For teens with cellphones, an instant party

Then there were eight: four more friends, invited to cheer on the Red Sox during a playoff game. But it didn't stop there. As cellphones chirped and instant messages flashed, kids looking for something, anything, to do had found their Saturday night party.

By the time police arrived, they found an estimated 100 teenage revelers, who quickly ditched the beer and marijuana pipes. The party ended when police arrested and handcuffed the cheerleader and honors student who had invited a few friends over.

"People will just flock to your house," said the girl, who spent a few hours in custody before a friend bailed her out. "It's hard to keep it under control . . . Just the whole process of cellphones and the word spreading rapid-fire. It happens kind of quickly."

Kids home alone for the weekend have been throwing house parties since time began. But instant communication is creating instant crowds -- and regular headaches for police, particularly in well-to-do suburbs where the latest high-tech gadgets have replaced passing notes or the family phone as the preferred means of getting in touch.

"The old way was, you went over to the local McDonald's and you'd find one or two people in the parking lot and say, `Where is the party tonight?' " said Sergeant John Pathiakis, an Andover police officer for 22 years. "Now there's no one at the McDonald's anymore because they're calling each other on their cellphones."

No group has embraced the wireless revolution more passionately than teenagers, who are coming of age together with the newest, fastest technology. Nearly a third of American teenagers -- there are about 31 million between the ages of 12 and 19 -- now own cellphones. That number is expected to double by 2005.

A 2002 study by Context Research suggested that while young adults use wireless technology primarily for work, teenagers rely on it to maintain their social network. Teenagers are also more likely than older users to send text messages on their cellphones, spurring their own language of abbreviated words and phrases.

The problem is not unique to Andover, where police say they get calls about house parties burgeoning out-of-control most weekends.

Hamilton Police Lieutenant Robert Nyland said he's seen cellphones play a role in crimes, including a break-in at a commercial building where two burglars kept in contact with wireless phones.

Most teenagers in his town, he said, now have cellphones. "It's a timing issue now, where they certainly could gather a lot of kids in a short period of time with the use of several cellphones," he said.

Last spring, in Wheaton, Ill., a wealthy suburb of Chicago, a massive house party that mushroomed as word spread over cellphones ended with $100,000 worth of damage and theft. Vandalism becomes more likely as the parties expand well beyond the friends of the host, specialists say. "They no longer have a stake in what happens to that home," said Mawi Asgedom, a 1999 Harvard graduate who teaches personal leadership to teenagers.

In Andover in recent months, several parents who were the unwitting hosts of large and sometimes destructive parties have urged other parents -- via letters to the local paper and personal phone calls -- to watch their teenagers more closely.

The same technology that sparks instant parties also helped organize thousands of protesters who swarmed the streets of Seattle to protest a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization, said Howard Rheingold, author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." And it has propelled the "flash mob" phenomenon, where hundreds of people gather -- as they did this summer in New York City, to ogle a rug in Macy's -- and disperse quickly, seemingly without reason.

"Now the action can find them much more efficiently," Rheingold said. "This is one example of a larger trend, which is that the mobile telephone enables people to organize face-to-face collective action in ways they weren't able to do before."

"It's like dominoes," said Andover High School senior Ryan Chua. "One person knows and they call their friends, and they call their friends."

Often in Andover, where police say they enforce a zero-tolerance policy for teenage drinking, the night ends when the party host is arrested for keeping a "noisy and disorderly" house. The teenager must appear in busy Lawrence District Court, where the charges are almost always dismissed in exchange for $50 in court costs.

Sometimes, parents return home to find their home ransacked. Last spring at an Andover party, shut down by police after it ballooned to 300 kids, there was $23,000 in damage and theft.

"There wasn't one drawer, one closet, that wasn't gone through," said the mother, who came home with her husband to find their photos in the trash and rugs littered with glass shards. The woman asked that her name not be used, since the family has been taunted since the party.

Eight months later, there are still lingering reminders: she recently discovered empty beer cans in a box of winter hats and gloves.

Andover High School students repeat the timeless complaint of teenage boredom, saying parties are their only social outlet. "It's basically because we have nothing else to do," said Conor Rice, a junior. Andover is an affluent community of about 29,000 residents, about 20 miles north of Boston. The median price for a single-family home was $490,000 this spring, and the public schools ranked higher than all but six other towns on this year's MCAS test.

At the Andover party during last month's Red Sox game, the teenage host thought she could handle the crowd. She didn't allow the growing group of partiers inside the house, and implored them to leave the property.

"They started to get very aggravated because they didn't understand why they weren't able to go in," said the girl, who asked that her name not be used, citing harassment after her mother wrote to the local paper urging parents to help curtail destructive parties.

When police drove up to the house, chaos erupted. Party-goers flooded inside through the unlocked back door. Some climbed on the roof and threw bottles at police, according to the host and her mother. The incident left the girl so rattled, she said, that she's reluctant to invite a few friends over next time she's home alone.

Even parents can't agree about how to keep parties under control. Some say the police are too tough on children; others say they're not tough enough.

And some have taken to imposing the ultimate punishment: confiscating their children's cellphones.

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com.