Free The Bird Market of Paris by Nikki Moustaki Page A

than I was, kids of my parents’ friends. On earlier occasions, they had delighted in covering themselves in ketchup and chasing me all over their houses, screaming that they had been stabbed and that the ketchup was blood. They’d terrified me. Now, behind the bar, they seemed like adults, though they couldn’t have been more than sixteen. They asked what I was drinking and I told them.
    â€œHere, try this,” one of them said, handing me a squat glass filled with ice and dark soda.
    â€œWhat is it?” I said, smelling the drink.
    â€œRum and Coke.”
    The drink was sweet, but I winced from the rum. It tasted like lightning.
    I sprawled on a bed in a dark room, pink satin comforter and pink and white pillows beneath my head. My shoes were off. A dim light in the room radiated from the open bathroom door. The ceiling spun. No, the bed spun. No, the entire room spun, in tight circles. The bed lifted off the floor and revolved when I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes and the bed landed with a clunk. I moaned and called out for my mom, but the walls swallowed my voice.
    Then came the projectile vomit onto the bed with the pink satin comforter, onto the pink plush carpeting, and all over the pink striped wallpaper. I sat up with vomit on my hands and face. Another wave of sickness. I fell off the bed and crawled to the bathroom, vomiting honey baked ham and quiche on the way, and vomited on the white tiled bathroom floor before making it to the toilet. I rested my head on the cool seat and vomited into the toilet and all over it.
    Someone woke me up after I don’t know how long. I had fallen asleep—or passed out—on the bathroom floor. The outline of the lady who owned the house appeared, a blurred vision dazzled by the mirror’s vanity lights. My mom stood behind her.
    Then it was morning. I didn’t remember how I arrived home or how I had gotten into an oversized white T-shirt. The ends of my hair were crusty. My beautiful pinstriped skirt hung over my desk chair, rumpled and covered in vomit. The corner of the room spun a little and my tongue felt hairy.
    â€œHey, Miss Champagne,” my dad said as I shuffled into the living room. He sat on the couch smoking a cigarette, leafing through The Boat Trader . “How many glasses did you have last night?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I croaked, holding my forehead, afraid to look at him.
    â€œYou threw up all over their room.”
    â€œI know,” I said, waiting for my punishment. Maybe I’d have to go back and clean it up.
    â€œThat’ll teach you. You can’t handle your liquor.” He patted the couch and I plopped down beside him. “What did you drink?”
    â€œI had champagne and then the boys gave me a rum and Coke.”
    â€œThere you go,” he said. “Never, ever , mix alcohols. That’s what got you sick.”
    We weren’t invited to that party again.
    But it was not my last party. I attended George Washington Carver Junior High for seventh grade, then Ponce de Leon for eighth, and finally Miami Palmetto for ninth, and I drank as much as I could in those years, sneaking sips from other kids’ parents’ stocked bars. During my three years at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, my friends and I bribed people outside of convenience stores to buy us Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. We drank in cars, at movies, at the planetarium during Pink Floyd laser light shows, and even at lunchtime during school. High school went by in a blur of Thunderbird and Mad Dog 20/20. Despite all the vomiting and violated curfews, I did manage to graduate.
    *   *   *
    I drank on weekends in college, prime drinking years for most students, but because I had the birds I didn’t need the distraction of great quantities of alcohol, and I couldn’t take good care of my baby birds if I was drunk. As my bird breeding hobby