Ryan did end up reaching out to him. I think all the dating turmoil was making her feel what I’d also felt when I’d gotten to California and become surrounded by tan, slender people with green smoothies and not one cable-knit sweater in sight: that I’d do anything for a little taste of home.
It came at a cost.
Justin
Ryan and I mostly just hung out at her place a lot. It was hard for her to go anywhere without getting recognized, and she didn’t want to pull me into that. I appreciated it, although I wouldn’t have minded a little more exposure that might’ve helped me make a name for myself.
Going over to Ryan’s helped me hide my money troubles from her. You’ll learn something if you hang around rich people enough: They don’t notice what’s going on in your life. They forget that not everybody lives like them.
I don’t mean to be snarky about that—it’s just the truth. Her reality was different from mine.
We’d sit out on this massive deck she had overlooking the ocean and talk about what was going on in our lives. She told me about the music videos she was working on. I would’ve given a lot to be a part of that production and was working up the balls to ask her for a job before, well ... before things went to shit.
Ryan read parts of my screenplay too. She said, “It’s hilarious. It’s very you.”
I didn’t know how to take that. “Am I hilarious?” I asked. I wanted her to get it—the story was funny on the outside, but you were supposed tofeel deeply connected to this guy who was desperate to find Bigfoot. It was supposed to be a commentary about striving and striving for something you can never get.
And she said, “You’re sentimental. Remember when we were dating? You were always so sappy.”
Ryan laughed. She was smiling at me when she said it, and I smiled back, but I think that was the first time I realized we remembered our first years together very differently. I don’t know, I’d thought about our middle school relationship as—as my first experience with these really powerful emotions, this pure feeling of being turned upside down by the thought of someone and knowing they felt the same. But maybe she’d viewed it as just that: a stupid middle school relationship.
“Maybe I’ve gotten better,” I said. I dared to say it.
“There’s only one way to find out,” she said. My stomach dropped. We looked at each other for a minute and my mind was racing, I was like,What did she mean by that? Does she want to try again? Does she want me to kiss her?
Two more seconds and I would have leaned forward on my deck chair and done it. We were that close.
But instead she started humming and walked over to pick up her guitar. She would play for me sometimes, especially when there was a melody she was working through. Ryan started strumming and looking off into the distance.
“That’s pretty,” I said.
She looked at me. “I can’t figure it out,” she told me. “It doesn’t sound like my normal stuff, but it’s been stuck in my head, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Does it have lyrics?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not yet.”
“You’ll have to sing it to me when it does,” I told her.
And she grinned and said she would.
Jasmine
It seemed like Ryan was feeling unsteady in a lot of her personal relationships, and that was aggravating the doubt she’d expressed to me back in Austin about where she was going with her music. Skip and I both knew it. You could just tell she wanted to try out something different but was afraid to swerve from her lane.
So I tried a different tactic. I said, “Why don’t you see what your fellow musicians think? It’s always good to avoid working in a vacuum. Why don’t you run it past them?” Skip and I were trying to push her to not be such a lone wolf with the songwriting—well, lone except for me, but I wanted her to get fresh eyes on her ideas. She and I had been locked in the studio together for too long.
The band was made up of people who were musicians first and foremost, of course, but a couple of them had a knack for songwriting too.
Celine was one, and Wilder—as you know—was the other.
The three of them worked well together. Celine was older and had grown up in the music industry, with her dad being half of the Walker Williams Band, of course. Wilder was closer to Ryan’s age. He was also a bit of a gamble in Skip’s eyes, I think, as a kid from out east with minimal industry experience, but for his audition he played this incredible remix of Joe Maphis’s “Flying Fingers”—the kind of song that’s just pure showing off. His guitar was like an extension of his own body. He was completely at ease with it.
I remember I sat in on one of their sessions, and the three of them were jamming together, creating this free flow of music that was just so cool. They came to a natural pause, and Ryan said, “That felt a little more like pop, didn’t it?”
Wilder shrugged and said, “Did you like the way it sounded?”
She said, “Yeah.”
