Birds of Summer

     It was last summer. I'd just turned eighteen and my parents, if you can call them parents, were pressuring me to move out. I was their only child, thank God, because they could barely support themselves with just me. Actually, now that I think about it, they weren't really supporting me. They put a roof over my head, as they so often liked to remind me, and fed me at least once a day so in that sense I suppose you could say they supported me. In reality though, the only real time I felt like I was supported by them was when they let me get a pair of birds. It was my fifteenth birthday when I asked them and, for some reason, they actually said yes. It was a huge surprise to me, but a welcome one. Of course, they said I had to provide for them, the pair of parakeets I got, all by myself. It was an impossible task but with the help of some friends I got by long enough for them to have babies. It wasn't something I thought about when I bought them but sure enough nature took its course. I couldn't keep their offspring of course, money was already tight with just two. But an idea occurred to me, that I could turn this problem into a profit. I could sell the babies to people who had the means to keep them and make some money on the side, it was a win-win. That started my parakeet breeding business. By the time summer rolled around and I was nearly eighteen I'd ended up with a few pair of the birds which I kept in various cages in my room and was turning out a surprisingly livable profit. My parents couldn't see that though. Every morning it was the same thing.
     "This whole house smells like shit cause of your fucking birds!" my father would say every morning to me as I got ready for school.
     "I take good care of their cages, maybe you should just clean more," I would shoot back.
     "What?! You ungrateful brat, do you have any idea how much your mother works to keep this house tidy?!" Whenever my father said something like that I wondered if he even knew my mom. All she ever did was sit on the couch watching her stories. She'd cook once in a while and I suppose that after she did she'd usually clean the dishes too, but in the sty we lived in that didn't count for much.
     "Whatever dad." I always made sure to say that whenever I knew the 'discussion' was going nowhere. It seemed to appease him. That was then though, last summer. After I turned eighteen officially my father told me I could either get rid of the birds, or get out. It was an ultimatum I hadn't thought I would encounter, but I'm glad now that I did. When faced with the choice between my family and my birds, it was an easy choice to choose the ones I both cared more about and which provided me with the means to live. 
     "Of course I'm choosing my birds." I said to my father calmly. He was furious.
     "Alright jackass, then get the HELL out of MY HOME!" he screamed to me. I did. I was annoying to have to move my whole bird setup on a moment's notice, but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle with the help of some friends. I stayed with one of them for a while, Tommy, good guy. But it wasn't even a month yet that I used what money I had been saving up from my parakeet trade to get a small apartment I could call my own. After graduating high school not soon after, I was able to devote more time to my trade. Now it's the fall and while my friends from high school are going off to college, I'm full time parakeet breeder. It's nothing fancy and I probably won't be leaving this small apartment any time soon but, in the end, I'm happy being here with my birds. I'm happy that I'm finally supporting myself. Everything feels like it happened so quick, now that I'm looking back at it all. I figure that maybe, that's for the best.