Loose Diamonds by Amy Ephron Read Free Book Online Page A

of brandy. She went into the bathroom and washed her face.
    “Do you want to stay here tonight?”
    “I wouldn’t mind,” she answered.
    When I woke up the next morning, she was gone. The bed had been perfectly made and except for the brandy glass on the coffee table, I never would have known that she’d been there at all.
    Three days later, the house on “No Name Street” was shuttered, vacant, empty. No sign that anyone had lived there before. Except that if you looked through the old-fashioned grate of the peephole, the black tiles of the staircase were visible as if waiting for someone to make an entrance from upstairs.
    Honey left town. I don’t know where she went. Shannon moved in with a friend in Hancock Park and started going to church every day. She talked about God a lot. Something had scared her, but I don’t know exactly what it was. I never really understood exactly what their dream was. Two months later, Shannon left Los Angeles, too. She said she had a rich cousin in Minneapolis and that she felt like going home and since her parents had died when she was little, it was the closest thing she had to home.
    Max was indicted, although I’m not sure for what. And I hear he spent a little bit of time in a minimum security prison.
    Honey called me six months later, “I’m he-ere!” she said, sounding a little Southern when she said it and as if she’d had a couple of glasses of champagne. “At the Beverly Hills Hotel.” This had a Southern lilt to it, too.
    “How are you?”
    “I’m in love,” she said, with an extra syllable in love. She didn’t tell me his name. “He’s Argentinian,” she said. “He’s in rocks.”
    I didn’t know if she meant cocaine or jewels and, I think, I actually said it. “Cocaine or jewels?” as I remember her answer.
    “Jewels, you fool, “ laughing a little bit because Honey got the joke. “I’d love you to meet him.”
    I declined their invitation for dinner. Some little bell went off in my head about how the “high life” can turn on a dime. I never heard from her again. I hope she’s barefoot somewhere in South America with lots of children around her (I imagine her on a ranch with horses, taking trips every six months to a fancy clinic in Lausanne) and that she didn’t end up in a small town in Texas where the only oil in shouting distance is at the gas station on the corner, or even worse, a rich divorcée buying champagne by the case.

Six
    Labor Day
    T here aren’t that many things that are a rite of passage, truly a rite of passage. A first kiss, that’s not really a big deal, it’s just a door opening to a second kiss. Or the fact that, now, you do kiss, if you know what I mean. Or for some of us loss of virginity isn’t such a big deal either except that you hope that you find someone better to sleep with the second time.
    I don’t remember my first kiss. Oh, yes, I do. I was wearing red silk pinstripe hip-huggers that I’d bought at Paraphernalia. He drove a red Corvette and I’d lied about my age. He was sort of slick and creepy and a senior in high school, not my high school. And I think he parked, yep, actually parked on Mulholland. I should have known, just by the red Corvette, that he thought of himself as fast and had more than kissing on his mind. I didn’t. But maybe I’m just not a red-Corvette kind of girl. I remember being sort of pleased that we didn’t go to the same high school and that I would never have to see him or his red Corvette again.
    I don’t remember my second kiss. I do remember the first person I was in love with (or thought I was in love with)—short-lived, as I moved to New York and he went to rehab. What can I say, it was L.A. and some things never change. In my own defense, I was not the reason that he went into rehab and I was fairly surprised at the substance he went into rehab for. I missed the signs and spent a long time thinking about how I could have missed the signs. What I took for a