Tonight, I spent an hour at my friend Becky’s house in the company proximity of her teenage daughter and friends. They were in her bedroom, getting ready for her (the daughter’s) Halloween house party. Apparently, 12 girls were coming but literally everyone on insta wanted an invite.

Her daughter was the most popular she had ever been.

I had the misfortune of catching sight of them through a gap in her door as I nipped to the loo.  One was pouting into her phone wearing cat ears.

Becky had made plans to go to her local and return at 10 to survey the scene. The teens were allowed to drink the beers in the fridge but everything else had been pad-locked.

I thought Becky must have lost her fucking mind and I told her so. Had she forgotten about Alice Green’shouse party when we were teens? I mean, back in the day we might have had turnips instead of pumpkins but the cider tasted the same.

It was probably late 90’s. Fuck, I’m old. Alice was a relatively quiet over-weight girl in our year at school who has basically invited the whole year to attend her 16th Halloween house party. She had used toilet roll to wrap herself up as a mummy and looked like a lobotomy patient and one of the mean boys told everybody she had come as the Michelin man.

The party quickly got into full swing. In fact, it soon resembled a hunting ground, with a couple of girls lolling around semi-conscious on the hall floor, like wild animals bathing in a lake, while males tried to jump on them. A corpse bride was soon throwing her guts up into a bush in the back yard. A couple of witches wearing bin bags were either pissed or stoned. The grim reaper was stumping cigarettes out on the sofa.
Some went into the bedrooms and stayed there for hours.

Everyone drank too much cider. Alice became hysterical. ‘Stop getting yourself soooo wound up’ a couple of Lucifer’s laughed, unravelling her toilet roll.

Everyone got drunker and drunker. Alice started crying about the Michelin man comment an hour after it had been said.
‘I’m leaving’, she’d turned to me. ‘I’m going home’.
A couple of us exchanged drunken suffering looks. ‘Er, this is your home’.
I had the good fortune of taking a quick nap on the effects of Thunderbird for a while.
When I got back up, I spotted a boy draped over the chair next to me, and I noticed that I was missing a shoe. After wobbling for a moment with one heel on and one heel off, I was inspired by the solution of finding the shoe, but then, hey presto, Alice’s dad thrust his head around the front door, marched into the scene with a face like a carved mask and told everyone to hop it. (Which was easy enough for me and my one accessorised foot, but a bit of a task for Alice and her prosthetic legs.) Anyway, I was really committed to getting my shoe back: I just wasn’t quite able to locate it, the alcohol was seeing to that.
‘I’ve lost my shoe’, I bawled to anyone who would listen.
Ideally, this boy draped over the chair would have found it, like a real life Prince Charming. He would have been madly in love with me, picked up my shoe and been searching high and low for the girl whose foot the shoe fit, as he would never be content until he found me.
The reality was, Alice’s dad Gary found it, and threw it out onto the lawn as a symbolic sign of what he would do to the rest of us if we didn’t all clear the hell out of his house in the next five minutes.
The shoe went flying out onto the lawn in slow motion.
I became more hysterical.
The boy who was draped over the chair lunged at Gary.
Gary sidestepped.
The boy ran full on into Alice who toppled over like a fallen tree, whilst I surveyed the scene, with horrified allure.
The boy, very protectively, picked up my shoe from the floor.
‘Here’. He slurred at me. ‘Take this’. (It was so nearly a Cinderella scene. If only my Prince Charming hadn’t been sporting a a shiner that put the moon to shame!) Thankfully, it was my shoe he was offering, not a right hook.
‘Thanks’, I’d returned, giddily.
I’d squatted down so that I was eye level to Alice.
‘Sorry about the.. er…sorry Alice’s dad’, I mumbled.

Outside, sounds echoed over my head. People were busily divulging tales about the party antics of the year: who’d added the artistic additions of moustaches on the framed family portrait in Alice’s lounge? Who was responsible for the compromising positions her mums collectible figurines had been left in along the window ledge? Had someone thrown up in the plant-pot on the landing? Everyone dispersed into town and despite being 2 years underage, went to the plaza and partied until the early hours until the bouncers chucked us out.

Apparently, Becky’s memory of the party wasn’t quite the same as mine. In fact, she couldn’t be sure she was even there. But she remembers Alice becoming the talk of the school the next day. Even if it was by carrier pigeon.

Teenage house parties eh? Do they ever change?