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 writtenaboutme. It wasn’t writtenforme. It was writtenforthe audition tape,forthe judges,forthe 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 somethingforRyan that I wanted to share with her. I’d written her a poem.
Thepoem.
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 washerfirst 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 notwaitto 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 werewhalingon 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.”
“Youwrotethe 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.”
