the grasshopper and the ant.

At the corner of Rue Montmartre, we met up with Dee-Dee, whose dinner alone had ended up in two Kirs and two beers. Consequently she was having a bit too good of a time with life in general. During the play, she kept finding humor in the least funny of situations. Especially when my runny nose called for desperate measures.

"Hey," I elbowed her as the lights dimmed. She was busy spying on the other members of the audience.

"Looook at Janine and Asher!" She squealed, grabbing my arm. "They're totally flirting! Oh Anne, isn't it a beautiful thing, l'amour?!!" She sighed dramatically.

"Yeah, look, I need you to do me a favor, can you ask the other people in the row if they have a tissue?"

She assessed the situation and then demanded, just as a hush fell over the theatre,

"Does anybody have a tissue for Anne Scott's runny nose?!!!"

"Great timing, Dee-Dee," I muttered from my hiding spot behind my program as she collapsed into giggles.

"Dee-Dee, are you drunk?!" Chastity hissed from my other side.

"Dee-Dee's always drunk," Rose said.

"Look at the grasshopper!" Dee-Dee yelled.

The play turned out to be long and monotonous, and perhaps as a consolation the ever benevolent Don Henley decided to extend our curfew. This could mean only one destination; le Champs. We girls took off, with Preston, abandoned by his coke-seeking friends, in hot pursuit.

“You guyyyys!!!” The nasaly cry was unescapable.

His presence almost prevented us from getting into an up and coming salsa club, for which we would have been eternally resentful. However, just as the bouncer was starting to turn us away, a great caucous of car horns and shouting went up on the Champs. It was the Moroccans, of which there are a great many in Paris, who had just won the world cup.

Consequently, a barrage of dark-skinned men were flooding out of the bars and onto the streets, jumping on car hoods, smashing bottles against anything that came in their way, and setting fires in alleyways as they danced around twirling the Moroccan flag. Traffic was at a standstill; in the distance, the ominous Parisian police siren droned.

The bouncer eyed the scene with apprehension; it could only escalate if the police were on their way. Then, he turned his eyes on us, and, with a sympathetic shrug, unclipped the velvet partition.

“Better to have you in here then out there,” he said, letting us by.

We were still dancing on the metro two hours later, not drunk so much as unbridledly happy. Now we were glad Preston had come, as he helped to spin us through the turnstyles and around the metro poles. We gallavanted into check-in and plopped breathlessly down on the lobby couches, content to chat and bond with the rest of our school group for a little bit.

Don Henley and Pascale were hanging out as well, but they excused themselves shortly after a group of teenage boys, intrigued by the sight of Rose, sidled up to the window, turned around, and dropped their pants in unison.