Exile by Kevin Emerson Read Free Book Online

PopArts, and playing guitar alone.”
    Caleb looks away and shrugs, a touch sulkily. “I guess.”
    From a business point of view, what I can feel myself about to say may not be a good idea. The grizzled, veteran me knows better. Throwing in with the mercurial head-case singer type? Never good. But maybe Caleb is just a singer of the average head-case variety who happens to be going through a really rough patch. I heard that song behind the school. Nobody at the Kickoff Concert had anything like it. I feel as certain as I can that I’ve found my next project.
    “I can help you,” I say. “You can put together a band, and I’ll manage. I know what to do. Your job is to get”—before I can consider stopping myself, I reach out and touchhis chest with my index finger—“ this out into the world. Then everything you’re talking about can happen.”
    Caleb shrugs, but then he takes my hand. “Maybe this is why I asked you out. How do you make everything sound so possible ?”
    I want to ask Caleb if this is a line he’s used before. But no, I don’t really want to know. I don’t care to know. Maybe he’s another band boy but so what so what so what? Sometimes things happen and we feel things because we are who we are and we can’t control it.
    “Because it is possible,” I hear myself saying, and I’m leaning forward, my body seeming to have already made up its mind about what happens next, and suddenly I’m terrified: am I really thinking about him as my next project or am I thinking about him as this cute, wounded beautiful soul, so honest on the surface, no games, no quoting his own lyrics at me, and getting hotter by the second? Slow down! It’s too soon! Remember last time — And I know, oh I know, this is so . . . Not. A good. Idea. Where’s one of those fortune-tellers made out of folded paper, a silly Seventeen magazine quiz, a flower to pluck petals, anything that would give me a sign that could make me feel certain about what to do next—
    But I tip up on my toes and kiss him anyway.
    I think it surprises him, but then he responds and, has it really been three months since I felt this feeling because, oh, kissing, hello! And this is exceptionally good and itmakes me wonder if we’re made to think each new kiss is the best one we’ve ever had, or if it’s possible that there are just frequencies between people, wave vibrations that align in a perfect hum. Maybe it’s our relation to the magnetism of the planet, or the specific arrangement of our molecules, or maybe we both just so happen to have slightly elevated levels of some mineral, let’s say manganese, in our blood. Who knows? But there is something, something more than just the simple physics of lips and tongues at work here, and it’s vibrating me like a kite string and it’s almost like I don’t need to know any more. We’ve only talked for half an hour and yet I don’t need to know what cereal he likes or what his politics are or which Kurt Vonnegut novel he read first. None of it matters because of this frequency that is making me long to slide my cheek slowly down his neck to his shoulder and feel his arms at my waist pulling me close so that my lungs can’t fully expand.
    Except I pull back. Take. A. Deep. Breath. “Okay,” I manage to say. “Wow.”
    “Yeah,” Caleb breathes. “Um, thanks.”
    “We should probably get back to school,” I say. “Either that, or . . . never mind.”
    “What?” He takes me gently by the shoulders. “What were you going to say?”
    “Nothing. It was silly—”
    He kisses me back. “Tell me.”
    Woozy. “I was just going to say that we either go backto school or instead we head to Long Beach and stow away on a cargo boat headed to Palau.”
    “Two solid choices.” Caleb hugs me. “Probably school. For now.”
    “We’ll need degrees in Palau. To start a music school.”
    “And we should learn Palauean first.”
    “Palau-ese?”
    “Wait . . . we should get this