“Don’t have the party,” we told Wendy, over and over. Only the naive or insane would offer their home to feral teenagers for an unchaperoned New Year’s Eve blowout. Wendy’s invitation to host seemed particularly suicidal given that her parents kept their home meticulously decorated. The impeccable ivory carpet and white baby grand piano seemed especially vulnerable. But how the party might advance her reputation must have proved too intoxicating; she ignored our pleas. And before the holiday break, word spread that Wendy’s house was the place to ring in 1998.
“Do her parents know about the party?” Mom asked us when we told her.
“Of course!” Tegan answered, truthfully.
Wendy’s parents had even organized to take her younger sister to a hotel for the night. What she hadn’t told them was just how many people she’d invited.
“We don’t have to go. There are other parties,” Tegan said to me later.
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as we think it will be,” I said, knowing full well that it would be worse.
The first sign that things had gone sideways was that no one had removed their shoes. When Tegan and I arrived, the house felt damp with intruders; the muddy footprints at the top of the basement stairs seemed especially ominous. Already there was a large dent in one of the walls, the result of someone being pushed violently from behind. A crowd of students perched atop the baby grand with cigars hanging out of their mouths. They were rapping along with the hip-hop blasting from massive wooden speakers while their boots dripped ice and gravel on the floor below their feet. A trail of blood snaked its way through the upstairs, evidence of a knife fight that had started in the formal living room between the leather sofas. I floated through these scenes, recognizing almost no one. Tegan begged me to leave with her and Spencer, but I was conflicted about abandoning our friends.
“We should do something,” I said.
“Like?” Her eyes opened wide, and her chin jutted toward me.
“Call the police?”
Tegan closed her eyes, shaking her head.
Upstairs, huddled in a bedroom, I dialed 911 and pleaded with the operator to break up the party. The dispatcher took the address, but she was far from empathetic.
Back downstairs we found that Christina and Grace had crawled under the massive dining room table with the cordless phone; Christina was hitting redial to 911 over and over, pretending each time to be a different neighbor calling in, oblivious that the phone number betrayed her. Kids spilled into Wendy’s parents’ bedroom and onto a pullout couch, clawing at one another and disrobing, oblivious to any audience. Sloppy threats between exes quickly turned violent. It seemed sobbing girls had locked themselves in bathrooms on every floor. Scattered between the basement and the upper level, we drank with abandon, and occasionally refereed or offered moral support to heavily made-up girls with hoop earrings and blunted bangs who were crying or trying to fight one another. Cars loaded with teenagers circled the cul-de-sac menacingly and flashed their headlights through the windows into the crowded, darkened rooms. The house felt infested, every corner and hallway corrupted. A group of us finally abandoned the chaos, no longer convinced we were safe or able to help control what was full-on mayhem.
“I feel bad,” I said as we closed the front door and carefully maneuvered over the icy sidewalks to Spencer’s car.
“We warned her,” Tegan said.
“But—” I looked back at the house.
“We’ll come back, Sara. I’m not spending New Year’s Eve with strangers.”
In the back seat I awkwardly squeezed in next to Naomi and her new boyfriend. We’d met him at a party at Naomi’s a few weeks earlier. I’d watched him drunkenly mime having sex with a male friend, while an audience of Aberhart kids I didn’t know well laughed. He’d left his malt liquor sheathed in a brown paper bag, and I couldn’t decide what offended me more—mocking gay sex, or a rich kid hiding his cheap beer like he was poor. Later I’d told Naomi that he seemed gay.
“You think everybody’s gay,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
Tegan directed Spencer to an affluent neighborhood in the northwest part of the city for the countdown. I sulked. I knew that invading the next party would feel as jarring as entering the previous one. Tegan had grown closer with Alex and Naomi’s friends from Aberhart, and their excitement had an alienating effect. When we pulled up to the house, it was brightly lit. Inside, a dozen people were smoking pot, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, jamming on acoustic instruments. Alex ran over to greet us, and for the first time that night, Tegan looked happy. Our intoxication made us clumsy and loud, and we filled the air with shrill accounts from Wendy’s party. At first, I reveled in their looks of genuine shock. Then I began to wish that the details of our night didn’t line up so closely with the assumptions held by this group of people about what happened on our side of the city.
“I can’t believe you had to call the police!” someone said.
We nodded our heads solemnly.
“Aren’t you worried?”
“There was nothing we could do,” I said.
Guilt about the crisis unfolding elsewhere weighed heavily on my mind, and after midnight I felt relieved to be back in Spencer’s car, on our way to the northeast and back to Wendy’s.
“I hope they’re not pissed at us for taking off,” I said from the back seat.
“They probably didn’t even notice we were gone,” Spencer said.
When we pulled up to the house, we could see through the windows that the rooms were emptied of people.
“Maybe the police finally came?” I said.
“Holy fuck,” Tegan said, pointing at the garage door. A dent the size of a car had crumpled it like paper.
Inside, the destruction was immediately and frighteningly visible. There was dried blood on the carpet and sofa, and chunks of drywall and dust collected at the bottom of the stairs. I ran my hand along the hole in the wall; the shape was the size of a wrecking ball. In the laundry room, someone had defecated in the washing machine atop a pile of towels. A kid was attempting to remove it with garbage bags wrapped around his hands. The remaining guests were crowded onto a basement couch. Wendy sat drunk and bewildered in the center of them. Zoe was long gone, but Stephanie remained at Wendy’s feet.
“It’s not that bad,” Stephanie reassured her.
