My best friend got a black Mustang convertible for her seventeenth birthday.
“Mustang Sally,” my dad called her from then on. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen up close. I wanted to touch her impossibly smooth cheek, twist her curly coffee-colored hair between my fingers. She’d pick me up and we’d go for ice cream, the movies, or the diner; we’d come home stinking of cigarettes even though we’d ride with the top down all the way.
The radio played Skid Row or Sting, and she’d sing off-key, her one endearing imperfection, crooked notes trailing behind us.
Cynthia Hamill 