One Guy in One House with Ten Girls

Chapter 1

The day that my parents died I was at my best friend Charlie’s house. It was 11 o’clock at night and I was sleeping over. After playing a truckload of video games we had finally had camped out all our stuff on his basement carpet. Our army sleeping bags were scattered this way and that.

It was the last day of freshman year; we were ululating and running around in circles around the softly snoring lump of a body on the ground. That stupid lump of a child was Max, the party pooper of the three of us. He had already fallen asleep by 10:30, sprawled across the floor like a tottling baby who fell asleep before reaching his destination. It was quite difficult running around him like that, we had to hopscotch in and out of his oddly bent limbs. 

The phone rang upstairs but we took no notice.

Charlie and I sat down with a plop.

“So who’s the hottest girl in our grade?” he asked, jabbing me with his elbow and sticking out his tongue and wiggling it all around. That is why Charlie is the perv of our group.

“Hahah I don’t know…. Stop that!” I said stabbing him in the shin with my big toe.

“Ow dude! Shit that really hurt!” he half squealed like a girl himself as he rolled over backwards with his legs still in “criss-cross apple sauce” formation.

“Shut up you baby!” I jokingly hissed at him through gritted teeth. “Wait. What the heck is wrong with your mom upstairs, she isn’t usually up at this hour.”

Sure enough I listened closely and I could hear faint high-pitched moaning and the slamming of drawers.

“Maybe she’s doing the nasty with dad, right there in the kitchen cuz she completely forgot we were down here.” He said so non-chalantly that even I let out a tiny snort of laughter.

“Ew you sicko, go see what’s up!”

“Fine, I will, but you come with me.” he stated propping himself up and then he crossed his arms over his chest defiantly.

“What are ya, scared of the dark?” I said in a teasing tone.

“Nah a’ course not. Now be quiet and come with me.”

His basement smelled like a Febreeze covered sweaty sock, it reeked like the inside of a used baseball mit. This smell was something I had gotten used to because I had been in his house like a jillion times in the last three years.

One time during the summer I had walked to his house to find nobody home. The back door was unlocked so I walked in, made myself a bag of popcorn, and ordered myself a movie on Demand on their plasma LED TV.

At five in the afternoon, his family pulled into the driveway and walked into their living room to find me watching The Hangover. I had pulled a complete Tom Cruise and was stripped down to my striped navy Polo shirt and my Adventure Time boxers, while I slid around on the Mitchell’s tile floor to Doug’s Song in my white Adidas socks.

They barged in on me precisely the moment when I had turned down the volume, had my back to the door, and was singing at the top of my lungs.

They all looked at me, nearly crapped their pants, and then simultaneously screamed, “Alex, GO HOME!”

I smiled to myself as we clambered up the steps to his kitchen, getting closer and closer to their bottomless refrigerator in which my arm had gotten lost in many times before.

Mrs. Mitchell is usually the smiling type, so I knew right off the bat, that something was terribly wrong when she looked up at me from the counter island in their kitchen to reveal, swollen, wet, and bloodshot eyes, refracting light back to me from the oven lamp that was on.

“Mom?” his voice shook a little, he seemed uneasy but concerned.

She snapped her head at him and then right back at me. Then she burst into tears, hopped off her stool, and embraced me until not enough oxygen was reaching my bodily cells.

Mrs. Mitchell stuttered and gasped trying to catch her breath but she couldn’t control herself. It took a whole three minutes of her sniffling before she was finally able to speak.

“Oh Alex, honey,” she whispered, tears welling in the corner of her eyes. She ran her fingers through my hair and moved it away from my forehead. “There was a huge car accident off the 95 near exit 6 and…and… your mom and dad both passed away. The car flipped off the side of the highway and hit a telephone pole.” She lost her shit again and buried her head in the crook of my neck, but soon enough I had lost all the feeling in my body, my arms went limp. She pried herself off of me just as the world gradually went black and an invisible force swept my legs, out from under me.

Like a fallen angel, my previously good life came crashing down around me at a 100 mph in just one minute.