Tegan and I piled back into Spencer’s car, dragging Naomi and Christina with us. A car parked down the street flashed its lights at us. As we pulled a U-turn away from the house, the car followed. As we approached the entrance to the highway, the car was still following us—too closely.
“They’re definitely following us,” Christina said. The air in the car felt colder than outside; our breathing fogged the windows, adding to the confusion. Spencer stayed frighteningly quiet. At a stop sign, three men suddenly piled out of the vehicle, bats and pipes raised stiffly over their heads, clumsily lunging on black ice toward the back of our car.
“Go, go, go!” we screamed at Spencer. He stomped on the gas pedal, and we fishtailed, then shot across the intersection, the back tires letting off a screech.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” Naomi gasped beside me. The scenario unfolded again at the next traffic light, and we had no choice but to run the red.
“The police station, at Franklin mall!” Christina called out.
“We should do that,” Tegan said, clutching at Spencer’s shoulder. In the dark, the angles of his jaw protruded as he clenched his teeth together.
“Spencer!” I yelled.
“I’m thinking!” he called out.
As each light turned from amber to red, a collective moan of fear would gurgle up from our chests, and Spencer would twist his head left and right without lifting his foot off the gas. We’d cleared half a dozen intersections when he suddenly jerked the steering wheel of the car to the right, making a harrowing entrance onto the highway. But the car followed, and the speed with which they pursued us became an additional threat.
“Please don’t crash,” I said, gripping my jacket collar.
“Hold on,” Spencer said. “I’m going to take the exit to your house.”
We skidded across the solid yellow line and onto the off-ramp. The car behind us couldn’t follow, and we all let out a scream of relief. Spencer parked on a dark street and extinguished the headlights. We collapsed to the floor, the breath from our bodies labored and fogging up the interior windows. We stayed like this for what felt like an eternity. When it seemed the coast was clear, Spencer turned the key in the ignition and drove cautiously to our darkened house.
Tegan ran upstairs to our parents’ bedroom and the rest of us remained downstairs on the couch, afraid to even turn on a light.
“She said it’s okay,” Tegan told us a few minutes later. On any other night, Spencer wouldn’t have been allowed to stay over, but Mom and Bruce were concerned, and we were given permission to head down to the basement together. We stretched out two to a couch, feet to feet, and recounted the night’s horrors. We were relieved to be finally safe.
In the morning, Stephanie and Wendy called the house to request empty bottles and cans for a fundraiser to help pay for the damage done the night before. The totality of the wreckage had provoked empathy from Wendy’s parents, not rage, and the resulting punishment seemed illogically minor. There was little humility from any of us on these calls, but no one dared to say, “I told you so.” Later with Christina, we bonded over how different our punishment would be if it had been one of our moms’ houses that had been destroyed. Boarding school? Forced to live with our dads? Jail?
“I’m just not surprised,” Tegan said finally. “They don’t care about what happened to us last night. How fucking traumatized we are!”
“Sounds familiar,” Christina said, rolling her eyes.
Our friendships with Wendy and Stephanie had been strained since a sleepover at Stephanie’s in the summer. After we spent hours smoking weed and wandering through the empty tennis courts and parks behind Stephanie’s house, she’d invited a few of us back to her place. While Veronica, Christina, Tegan, and I drifted off to sleep in piles of blankets on the carpet downstairs, Stephanie and Wendy had sat on the front steps outside drinking wine from long-stem glasses and gossiping in the dark.
When I woke up, it was blindingly bright. The overhead lights, which were never on in Stephanie’s room, exposed a nightmare: Christina was screaming angrily at a group of men who were bent over our bodies. These men weren’t boys—they were older, stronger, and no one I recognized. They were laughing, grabbing at our ankles, which were exposed by the blankets they’d tossed off us while we were still asleep. Christina intimidated them with her wild kicking; at five eleven she was formidable prey. I pedaled my legs defensively in the air. They turned away from us to focus on Veronica and Tegan, who despite their furious kicking and yelling were easily overpowered. With their fists tight around both girls’ ankles and wrists, these strange men dragged them to the bottom of the stairs and then up to the main floor. Christina and I followed behind them, howling, helpless to do anything more than create a vacuum of panic and noise. When we arrived in the living room, the men finally released Tegan’s and Veronica’s limbs. Wendy and Stephanie were standing near the front door, blushing and laughing, still holding wineglasses. I’d been betrayed by girls for male attention before, but this set a new precedent.
After that night, whose side you were on was determined by whom you identified with most in the story. We fixated on the role each of us played in the incident, rarely considering the men who had participated in the attack. However unfair, the betrayal seemed to reveal something sinister about what girls would let boys do to other girls. Why had these strangers been permitted into the basement to scare us? Why hadn’t Stephanie and Wendy come running when they heard our terrified screams? Why wouldn’t they apologize for a prank that had spun out of control? There was a code that we had always adhered to, an unspoken promise to close ranks when any of us were at risk. These men introduced a permanent shift in our world, a danger that was impossible to dismiss.
When we returned to school a few days later, I recognized faces in the hallway that I’d never noticed before New Year’s Eve. Perhaps even more jarring was that they seemed to know mine. Bound together as central characters in the story of Wendy’s already infamous party, we snuck knowing glances at one another as we passed. Details were exaggerated in animated retellings across rows of desks in classes. Even the specifics of our car chase filtered through a school-wide game of telephone. In these versions, we crashed or were caught, were dragged from the car and beaten. Wendy herself heard tales of the unlucky hero who threw a party and was kicked out of her house and then sent to another high school by her furious parents. In that way, Wendy got what she wanted. The party was a legend, and everyone knew who she was. She seemed to bask in the glow of the newly famous. Maybe we all did.