Burke grins. “That’s what I like to hear. In just a moment, I’ll hand out the maps for your first leg. These will get you to your team’s backcountry campsite, where further instructions for the night await. If you successfully complete your tasks and make it through the night, your team will receive a map to the next checkpoint. The last team to arrive at the checkpoint will be eliminated. Any questions?”

When the only answer he gets is the ambient sounds of the forest, Burke pulls a stack of envelopes from the inside of his puffer vest. “All right, then. I have your maps here.” He pauses, smirking. “What are you waiting for? Come and get ’em. Ready, set, adventure!”

* * *

“What do you think about Team Finnatalie?”

While the question is meant for Finn, I pose it to the camera and our future viewers with a wide, open-mouthed smile, waving the fingers of my free hand around jazz hands–style. I’m walking through the woods behind my teammate, who holds the map we were given to our first campsite and seems to be looking down at it every thirty seconds or so, even though we’re walking most of the way on the clearly marked main trail.

“Team names don’t matter. No one uses them,” says Bad Mood Becky up there.

I give the camera a good-natured—as far as I want viewers to know, anyway—eye roll. “Viewers use them! People will hashtag it and stuff as they watch.” I gasp as something occurs to me. “Our fans can call themselves Finnatalics!”

There’s a beat of silence as Finn takes in this stroke of genius, and I turn the camera forward to watch the back of his head for a while. This is the view it’s been getting from its holster on my new pack for most of the hike, as our cameras are supposed to stay rolling from when we wake up until we go to sleep, except for our allotted ten minutes per hour of privacy when we get to shut them off. I’m glad the holsters exist, so it’s not entirely on us to be amateur cinematographers. But it’s also quickly become clear that if I want any footage of myself on the trail, I can’t count on Finn’s backpack cam to capture it.

“Why not just…Finnatics?” he asks, and I can hear the reluctance to engage with me in his voice.

I smile to myself. Wearing him down already! “Because, Finn, that’s already a word and also it only noticeably uses your name. I’m not even part of the picture anymore.”

“Wouldn’t that be unfortunate,” he murmurs almost too softly for me to hear.

Oookay, not worn down. “That’s it,” I sigh frustratedly, fitting the camera back into its home at my shoulder. I briefly wonder if I should be using my off-camera ten minutes, but find I’m too irritated to care whether I’m about to make myself The Drama of this episode. “First Team Finnatalie meeting commencing now.”

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