Party At Ground Zero

It's all over now. As my son is fond of saying, "Nobody died." He got that from me, but it did come as a relief. His first big high school-type party was held in our basement over the weekend and nobody died. Huzzah.
Well, there are plenty of reasons for this, not the least of which was the sheer lack of percentages. If he had been the host of the kind of rager where Guido the Killer Pimp would be in attendance, a death might be more expected. If his exhortations on social media had been such that the guest list would have numbered in the hundreds, or even the forty that he had initially invited, then we might have been in for some trouble. Instead, we had nine pretty well-mannered kids show up. They played Xbox and listened to dubstep at volumes just loud enough to make the floor beneath our feet vibrate. Kind of like those chairs at the state fair.
There were a couple of girls who showed up. They stayed for about half an hour. That was when the music got turned down. We knew there were girls because we could hear their voices. They didn't come up the stairs to meet the parents. They had places they needed to be. Once the girls were gone, the thumping bass returned, and we started cooking the frozen pizza.
Considering the damage these young men did to the food that we bought for fifteen to forty guests, I suppose we should be grateful that there weren't more hungry mouths to feed. There was plenty of soda consumed, enough to make a couple trips to the recycling bin. We can only assume that this heightened the sensation of driving virtual cars on the Xbox while being subjected to electronic beats that began to alter the heartbeats of the grownups upstairs.
And before you knew it, it was ten o'clock. Five hours of this frolic had taken its toll. Eyes were bleary and nerves were frayed ever so lightly. My son chose a pair of the heartiest souls to stick around and keep the party going for a couple more hours. No dancing. No Pinata. No more throbbing beats. Just a few more laps around the virtual track before they fell asleep under the Christmas lights.
When I went down to check out the carnage the next morning, there were three bodies. Worn and slightly frazzled, but still very much alive. When they came up for breakfast, there was no lingering need for one last race. They ate real food, and washed it down with juice without carbonation. We returned the guests more or less the way we received them.
But we may never be the same.