What is rarely said about these people and about these moments in our lives is that sometimes the wrong crowd is simply the crowd that loves you the best. The crowd that sees you the clearest. Their wrongness perhaps not inherent but cultivated through a series of neglects or unresolved pains. But in the midst of that love, the love of the wrong crowd, dirt is sometimes done. And this, we were to understand, is what led my father to steal cars before he could even drive them. He would have been a promising athlete, we’d be told. Who is to say when trouble consumes a life.
