As I walk down the stairs and into the room, followed closely by Joel and Christina, who insisted on carrying the bags down for me, I smell the pizza, and I can hear the soft chat of the girls waiting for me.
"You guys are finally here!" Coral shouts and glee, she picks up a price of pizza, and brings it up to her mouth only to be interrupted by my loving brother.
"Before you guys start eating and stuff, me and Christina wanted to congratulate you guys on tonight, and also give you a gift." Joel walked up to the stage, and pulled back the curtains that covered the back wall, revealing a massive sign with Neon written in giant cursive LED lights.
We all get out a gasp, and then smiles.
"This is beautiful. Thank you so much."
"Well..." Christina starts, waiting for us all to look back at her so she knows we are listening, "We thought you would need a better backdrop for your YouTube videos. So we went to a dude, who talked to a dude, and came up with that logo for you guys." Shock flies across all our faces.
" If you guys are ever going to go big one day, then you need something that people can recognise you by, but something that people can trace back to before you were famous. And there is no point being a band without an amazing logo..." Joel explains. I don't even need to rebut him on this, because it is just so overwhelming.
Within seconds we're all on them both, greeting them with massive hugs, there's laughter and smiles whilst they claim that it was "no big deal". We quickly piled off them and they said their goodbyes, knowing that we needed to eat.
We sit on the floor, surrounded by a circle of couches, all stacked with bags of gifts to go through when the pizza in the middle was demolished. Not that it took long...
"Can we have a proper look at what they gave us on stage?" Coral asks. I am sure she already looked through her bag fully, but curiosity kills that cat, and there was no way to stop her from placing all of our bags in front of us and waiting for us to open them so she could play with her new toys.
Sighing, I carefully take the tissue paper off the top of the bag, making sure to do it as slowly as possible, to test Corals patience.
"You know, I think they went a little overboard with this..." Mia states. She is slowly taking out each item, looking it over with wide eyes, and then grabbing the next one. I look back to my own bag.
Inside is filled with notebooks. My guilty pleasure. There are big ones, small ones, medium ones, plain and grid, colourful and monochrome. I pull out each one, counting ten, only to find more stuff underneath. Pens, rubbers, a pencil case, coloured pencils, highlighters. Everything I could ever need.
"Look further down there is one more layer I think. It's wrapped in paper, so I haven't opened it yet." Coral looks at all of us expectantly, waiting for us to pull out the parcel so we could open them together.
It was intact wrapped, lying in a thick layer of blue wrapping paper. Strapped to the outside was a card, although we all know that there would not be enough time to read it as Coral was just about to burst waiting for us to give her the go ahead to open the gift.
"On the count of three."
"1..." Mia says slowly, like a snake was going to emerge from the paper wrapped object.
"2..."
"3!" Coral shouts, and she rips the paper off, letting the contents fall into her lap. I open mine blind, not taking my eyes of Coral, waiting to see her reaction.
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In Your Company
قصص المراهقين--Re-written-- When I was 8 we were playing hide and seek in the little park surrounded by bush down the street from my house. It was a large group of us. It was always fun down at the park, since our parents never really came and checked on us. Bei...
