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even react, he’s getting to his feet. “Shit. What was I thinking? I shouldn’t have told you. You, of all people . . .” He spins and walks off.
    “Caleb . . .” I hurry after him. “Why did you tell me?”
    He stops, shrugs and stares at the ground. “I felt like I had to tell someone .”
    “FYI, telling a girl she’s just someone is not the best way to make her feel special.”
    Caleb throws up his hands. “That’s not—look, I’m not good at saying things right the first time. You just seem, I don’t know, not that you like me, but that you’re like me in some way. Both of us have ended up alone for a reason. And I needed someone to trust. I don’t know—”
    “It’s okay.” I touch his shoulder. “I get it. Now listen, I promise I won’t tell anyone, but why are you keeping this a big secret?”
    “Because,” says Caleb, “I don’t want to be Eli White’s kid. I don’t want that to be the reason I get anywhere in music.”
    We start walking again, weaving back through the mall toward school. I can barely keep up with his pace. “I get that, and for the record, I loved that song you were playing on the wall before I knew who your dad was. So why did you nuke your band? Was it because you were afraid of them finding out?”
    “That was part of it. And . . . well, it’ll sound dumb.”
    I grab his arm. We’re right near the doors to a children’s clothing outlet store, so there is a traffic jam of strollers around us. New moms eye us suspiciously, like we’re threats, or like they fear that if they don’t use the right kind of sippy cups or buy the right wooden toys, their little trophies might someday end up like us.
    “Tell me.” When he hesitates, I remind him: “Life of crime.”
    “I know.” Caleb searches the sky for words. “It’s just that, Eli might have been some kind of musical genius, but he was also a self-centered asshole, by all accounts. He treated my mom like crap, totally bailed on any responsibility to me other than cash, hooked up all the time, was into heroin . . . I just . . . I don’t want to be like that.”
    “Not even the hooking-up-all-the-time part?” I hope that sounded like a joke.
    It nearly makes Caleb smile. “I mean, I want to transcend. I want to do the big things, get all the way to the top, write the biggest song ever, but Neil Young was wrong.”
    “About what? Aside from muttonchops.”
    “He said it’s better to burn out than fade away. Kurt Cobain quoted it in his suicide note. But they’re wrong. I want to do all those things and then still be around later, like, get old, get a lifetime achievement award fifty years from now, to still be . . .” He throws his arms up as if to indicate the world. “In it. Does that sounds silly?”
    Silly or possibly painfully romantic. “No,” I say.
    “But now I find out that my musical genes come from someone who did his best to be out of it, who couldn’t survive his own success.”
    I find myself taking his hand, and buzzing at what he’s saying, so much like the thoughts I’d had this morning, sandwiched between oblivion and optimism. And I’m thrumming with the idea of this boy, this dark, busy mess of a boy, and how both of us have ended up exiled together . . .
    Now what, then?
    “Caleb.” I see his eyes snap down, just as affected by the use of his name. “I know what you’re talking about. Well, not totally. My dad sells concrete and is home every night at six. But the rest . . .”
    An absolutely screaming baby is wheeling by us, the mom shushing it. I want to get us to a more private spot but I don’t want to lose this moment. And also Caleb is taking my other hand. Now we are two people holding each other’s hands facing each other, which makes people notice us and give us a wide berth, and I am determined to finish what I was going to say.
    “If you don’t want to burn out, then you need to stop deleting Twitter accounts and alienating everyone in