“Told you,” Silas said. “City eats hungry boys.”
Harlan Wynn smiled—a real smile, not the marionette kind. He wasn’t famous anymore. He wasn’t rich. But he was, for the first time in a long time, himself.
He’d just finished a show—a good one, by all accounts. The crowd sang along to every word of “Dirt Road Dynamite,” and he’d smiled through it like a marionette. Back in the dressing room, he cut a line on a mirror that had a crack running through it—a real one, not the metaphorical kind. He leaned down, and in the fractured reflection, he saw not a star, but a hollow-eyed boy in a bus station, lost and hungry. countryboy crack
“Open mic in an hour,” she said. “No prize money this time. Just a stool and a microphone.”
Rickey was a producer—or so he said. He had produced exactly one song that charted, back in 2008, and had been riding that wave ever since. He wore snakeskin boots and a watch that was either very expensive or very fake. He slid a card across the bar to Harlan. “Told you,” Silas said
Rickey introduced him to pills first. “For energy,” he said. “Touring’s a beast.” Then came the powder in a Nashville high-rise, a bathroom mirror reflecting a boy who no longer recognized himself. “This,” Rickey said, arranging it into two neat rows, “is the real countryboy crack. Makes you feel like you can write ten songs before sunrise. Makes you feel invincible .”
When he finished, the room of twelve drunks and one old bootmaker sat in stunned silence. Then Jade started clapping. Slow, at first. Then everyone joined in. He wasn’t rich
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”