Chapter 3
Three
Justin William Ayers, Ryan’s first boyfriend
Look. I already know I’m going to be the villain in this story, okay? But I’m just a regular human being who was swept up in this—in this web of Ryan’s fame.
It wasn’t a life any of us expected to live. Take the brains of kids, teenagers, going through puberty, and then throw them into nationwide visibility, throw them into mass attention, throw them into amounts of money they have no idea what to do with.
I’m not going to make excuses for any of my actions. I’m also not going to make any apologies that, quite frankly, I don’t think I’m under any obligation to give.
All I ever asked for was my fair share. All I ever wanted was basic cut-and-dry recognition where recognition was due.
When I didn’t get it, I had to take matters into my own hands.
But I’ll get to that.
Yes, I am the William in “Providence.” That’s my middle name, that’s the nickname she used for me all the way back then.
We sort of started dating, if you can call whatever thirteen-year-olds do “dating,” the summer before her bluegrass thing in Rhode Island.
She wanted it to be a secret. Thought it would be “thrilling” and “romantic.” You’ll learn this about Ryan, if you haven’t already: She liked to make way too big of a deal out of things, have them her own way, create all this theatrical, elevated drama that was unsustainable for normal human relationships.
So maybe she was born for the life she ended up living, who knows.
But I’d never liked a girl before like I liked her. So I went along with it.
She always liked to call us star-crossed lovers.
Ryan had these big plans she used to tell me about—I’m going to travel the world, I’m going to make music, I can’t stay in Hamilton forever—and she would always dangle them over me like she wasn’t sure I was in her future.
I was like, dude, I’m thirteen, I don’t really care.
I mean, I did care a little. Obviously.
She made everything feel kind of magic, even back then.
I will give her this: For as huge as she got, for as much money as she made, Ryan never stopped being a great listener.
The summer before she started doing all those festivals, Mari was gone with her parents on a trip to the Grand Canyon, and Ryan and I spent nearly the whole week together.
Her parents probably knew there was something going on between us, but for all she told them, we were just friends—and the thing is, we were really good friends.
She was cool; even though I liked country more than bluegrass, we had a lot of common ground.
We both loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I told her that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up—I’d never told anyone else before.
She read my stories and didn’t laugh at them, and I read her songs. We had a lot of respect for each other.
I wish that was still true.
There was one day that week, Saturday, I think, that Ryan and I rode our bikes out to the Pingree Woodland trail and hiked from there.
Mari was coming back the next day, so I wanted to make an impression.
There’s a marshy stream that flows through there, and we walked along it until we found an old stone bench to sit on.
I was working up the guts to tell her something when she started first.
“I got into the festival,” she said. She was talking about River Rocks.
“That’s awesome,” I said. “I’m really proud of you.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said. “Because I wrote the song in my audition tape about you.”
Do you have any idea what it feels like for someone to write a song about you? It’s a special thing. It’s like—wow. Someone liked me enough to put all this thought and creativity into something brand new, something that has never existed in this world before.
Except that wasn’t quite it.
I want you to realize the difference, the one that took me forever to grasp: The song was written about me.
It wasn’t written for me. It was written for the audition tape, for the judges, for the purpose of advancing Ryan’s chances at a career.
Some old guy in Rhode Island got to hear that song before I ever did.
And yeah, it’s her music, she can do what she wants, but there’s a difference. There is.
I, on the other hand, had done something for Ryan that I wanted to share with her. I’d written her a poem.
The poem.
How do I capture your hummingbird heart?
It’s always moving, full of art
I’ll do what I can and return to the start
To try to make you mine.
There’s more, but you get the gist. And when I was done reading it to her, I asked her to be my girlfriend. She answered by leaning over and kissing me on the lips. My first kiss, there in Pingree Woodland. And no one ever knew.
Mari
Of course I knew about the kiss. It was her first kiss too—do you think my best friend wouldn’t tell me something like that?
Justin is an asshole. I don’t want to talk about him yet, but let me just put it like that: asshole.
