Soda bottle tops pop as they're thrown into Joe Kingman's bon fire. It's 50 degrees but the nine of us are alright, because it's ten o clock and we can yell as loud as we want because anything we say can be heard, there's nobody to hide it from. We think.
I'm sitting in between Alicia, my pre-school to eigth grade best friend, and Reese, my new friend whom I share 5 out of 10 classes with. Kale and Bennett are on the deck off of Joe's pool, texting their lover comments to each other because we're 15 feet away, and we'll laugh. Monica is on the other side of the fire, laughing about a "that's what she said" with Jon and Aiden. When the noise as finally gone down from maximum annoy-your-neighbors tone to medium just-kind-of-erk-your-neighbors tone, when Reese screems and drops her Rockstar.
"What?" "Reese, what's going on?" "Are you okay?" are our reactions. All we get is a blank stare and a point towards the water tower, behind Joe's house.
"Yes, Reese," Jon replies to the gesture sarcasically, "that's a water tower. There's a lot of those around here..."
"Not, the, watertower." She repeats. I look up to the gray 500 foot bucket of steel.
"Oh-oh my gosh!" I yell, making the same priceless look that I now claim Reese worthy of, "Do you guys see that too?"
"See what?"
"What are you talking about?"
A few moments of silence and pretty soon everyone is staring at not only the watertower, but specifically the shadow on it. It's very faint, you have to look for a while. But it's there. It looks like a person, but not completely. There's wings, and pointy ears like a dog.
"It's nothing!" Joe says, "probably just a part of a machine making a shadow."
We all shake it off and go back to the fire.
"Bahaha! What a loser!" Monica shouts out, looking at her phone. Aiden and Jon chime in with hysterical laughter.
Monica looks at all of us, "Kiana just asked Aidan to go on a 15 mile bike ride with her tomorrow!"
"15.2, actually..." Jon adds. Aiden laughs, but doesn't say anything because he knows it's ridiculous, and he also liked someone in particular around that fire.
"What the heck?" Alicia asks, laughing now too, "you should send her another voice mail!"
"Haha, ask her to go on another bike ride...but to, Minneapolis!"
Without a thought, Jon pulls out his phone and calls up Kiana. "Oh, hey Kiana. Yeah, I heard you were into bike rides. So I was wondering, you wanna go on a 108 mile bike ride up to the cities on Wednesday? I need someone to go with, and I thought you would be a good choice. Okay bye."
Laughter drowned out all other noise in the city. We were in a trance that couldn't be disrupted. This was awesome. Nothing could stop us but-
"Aaaaaooooooo!"
"What? What the heck? What is happ-" Kale's voice was cut off, she grabs hold of Bennett.
"Where's the shadow?" I ask, and grab hold of Aiden, who doesn't move.
"Eeeeeeek!" A strange formation with a human body, wings, wolf ears and a buttload of eye liner circles down from the water tower. She's wearing flashy boots and hollister everything else, but is too dark to identify. Everyone is silent except for the occasional scream or gasp of fear, terror, and astonishment. Before anyone can look at each other and ponder the fact that this creature is actually real, she falls into the fire. After we all wait there, she pulls herself up, limps out with both hands grasped around her knee, and flies off into the south west.