I stood in the doorway as people carelessly pushed past me, making their way further into my house. My dad was in his room, and was sure to hear the commotion from all these people. Yet, he stayed locked in his room, acting as if it’s only me down here.
I close the door and press my back against it. At this point I’m starting to freak out, and Luke hasn’t even showed up yet. I start to walk towards Laila as the doorbell rings again. I open it to find twenty more people, plus Michael, Luke, Ashton, and Calum. I’m relieved that they showed up but I wish I didn’t have over thirty people at my house when they did. The boys file past me and into the living room where majority of the party was.
“Hey Everybody! The basements bigger, there’s more room down there!” I look around to see Laila standing on top of one of my wooden kitchen chairs with her hands cupped around her mouth. Just as she says this, everyone begins to shuffle down to the basement.
“Thanks for doing that Laila.” I say to her as she gets off the unstable chair.
“No problem. Now the real problem here is that Nash thinks about thirty more people are coming.” Thirty more people, I can’t even handle ten and now I’m going to have over sixty jammed into my basement! Plus, I can’t let my dad know that all these people are going to be here, he’ll really hold this against me, not to mention the fact that he could possibly ground me.
“Have there ever been sixty people here before?” Michael asks worriedly.
“No the most we’ve ever had was around twenty- five, and that was even pushing it.” My family usually comes here for Christmas Eve, and it gets pretty crowded then.
The doorbell rings, Ashton goes to open it, and fifteen more people pile into the living room. My phone vibrates and I look at it to see who’s texting me, it’s Grace, “Hey are we still hanging out tonight? There’s a lot of cars in your driveway.”
I text back as soon as I receive the message, “Yea, come on over, there’s just more people than I had planned to be here.” That statement couldn’t have been further from the truth. I didn’t want 95% of these people to be here, but yet here I am standing in the center of my living room with a bunch of people, I didn’t even know, surrounding me. I begin to notice people coming up from the basement with red cups.
The doorbell rings. I open the door to Grace’s smiling face and the mystery guy from the other day. They both look down at my purple arm, and I know that they’re both thinking about the accident that took place last night. Thinking back on it, it seems like months ago.
“Hey guys!” I try to sound as cheerful as I possibly can with forty, now drunk, strangers in my house. I let them inside, introducing myself to the mystery boy as he walks past me, “Hi, I’m Madi!”
“Hey I’m Bradley.” He says calmly. He seems like a very calm and relaxed kind of guy.
“So do you know all these people?” He says motioning to the room of people.
I begin to laugh, “No, actually I know almost none of them. See that group there in the center of the room?” I say pointing to the spot where I was standing previously.
He looks over at the direction my finger is pointing to, “Ah, yea I do see them.”
“Yea those are the only people I actually know here.” I say before giggling at myself.
Bradley begins to laugh along with me and his laugh is soft and slow. It suited him, and I liked it. You’d expect a laugh like that to come from a guy like him.
I lead him to the group of people I actually knew, and introduce him to everyone. We all started talking and Laila excuses herself to go get a drink from the basement and I join her.
