Exile Read Online Free PDF

all have a glare for Caleb, and by extension me.
    Out in the hall, Caleb stops before heading in the other direction. Streams form on either side of us.
    “So,” I say, “you’re gonna do the loner thing.”
    Caleb frowns and glances away. “Not that simple.”
    “Okay. What happened then? What happened on August fourteenth”—just the mention of his Twitter-nuking date makes his eyes flash back to me and they’ve cooled and I can tell we’ve entered shark-infested waters—“that turned you into an—”
    “Exile,” says Caleb. He just looks at me.
    A second passes and it’s weird. “What?”
    He looks at the ceiling. Back to me. He’s not smiling, exactly, more like studying, but . . . damn those eyes. “You want to know?”
    I give him a courtesy eye roll. “We covered that topic already when I asked what happened .”
    “I’ll tell you, but you have to go out with me.”
    “What?” I wonder if I heard him right while knowing of course I heard him right and thinking this is one of the most backward pickup’s I’ve ever heard of, but also I think my pulse just hit a hundred. “You’re asking me out?”
    “Yes.”
    I don’t want to say yes, but I don’t want to say no, and then just to say something I hear myself ask, “When?”
    Caleb’s eyes stay dead on me. “Now.”
    I probably kind of gape at him. “Now.”
    “Now.” He glances at the pair of doors that lead out toward the parking lots.
    “I have class,” I say.
    Caleb sighs. “So do I. Everyone has class. There will always be class. Come with me anyway. And I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you everything.” He steps closer. It feels dangerous, like maybe he’s being too forward, or like maybe I might just reach out and touch him, and I’m having no luck figuring out which, because my senses and my heartbeat and my thoughts are all a blur.
    “I thought you were going with the nobody-understands-me thing.”
    “I was, until five minutes ago. But one thing I learned this summer is that life can change pretty fast in five minutes.”
    I remember a five-minute stretch in July where I learned the same thing. “I’m not gonna lie; you’re making a good case here.”
    “Summer,” he says.
    What is it about someone calling you by name? How rarely does that actually happen? To hear your name in close confines.
    “Um . . .” None of this is what I’m used to people saying to me. Summer . . . but what the hell? I just spent the vast majority of two months rehashing and regretting all things band boy! Did I not just do this? Is this not just me going in another circle? The cute singer boy who says the big things, all mysterious and poetic? And we remember how that turned out and yet, YET, Caleb isn’t Ethan , I find myself thinking, and I want to know. I want to know.
    Dammit dammit dammit.
    I need to know.
    It’s my turn to glance at the doors. This probably lets him know he’s almost got me. Maybe that’s my point. “When you say tell me everything,” I say, “do you mean like tell-me-you’re-secretly-a-psycho-killer-with-a-plan-to-add-me-to-your-petri-dish-collection everything? Or—”
    Caleb laughs. “We’ll walk to Taquitas. There is nowhere along that route for me to dice you up with a scalpel.”
    I stare at him. Six thousand miles away, the bell rings.
    We’re late.
    And it is like that bell has somehow severed me from the universe. The hall has emptied. Life has gone on, just like it did last night in Silver Lake. Everyone is somewhere and I am in this other place, a bubble out of time. Only this time it’s not in Burrita Feminista, though the similarity in prospective restaurant choices does hint at a larger plan to a universe I was calling out as an empty void just a few hours ago. We are in our own time line now, that’s how it feels. Like life has left us behind but maybe also like we are free. We could do this. I could leave school on the first day back. . . .
    Somewhere, Carlson Squared is