Lost in the Shadows

Heidi often woke up in the middle of the night to see raging fires on the beaches. It always peaked her interest but she was never sure if it was safe. These ragers always went on until the wee hours of the morning and bottles, clothes, and cigarette butts would flood the sand when the sun would come up again.

The curiosity of the strawberry blonde, blue eyed girl could not help herself from going for just one night and seeing what it was all about. It would be full of strangers but it was a fight she had to put up with herself. This was California and she was young. This was the best time in her life to go out and to go wild with the other angsty kids.

She threw a shawl over her tank topped shoulders and headed down towards the glowing light of the fires with embers floating up to the clear sky. She recognized all these people to be surfers. They all wore the same things. It had a laidback feel to it. Heidi smiled as people greeted her. Everyone swapped names. There was not a name that she could remember in the short time but she always made it her quest to learn the names with the face and personality.

Heidi sat beside a guy on an empty log. His brown hair fell to his shoulders and he only had his bathing suit shorts on. “Craig.”

She looked over at the guy, shocked that he was so quick to introduce himself. “I’m Heidi.” She held her shawl even closer to her body as she looked upon the fire.

Craig was about to stand up. “Do you care to have a beer? We have a huge case for anyone to just take. First come, first serve.”

Heidi smiled at him. “I don’t think I should drink. I have work in the morning and not waking up for my shift sounds like a nightmare to me.” She was rambling on and the guy went to get her a beer before she could say another word.

“Just drink.” He came back and handed it to her.

She looked at the type of beer that they were drinking. It was Pabst Blue Ribbon. She knew it was a party drink but it was not something you drink for the taste. “Thanks. Do you guys come here a lot?”

Craig nodded. “We come to this beach once a weekend to do this and we have some wild times. Sometimes it’s so wild that we don’t end up waking up in the morning.” He laughed and snorted as he did.

“You don’t wake up?” This was shocking to hear. “Why do you drink so much that you feel horrible in the morning? Wouldn’t you just rather wake up early and start your day strong to complete something productive?”

“This is Santa Carla. This is the land where you do what you want. Sometimes it isn’t the beer that get us totally messed up. Have you ever done drugs?”

“You mean pot?” Her eyes widened.

“Yeah, sometimes weed. Sometimes it’s angel dust and sometimes it’s molly. It’s always a mystery of what it is you’re taking when you put your hand in that bowl. You’re not from California?” He picked up something strange about her.

It stunned her that he knew this. “How could you tell?” This was not the type of group that she would typically hang out with. All her friends back in Boston wanted to be successful. Most people she knew went to college for the arts or nursing. There was no in between. Heidi wanted it different though. She wanted to live in California for at least a year but she could tell that all these people pretended to like each other and just accepted that they were all in the same group without truly being happy with each other’s company.

“Dude, your accent? Where are you from?” He took a large gulp from his beer and threw it into the powerful flame to create a satanic flair with his now broken glass.

Heidi held the beer to her stomach after taking a sip of it and kept her eyes on the fire. If she was going to stay at this camp site for a couple hours than she wanted to enjoy it as much as she would allow herself to. “I’m from,”

One of the surfers stood up. “Let’s play a little game here. Lay down. Close your eyes. When I count to three, open them. We’ll go in a circle and each person calls out what they see in the sky be it constellations, shapes, planets. If you don’t see something, you have to drink. No repeats or you still drink.”

Heidi had never been one to drink. This was one of her first beers ever. She laid on the sand with everyone else and closed her eyes as her nails clinked her beer bottle.

The surfer counted to three and everyone began naming off what they saw. When it came to Heidi’s turn to name something off she frowned, realizing that she had not paid attention to what everyone was saying. “I see the big Dipper?”

“Drink, bitch!” Someone called out playfully. "Someone already said that, slut."

She sat up a little bit to drink some of her beer. The names they were calling her were unbelievable. The one thing Heidi never understood was how people could easily call others foul names. The group went on playing the game.

Everyone was having such a great time. There was plenty of laughs and crude language. One person had called out a phallic symbol of the sky while another pointed out some type of alien. After a few minutes of playing, she found her body was weak. Her hearing was going out the door and she could barely keep her eyes open.

She tried opening them several times to see red in several places. It was a mixture of her hair and the fire’s reflection on faces was what she was convinced of. Distant screams were around her but she was sure this was all a delusion. She had been drugged no doubt. She never saw her beer be opened and she never saw it until she took it.

It came to a point where she was unable to even crack her eyes open a little bit. Her mind floated off to Neverland at this point.