House Party (6 page)

There was a tremendous smash and people started to scream. It was coming from upstairs in the living room. I rushed up the stairs and stopped, stunned, unable to believe the scene. The entire floor was covered with broken glass. The big front picture window had been smashed. There was a gigantic hole in the window and there was a brick lying in the middle of the floor.

A girl was holding onto her arm, which was bleeding badly. It looked like she'd been cut by flying glass. She was crying and two other girls were holding onto her,
trying to comfort her, but they weren't stopping the blood from dripping down onto the carpet.

Then a second brick smashed through the window, taking out part of the remaining glass, sending shards showering into the room. People screamed and yelled and pushed and shoved as they scrambled out of the way, bumping into each other, dropping their drinks and knocking over chairs.

I pressed against the wall as they rushed past and toward the door. Mike saw them coming and swung open the door. The mass of people tried to rush out, and at the same time some others on the outside saw an opportunity and tried to run in. There was a crash of bodies, people pushing and shoving and fighting to get past each other. Kids were jostled and trampled as bodies bounced against the wall and each other, but finally the force of the people trying to get out overpowered the others, and kids literally fell out through the door.

There was a loud smash and the music
just stopped. I turned back around in time to see my father's stereo fly through the air and out the picture window, taking one of the few pieces of glass still clinging to the frame.

There was more screaming and yelling, and then there was a tremendous smash of broken glass coming from the kitchen. More people ran out of the kitchen as I tried to force my way upstream to find out what had happened. I barged through the crowd and saw that the punch bowl was in a million pieces and the reddish fruit punch had stained the floor!

My mother's punch bowl—her antique family heirloom—was gone. How would I explain what had happened? I couldn't. I couldn't explain that or the broken windows.

I felt like crying. I wanted to just slump to the punch-stained floor, roll into a ball and cry. Instead I started to yell.

“Everybody get out! Everybody get out of my house!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

The people in the kitchen stopped laughing and looked at me as if I were crazy. I
was
crazy.

“Get out of my house!” I screamed again. “I don't even know any of you! Get out!”

They stood there stunned. Nobody moved.

I reached over and slapped the drink out of a girl's hand. The plastic cup bounced against the wall and splattered onto the floor as she jumped backward.

“Get out of my house!” I screamed.

Everybody unfroze. Some of the people put down their drinks, and others just started moving out of the kitchen. Out of the kitchen was good. Now I wanted them out of my house.

I followed them into the living room and was met by a mass of people. My sudden burst of courage seemed to deflate. How could I ever get this many people to leave?

Just then I heard the sirens.

For the first few seconds I thought I was the only one who heard the sirens. Then, all at once, it was like everybody heard them. They stopped and listened. The sound was unmistakable and it was coming in this direction. The noise was getting louder and louder. Suddenly one kid moved toward the door, and then another and another, until everybody started running toward the front door.

There was a mass rush. It was like a school fire drill that had gone completely out of control. Drinks were dropped or tossed against the walls. Bodies began bouncing against each other as everybody tried to make it out of the house.

The front door was wide open—Mo and Mike were nowhere to be seen—and people streamed through, running outside.

I ran over to the front window, glass crunching under my feet and into the carpet.

The scene outside was wild. Hundreds of kids were on the run. It was like a wave of people. Some of them were running down the street, while others were heading out the other way, into the field at the end of the street. Others were jumping into cars. Vehicles were starting up, revving and trying to jockey away but were blocked by other cars trying to do the same thing.

One of the cars bounced up over the sidewalk and drove on the lawns of the neighbors! The driver bypassed the line of
cars and then bumped back onto the road and into the intersection, squealing away.

The sirens—and it was clearly more than one siren—were getting louder. I didn't know if they were coming to my house or not. I was just grateful they were in the area. Maybe there was a fire or an emergency they were rushing to nearby. If that was the case, I had to get to the front door and lock it so that the people who had run out wouldn't come back once the sirens had passed.

Then the flashing lights appeared at the top of the street. It was a police car—no,
two
police cars. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth car appeared. They came up the street, blocking any other cars from leaving.

The cars were trapped, but the people on foot weren't. They turned around and started running toward the field and away from the police.

While the police had blocked the cars from leaving, they themselves were blocked from coming any closer. The doors
of the stopped police cars opened and the officers got out—two per car.

The police fanned out across the width of the street. It was eerie watching them come toward us, their passage illuminated by the pulsing of the lights on their cars, radiating out and across the whole scene.

Jen appeared at my side. “I…I can't believe all of this. How did it happen?”

I shook my head. “I don't know. It just kept building and building until it was out of control.”

“What are you going to say to the police?” she asked.

I hadn't even considered that. I was just so grateful that they'd appeared. I hadn't thought that they were going to come to the house. And it wasn't what I was going to say that was important, but what they were going to say to me. Even worse, what were they going to do to me? Was I going to be arrested?

The police officers started moving to the cars that lined the street. Doors were opened and drivers and passengers removed. Other
cops formed a line on the street, forcing the remaining kids to run in the other direction. It didn't look like they were even trying to catch anybody, just moving them away to break things up. Most of the crowd had left, and most of those who remained were fleeing as fast as their legs could carry them. The only ones who couldn't run were Jen and me.

Then I looked down at the lawn. There was somebody lying there, not moving. How could somebody sleep through all of this? Maybe they weren't sleeping. They must have passed out.

“We have to get rid of all the alcohol,” Jen said.

