The Wild Ones

“I remember my dad once singing a song to me.”
I subconsciously fiddle with a loose thread from my shirt as I feel myself go back in time where everything seemed ok.
“He said, ‘The man painted the night sky with the colours of his pain’.”
I stay silent for a few seconds, letting my words sink in, waiting for the person beside me to say something.
Anything.
“I think back to that night a lot, wondering whatever the singer could have meant. And I still don’t know.”

Sally Parker didn’t know what hit her when she got called out of her sixth grade class, walking through the spaces in between the desks as her classmates let out “Ooooohhhh’s.”
She didn’t ever imagine hearing from her dad’s best friend and police partner that the man she always looked up to had died.
She didn’t imagine ever coming home to an empty house, a letter on the kitchen table being the last memory of her once warm and loving mother.
She didn’t imagine any of this.
And nobody had ever imagined that the once sweet and bubbly girl would become bad.
The Wild Ones.