Diamond Girl

Chapter 24



There are an awful lot of things I think I would do differently if someone would just come in here and save me. Or, I don’t know, probably everybody says that, probably everybody thinks that, even if they are not deep in some serious shit.

I bet there isn’t anybody alive who hasn’t made at least one major wrong call and lived to regret it, as they say. Now me, I kind of have the best of both worlds here. I get to rehash the best of Carey Kelleher and then probably not live to regret it.

I should be more appreciative, I guess.

There’s a lot to choose from in my not-so-greatest hits collection but I think Michael is always going to be the big one. There’s this whole other life I am meant to be living, maybe could have been living, but it’s me, and when I get nervous, I get afraid, and when I get afraid, I don’t just make bad choices, I make choices so bad that when other people talk about my life, they get to feel better about themselves, kind of like when people back into parked cars and, for a minute, they feel really stupid, but then they think, Hey, at least I’m not in the Darwin Awards.

Well, I’m the Darwin Awards for bad choices, the girl who everyone is glad they aren’t. And if you think about who I am - or who I was - well that’s pretty freaking ironic.

I didn’t get here alone, though. I had the support of my parents, especially my mother. Who knew in this day and age you could actually get exiled from your home? It’s medieval really. But money and power keep an old school feudal system going even now, though nobody likes to admit it.

Which came first, the break-up or the drugs?

I guess it was the drugs because I was so afraid of the break-up, but then did Michael really leave me because of the drugs or would he have left anyway?

After Michael came back from L.A., he started spending more nights at his own apartment which, considering the drop in neighborhood and style from my own place, made me worry. I thought that even if he didn’t totally worship me like I did him, he would at least miss having his dirty clothes picked up and either hand-laundered or sent to the dry cleaners. I thought he would miss home-catered meals from Dean and Deluca and use of any toy he wanted from my cars to company limos and weekend rides out to Tamerlane, or the Hamptons, in the helicopter.

Sure, I would have loved to have believed that he would be with me even without almost daily presents and last minute trips to Isla de Ferradura, but, since I could provide him with those things and I wanted to, I saw no reason to test his love. I guess I was remembering what Milan had told me, that he was young, that guys stayed young for a long time, and if I could just make life perfect for him, he would eventually return the favor by giving me the only thing I wanted, a ring, any ring, as long as he put it on the third finger of my left hand. Seriously, I would have been happy with a Pirates of the Caribbean skull and bones ring, I wanted him to marry me. I wanted the security of being married.

I know that marriage doesn’t always mean forever. I had actually noticed that, but when it’s your first love, and when you are nineteen and twenty, and then starting to turn twenty-one, you still believe totally in marriage.

More stupidly, if you are a girl and your man is starting to pull back a little, you think that marriage will cement him right back to you, body and heart forevermore. Even now I still think that if I had pulled it together and made him just a little bit happier, Michael would have married me and I would be living the right life.

But I didn’t pull it together. I crumbled.

When he spent the night at his place, or said he did, I would call him every ten minutes. If he didn’t answer, I would text, texts where I tried to be funny or sexy but, let’s get real, fifty texts in twenty-four hours is going to make a girl look like a psycho stalker no matter what the actual words are.

I can see now that he must have really loved me after all because, if he hadn’t, he would have cut me loose right when I started acting that way. He didn’t. He still spent a couple of nights a week with me and, when at the beginning of my last New York summer, he finalized the deal on the club in the Hamptons, Endpoint, he took me with him for the grand opening weekend.