Imagine one of the most horrible things that can happen in a small town. A school shooting. A teenager walks into a middle school and kills the counsellor and a young girl.
The Boston Marathon attacks. San Bernardino. The Pulse Nightclub. People were outraged. They were glued to their televisions, to their web pages, to their Facebook feeds. They vocally expressed sorrow, horror, fury, pain. They cried for change. They raised money. They demanded action. And then they went back to their lives until the next one happened again.
The girl, Kelly Wilson, appears to be mentally slow and it looks like she had suffered from a lot of bullying in high-school and there were rumours of a terminated pregnancy and a shamed family sending their boy to school somewhere far away. Now she comes in dressed in Emo Clothing and starts shooting.
A man’s feet pointed up at the ceiling.
Behind him, to his right, a smaller set of feet splayed out. Pink shoes. White stars on the soles. Lights that would flash when she walked.
An older woman knelt beside the little girl rocking back and forth, wailing. Charlie wanted to wail, too.
Blood had sprayed the plastic chairs outside the office, splattered onto the walls and ceiling, jetted onto the floors. She had seen this before. She knew that you could put it all in a little box and close it up later, that you could go on with your life if you didn’t sleep too much, didn’t breathe too much, didn’t live too much so that death came back and snatched you away for the taking.
This is only part of the story. What The Good Daughter tackles is not one but two major dramas and I must say I read the whole book in close to two days.