“What?” I asked. I understood the words but didn't know what she meant.

“We have to dump all the alcohol. We have to get rid of the bottles. We have to hide the evidence before the police get here!”

“Jen,” I said, shaking my head, “it's over…there's nothing we can do…we can't hide all of this.”

I gestured around the room. If only it was just the beer bottles that littered the room. There was the smashed-out front window, the pieces of glass in the carpets, broken bottles, garbage, overturned chairs, spilled drinks and stains on the carpets.

“There's nothing that can be done. Nothing.”

I started to cry, and Jen put her arm around my shoulders.

“I'm so sorry,” she said.

“So am I. But not as sorry as I know I'm going to be later.”

I watched as the ambulance slowly drove away, lights flashing. It was carrying the girl who passed out on the lawn. That was all it was. She had drunk so much that she passed out, and when the police arrived, her friends just ran off and left her. Nice friends.

The only vehicles left on the street were the police cars. The only people left in the
house were Jen and me and the police. The officers strolled through the house, their big thick black boots grinding the glass and garbage even farther into the carpet. They'd been walking around, checking out the house, making sure nobody else was hiding or passed out. Occasionally I heard one or other of them comment that they were glad it wasn't their house.

A female officer came up to us.

“Here,” she said, handing me a glass.

“Thanks,” I said as I took it and had a small sip. It was water.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

She had been nothing but nice to me. I'm not sure what I had expected, but they'd all been nice.

“I don't know how I feel,” I said. “I guess just numb. I can't believe any of this happened. I can't believe it happened.”

“I've seen worse,” she said.

“Worse than this?” I gasped.

“Far worse. I've been to places where sinks have been smashed, toilets ripped out, walls broken, televisions stolen—”

“I stopped somebody from taking my father's digital camera,” I said.

“You won't know what was taken until you and your parents check out the whole house. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of things have been stolen.”

What an awful thought.

“And we can all be grateful that nobody was seriously hurt,” the officer said. “There have been some real tragedies at parties like these. Broken bones, head injuries…there have even been deaths.”

“Deaths?” I said.

“If you have hundreds of teenagers fueled by alcohol, with nobody to put on the brakes, there's no limit to how bad things can get.”

I thought about that girl who had been cut by the flying glass. I wondered where she went, how badly she had been hurt and what would have happened if that brick had hit her in the head or if the glass had flown up into her eyes.

“Is that girl in the ambulance going to be okay?” Jen asked.

“She'll be fine. Alcohol poisoning. I talked to her. Stupid kid had never drunk before in her whole life, and tonight she chooses to down a whole mickey of whiskey.”

The officer made a face like she was disgusted, and my stomach did a flip. The alcohol in that punch was more than I'd ever had before. I could only imagine how Jen was feeling.

“She'll be treated and released, probably tomorrow morning,” the officer said. “I don't know what will be worse—the way her head is going to be feeling or facing her parents. And speaking of facing parents, we haven't been able to get in touch with your parents. Nobody is picking up at your grandmother's house.”

“The phone is in my nana's room and she's hard of hearing. If she took out her hearing aid, she probably can't hear it ringing. She must be sleeping through it,” I said. “What about my father's cell phone?”

“Nobody is picking up—it says the customer is not currently available.”

“I guess my father turned his cell phone off.”

“Were you able to get in touch with my mother?” Jen asked.

“She should be here soon,” the officer said.

“Did she say anything?” Jen asked.

“What do you think?”

I had a pretty good idea. I wanted somebody here, but I was afraid of what Jen's mother would say, or what she'd think, and what she'd do. There was no telling how much trouble we were going to be in.

“It wasn't supposed to be like this,” I said. “We just invited a few people.”

“That's how it usually starts,” the officer said. “A small gathering with a few people.”

“Honestly, that's all we invited. We didn't even know most of those people. You have to believe us!” I pleaded.

“I do believe you. What happens is you invite somebody who mentions it to somebody else on their MSN, or they send
out an instant message, or some people make a few phone calls, and it just keeps building and building until it gets out of control and it can't be stopped.”

“That's what happened. We tried to control it but we couldn't.” I started crying again. I'd been crying on and off the whole time.

The officer put a hand on my shoulder. “It's over and there's nothing you can do. What we have to do is look at what will happen next. We can't just leave you here by yourself. We need to be able to leave you and the house in the hands of a responsible adult.”

“How about my mother?” Jen asked. “Could she be in charge?”

“We could ask her when she gets here,” the officer said.

“Do you think she'll agree?” I asked.

“I don't know what to expect,” Jen said. “I can't even predict how she's going to react.”

I knew we wouldn't have long to wait.

“You two seem like nice kids,” the officer said.

“We are,” Jen said. “I've never been in trouble in my life.”

“Me neither.”

“We all make mistakes,” the officer said. “This one was a bad one, and hopefully you'll learn from it.”

We heard a sound at the front door and another police officer walked in, followed by Jen's mother.

“My goodness, this is beyond belief,” she said. She looked slowly around the room, taking in the whole scene.

“How could this happen?” she gasped.

There was no answer I could give.

“It looks awful,” the officer said, “but it's only property damage. Nobody got hurt. That's the important thing.”

Jen started to cry, and her mother rushed over and wrapped one arm around Jen and her other arm around me.

The last of the police drove away, leaving the three of us at the door. Jen's mother had agreed to take charge of us and the house. She had already called the number the police had given for the emergency
glass-repair company. They were coming to replace the two smashed windows.