"What's wrong," I asked, already irritated because somehow I knew the answer.
"The fucking keys are gone! The keys...we fucking left them!" He dug through the pockets in a frenzied desperation.
I searched my jeans, discovering that my lighter, the lucky one with the owl on it that had been with us the entire road trip, was also missing. I muttered under my breath. If this wasn’t an omen I didn't know what was.
"What!” Patrick demanded. I startled at his sharp tone and took a deep breath, dreading what I was about to say.
"We lost the lighter too."
Patrick lost control. He threw down the coat and started banging on the hood of the ancient car we were calling home. I turned to Alec, some little hippy kid we'd picked up at gas station in the previous county, and apologized.
"He gets like this sometimes," I tried to be reassuring. "Don't worry." But the kid looked like he was going to run. I couldn’t tell in the moonlight if this was just how he looked. At the gas station I thought he had just looked hungry.
"Pat! Patrick! Chill!" I said. Alec had gas money for a ride to San Francisco. Which we needed desperately or WE would not be going to San Francisco. We couldn't afford for Patrick to scare him off. I put my hand on Pat's shoulder trying to draw him back to me. "They probably just fell out where we were sitting. We'll just go back and find them."
Patrick stopped ranting and pacing and whirled around, his eyes lit with violence and rage. "Oh yeah," he seethed. "And just how in the hell do you expect to do that? In case you hadn't noticed, it's dark now!"
I opened the back door, grateful that the doors to this giant emissions-leaking beast no longer locked. We could sleep here where we were parked if we had to. I grabbed the Coleman lantern before remembering that we did not have a lighter to light it, and dug around for a flashlight instead.
I held the flashlight up to my chin and flashed a smug smile, wiggling my eyebrows. “Come on,” I said over my shoulder as I took off toward the beach. I really had no idea what my plan was. I have the worst sense of direction and being in a different state wasn’t helping at all. In Colorado, West is always toward the mountains. Out here, in the dark, I wasn’t even really sure I was heading back toward the beach until I reached the sand. I stopped short.
Patrick and our hitchhiker caught up to me then and, smiling triumphantly, I shone the flashlight onto the sand, revealing three perfect sets of footprints in the sand: mine, Patrick’s, and a smaller set belonging to Alec.
Patrick grabbed the flashlight from me and smacked me on the back. “Good job Watson!”
We followed the footprints all the way back to the lifeguard tower where just a short while before we’d all been sitting; watching the sun set, eating a gas station dinner, and talking about our individual hopes and dreams for San Francisco. Wedged into the sand at the base of the tower, a sliver of metal glinted in the moonlight. I reached down and snatched up the partially buried keys and felt around in the sand for the lighter which by now had been completely sucked into the sand.
Alec looked amazed. Patrick looked ecstatic. I looked at the moonlight glinting off the ocean. I followed the boys back at a distance, completely unaware of anything but my focus on those sets of footprints. It had just occurred to me that all Patrick and I were doing on this trip was following footprints into the dark.
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