Diamond Girl Read Online Free

scholarship because she had told me so herself. The thing that was funny was that she laughed when she said it, which somehow I knew was different than how my mother would have said it.
    It seemed like everything made Stacey laugh. She was studying to be a psychologist at NYU, and a professor of hers who knew someone who knew my mother had helped her get the job. Stacey said she wasn’t a real nanny; that she was an au pair. My sister Kelly was so little that she couldn’t pronounce au pair at first and pronounced it 'aper'. Stacey found that as hilarious as she found most of our antics and, for a month or so, would crack up Kelly and me, and George too, during the drives out to Connecticut by making ape voices and faces.
    That didn’t last, though. Someone must have reported it to my mother, who must have talked to Stacey, because there were no more ape games. Poor Kelly was immediately enrolled in four-day-a-week after pre-school speech therapy and made to wear a mouth guard at night for a year. She was three then.
    Anyway, it was Stacey who noticed that something was wrong with me.
    Like every other little kid in the world, I loved candy and sodas and anything but what was on my plate. Being raised by nannies, though, and living most of my life four stories above the kitchen and attending the nutrition-based Chapin - which actually means we promise to keep your children thin if you pay us forty thousand a year plus endowments for them to attend - didn’t give me much of a chance to indulge my sweet tooth.
    Weekends and holidays at Tamerlane were different. The cook there, Rosy, thought it was cute when Kelly and I would run into the kitchen and steal cake batter, or munch down on the cookies she made for us. Since Stacey liked to go into Greenwich on weekends and window shop and flirt with cute guys, she let us buy Cokes and candy bars so that we wouldn’t whine about being bored.
    The first signs of the illness that would dominate my life showed much more clearly at Tamerlane than they did in New York because of these normal kid indulgences. In the city I was always thirsty too, but no one - well Elizando or my teachers anyway - remarked on it. It was Stacey who noticed that I was crazy thirsty sometimes, no matter how much I drank, or that I seemed to have to pee about thirty times a day. My riding instructor, Bill, would tell her that he was worried about me. He said I complained sometimes that I couldn’t feel the reins. Well who else was he going to tell?
    Then, one afternoon in Greenwich after Stacey had taken Kelly and me for ice cream, I got really sick and so dizzy that Stacey had to carry me back to the car.  I might have never been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes if left to my mother, because I know Stacey called her that day. I overheard her side of the conversation, and when she said, “Well, yes, Mrs. Kelleher, she seems fine now”, I could tell she was upset. She must have been because she took it upon herself to break my mother’s cardinal rule with staff: never bother Mr. Kelleher about anything . Stacey somehow wormed out of George my father’s private cell number and called him herself. I don’t know what they said to each other, but by Monday of that week, I wasn’t at school, I was at our family pediatrician’s, screaming in Elizando’s restraining arms as they tortured me with long painful needles that drew out so much blood I was sure they were trying to kill me.
     
     

Chapter 4
     
    My diagnosis hit my mother hard. It had to have been really devastating for her because I thi nk, by the time she found out, she had been able to convince herself her position was permanent, despite not having produced Kells VI which, after all, wasn’t her fault. I’m sure she reminded my father, and the other Kellehers, the sex of a child was dictated by the man, wasn’t it? 
    Of course it was, she knew that, and she had produced two beautiful little girls, one of which – me - was a perfect spit