It wasn’t an insult that was even very clever or creative. But dammit, they called me Pigpen from that point forward, and it bothered me so much that I wore my hair down every single day, even in gym class, even when it was ninety degrees in our classroom with no air-conditioning in August.
So you can imagine the kind of treatment I thought Ryan would get.
And I feel horrible admitting this—I already admitted it to her long ago, and she forgave me, so I can say it here. But I was irritated when she sat next to me at lunch that day. I thought,Oh great, she’s just going to make it worse for both of us.Because that’s how it worked, right? The law of the jungle and all.
And sure enough, those girls walked by and immediately said something like “Look, Pigpen’s got a new friend!”
“Pigpen and Pinky!”
I saw Ryan hesitating with a half smile, trying to work out what was going on. I could feel my face going red in that way I hate—I’ve always wished I could control it, but in any stressful situation, I look like a beet.
“I love Pigpen,” she said, giving me a meaningful glance. “I read him in the comics—he’s so cute! But who’s Pinky?”
“Pinky, like fromPinky and the Brain?” one of the girls said, like she was talking to someone impossibly stupid. “You look like that skinny lab rat.”
“Oh!” Ryan said brightly. “I haven’t seen it. Is it a good show?”
The lead girl made a face. “Everybody’s seen it. Do you live in a hobo shack or something?”
Like I said—not clever.
Ryan just shrugged. “I don’t watch a lot of TV.”
The girl smirked at her. “That’s pretty weird.”
I was feeling a lot of secondhand embarrassment by that point, but Ryan gave her a wide, genuine smile. “I know, right?” she said. “I’ll have to watch it and tell you what I think!”
The girl frowned. “Whatever.”
The group gave up and walked away, hardly giving a backward glance; Ryan watched them go.
“You really don’t knowPinky and the Brain?” I had asked, still being kind of snotty. It was a weird mix of emotions—irritation that she had brought this on us, surprise by how she’d handled it, and relief that the attention hadn’t been on me.
Ryan turned back and looked me right in the eyes. “Duh, I knowPinky and the Brain,” she said in a much different, more down-to-earth voice than the bubbly one she’d been using before. “What Ididn’tknow is how many assholes there would be at this school.”
I stared at her. Even in the years afterward, I barely heard her swear. I think she picked a very choice moment to employasshole, to show me who she really was.
And then I burst out laughing.
She did too. And from that point forward, we were best friends.
Apart from the little shits at school, we had a good childhood; sometimes there’s this perception that the best art comes from people who have suffered in life, but Ryan and I were happy kids. We rode our bikes to school, swam at Ipswich, had sleepovers, and made friendship bracelets. She was always humming, coming up with little melodies even back then. She would write out poems and songs in this little pocket notebook that she carried with hereverywhere. It was packed with these wrinkled, dog-eared pages that were almost illegible with pencil and pen scribblings that, to be honest, were so, so angsty back then. An all-American green-eyed girl with that wild hair I always envied, who came from a comfortable background and caught fish off the Walnut Road bridge in the summer—what did she have to be angsty about?
But Ryan was very into Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and her mother was born and raised in Kentucky, where she lived until she moved to New York for school. So Ryan was introduced early on to all that bluegrass music. I swear, the first thing she downloaded when she got an MP3 player was “House of the Rising Sun” by Doc Watson. I don’t think she knew whatit meant—I mean, I hope she didn’t, at that age—but she was raised on those old folk songs.
It resulted in her being this strange, sort of ethereal kid. Walking around in her own world, listening to these mournful songs in her headphones, all wrapped up in her notebook. She was tall and lanky, even back then, and it made her stick out in groups. Ryan didn’t have many friends, and neither did I—we leaned on each other—but that didn’t mean she was shy.
She was one of those weirdos—I say that very fondly—who would break out into song during recess or sing to herself while she was at her locker. This did mean, unfortunately, that she was the target of more than a few unkind comments. But she generally let that roll off her back. And here’s the thing—she had the talent to do so.
I remember we had a middle school talent show, just an informal thing, and Ryan brought the ukulele she’d gotten for Christmas. I saw the faces of some of the other girls when Ryan walked up to play, like,Oh boy, here we go.
But where anyone else at that age would have strummed simple chords and sung Alanis Morissette or something, Ryan fingerpicked the most delicate, haunting melody. It was one she’d written herself. It was never published, but I remember it. I always thought she should try to rework and record it:Meet me under the willow, the willow / When the full moon is high / Hear me call on the air when the wind blows / I’ll be there by your side.
Eleven years old. She wrote that. Near rhyme and all.
A lot of the people who criticize Ryan now don’t listen to her music. It’s easy to look at her fame, which—let’s be honest—is almost obscene, not that she can really control that. But if you actually attended her shows, listened closely to the lyrics, understood what she was doing and the musical tradition she’s rooted in—she proved herself every time.
The girls in our class stopped making fun of her after that day. I know for afactthat Stacy Hiester asked for a ukulele for her birthday the very next week.
