Storytime speech

Moral – Don’t give in to peer pressure

I was struggling to walk through the empty bottles and food wrappers covering the floor. My eyes were having a hard time seeing straight with the coloured lights being shone across the room. Looking around, I could see that everyone was still drinking, dancing, and having a good time.  I had been hanging out with my good friend Tony for most of the night, and he had been quite entertaining because of how drunk he was.  I walked over to Harrison to ask him if he was worried that his parents would find out that he had hosted a party while they were away, “Don’t worry Jaime, I’ll clean up in the morning and my parents won’t find out” he shouted over the music.  I nodded with a smile on my face.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lorenzo kick open the door.  He was a Columbian boy who’s one of my best friends.  He paraded over to us, and flung his unzipped bag onto the table, spilling out a mountain of booze, the source of everyone’s cheers. At around 3:30 AM, most of the people had left the party, and there were only six people left which included Lorenzo, Harrison, Tony, myself, and two other boys named Oscar and Brian.  I was sitting on the couch next to Harrison and Lorenzo trying to regain some energy.  Tony came stumbling over to us, barely able to form a sentence.  He managed to tell us that he had just come up with a genius idea to go for a drive.  I laughed thinking he was joking, but Lorenzo and Brian’s faces lit up with joy and they both looked at me with pleading faces “Let’s go steal your parent’s car, Jaime!”.  I knew this was a dumb idea but the others did not seem like they would give up so I bowed to peer pressure, with a compromise, telling them we would only go for a drive around the block and they all excitedly agreed.  We began to walk from Harrison’s house over to mine.  Lorenzo could sense my worry and said “Don’t worry man, it’ll be fine.”  When we reached my house, we pushed the car away from the driveway and then Lorenzo hopped in the driver’s seat, as he was the least drunk.  Harrison and I squished into the passenger seat, while the other three sat in the back.  We headed off, and my mind was so focused on being worried about getting caught that it took me about 10 minutes to realize that Lorenzo had driven us way past the area we were supposed to drive.  I told him we had to go back but he said: “yeah we will soon”.  “How much fuel do we have,” I asked.  He said there was a full tank.  Oscar then told us that he was pretty tired and asked to be dropped off at home.  His house was half an hour away and I knew it was pretty risky, but everyone was begging me to let us drop him off and everything seemed to be going fine so far and I decided I didn’t have the energy to argue.  We managed to make it to his house and we dropped him off.  I vaguely wondered if his parents could hear the loud music coming from the car.  We headed home.  Lorenzo was going pretty fast and I was beginning to wonder if we would make it back alive.  We did manage to get to Harrison’s house and then we all got out and relaxed for a while. By this time, it was about 4:45 AM.  Harrison went to sleep and I was thinking about heading home myself when Brian said that he had left his phone on the road outside Oscar’s house when we had dropped him off.  He said that it was really important that he got it back because it was an iPhone 11 and he didn’t want it getting run over.  Brian, Lorenzo, Tony, and I all jumped back in the car and headed back towards Oscar’s house.  Lorenzo was driving even faster this time, reaching a top speed of 150 kilometers per hour.  Somewhere along the way, I asked him how much fuel we had again and he replied with “Pretty much full tank”.  We arrived outside Oscar’s house only to find that Brian’s phone had already been run over.  It was completely flat and destroyed.  He was devastated, but the rest of us found it pretty funny.  Then Lorenzo decides to throw an empty glass bottle next to somebody’s mailbox.  “Are you an idiot” Tony yelled.  “What did you do that for Oscar asked him” in a demanding voice, but before he could answer either of them, the door of the house opened, and a very large looking man stepped outside and yelled “Oi” in a deep voice.  We all sprinted back to the car.  “Quick hurry up, get us out of here” we were all yelling, as Lorenzo struggled to start the car.  I could see the man running towards us.  He was almost here and Lorenzo was taking a disturbingly long time to get us moving.  Just as the man was about three metres away from the car, Lorenzo managed to figure out that the handbrake was on, so he took it off and quickly smashed his foot on the accelerator, and the man was less than a metre away from the car when we shot forward.  We all had our adrenaline rushing.  We were trying to calm ourselves down as we were driving back.  We were heading up a big hill and I was thinking about how nice it would be to lie down in bed and go to sleep when I heard the engine starting to slow down.  The second I saw Lorenzo’s terrified face I knew that we were out of fuel.  “You have got to be joking,” I said as the panic rose in my voice.  Lorenzo turned the car around and it came to a slow stop at the bottom of the hill.  We debated what our options were.  We knew that we were about a 25-minute drive away from my house. I picked up my phone. Ring, ring, ring. The voice mail of Robert Albridge, my uncle, was a pain to my ears. Brian called his mum and asked her to pick us up.  She got out of the car and stormed towards us.  I wouldn’t be surprised if her yelling had woken up quite a few people living nearby. I wanted to ask the others what we should do, but the tension in the car was too high to risk it. The clock showed 5:50 AM when we arrived and after about another hour of trying to solve the situation, the others started to fall asleep, and I realised that there was no possible way we could get the car back to my house by the morning, because even if we found a way to get back to the car, we still didn’t have any fuel and that letting the others take my car had been a huge mistake, so I closed my eyes and awaited the consequences I would face in the morning.