I didn’t give much thought to him then—I knew about their “secret” relationship too.
Maybe I had some lingering jealousy around Ryan, who knows.
I’m only human. But I’m still glad he didn’t come to Providence with us for the festival.
I was lucky that my family’s Grand Canyon trip didn’t overlap with River Rocks, because I honestly think I would have made my parents leave me behind otherwise.
I could not wait to go. It was a three-hour drive down on Friday, and we skipped dinner because Ryan wanted to get to the festival ASAP.
When we made it to the grounds just outside, you could already hear the music from a distance.
It was . . . thunderous. I realized I hadn’t been expecting much from a genre that wasn’t rock, and before you come for me, remember that I’d only been listening to Ryan alone on her banjo all these months.
But with those musicians together . . . it was unlike anything I’d heard before.
They were whaling on the strings, singing at the top of their lungs—the crowds along with them, with all these wild harmonies and whoops.
There was the main stage and two smaller ones, but people were spread all over the grass, jamming with each other in little groups or watching the performers.
“Why didn’t I bring my banjo?” Ryan said next to me.
And then Frank came out of the crowd with a hot dog, waving to us and saying he was glad we made it.
“You see that big old stage?” he said to Ryan, pointing at the tall band shell with strings of carnival lights between its high rafters and the oak trees that dotted the park. “Tomorrow afternoon, that’ll be you up there.”
I remember watching her as she followed his gaze, the evening starting to fall around us. The fireflies were beginning to come out.
And she looked like she had come home.
I don’t think Ryan slept that night. I, too, found myself pretty restless. At one point, becoming aware of the change in my breathing, Ryan whispered to me: “You awake?”
“I’ve hardly been to sleep,” I whispered back.
She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “What if it all goes wrong tomorrow?”
“What could go wrong?”
Ryan looked at me through the darkness. “My strings could break. I could faint. I could forget the words.”
“You wrote the words,” I said. She was going to sing both songs from her tape, and a third—“My Tennessee Mountain Home” by Dolly Parton—that she’d used for her in-person audition in Boston. “And you know the others by heart.”
“Not always. I forget sometimes, even when I’m playing for Frank.”
I studied her for a moment and realized she was genuinely scared. From standing up to that clique to her ukulele performance at school to her weird relationship with Justin, I hadn’t seen her scared before. This is what she was afraid of failing at.
“Then just play for Frank. He’ll be there,” I said. “And play for me.”
She closed her eyes and took a big, long breath.
“I think I can do that,” she said.
Ryan’s mom had to just about force-feed her in the morning.
“I am not letting you get on a stage in ninety-degree weather without having at least a little bit of protein,” I remember Barb saying as she heaped the scrambled eggs from the hotel breakfast onto Ryan’s plate.
They were horrible eggs, dry and kind of gritty.
Ryan was looking green as she tried to choke down a few forkfuls.
Yes, it was forecasted to be a high of ninety-two that day.
When we stepped out of the air-conditioned hotel to load Ryan’s banjo into the car, I could tell that for the first time she might have been genuinely doubting the decisions that had gotten her to this point.
Her eyes were flat and staring straight ahead, her mouth in a thin line.
I only saw that look a few more times over the course of Ryan’s career. But that day, it was there.
Frank
Ryan didn’t initially seem nervous when she and her crew came walking across the grass, but when I asked her how she was holding up, she just nodded, kind of looking through me.
I thought maybe it was dawning on her that all these people here were going to be staring at her and watching her every move.
River Rocks wasn’t a huge festival by any means, but a couple thousand people was far more than the handful she’d performed in front of before.
Funny, isn’t it? Ryan’s played for a hundred million since then. But that day in Providence, the bluegrass crowd in the park must have felt like a stadium.
“Do they have any water backstage?” Ryan asked, sounding numb.
“Water, Gatorade, of course,” I said. “Let’s get you set up.”
We got her tuned up while another young man performed his set, and I sat with her backstage while her parents and Mari went to watch.