Theo

When I kissed Caleb goodbye at the airport in New Orleans, it had felt like something was being torn away from me. Somehow—though we’d spent countless hours together at the farmhouse, or in my apartment—being with Caleb out in the world, doing things with him, had made me feel like we were together. A team.

I’d had friends, of course, though not many, and the band, but with Caleb, I felt like I had someone who was…mine. I knew Caleb’s situation was a little different. He had Rhys, who had known him for so long, and so well. And he had Huey, who was, in a lot of ways, his first phone call. And I knew he had a whole community of folks he’d played music with for years, and I assumed that once he felt on steadier ground he’d reach out to them again.

But the last few days, moving through the city together, playing together, I felt, for the first time, like I had a partner. And letting that go—not just Caleb himself, but the feeling of being a part of that pairing—was wrenching. I felt more alone with him gone than I had before he’d arrived.

We went on to Atlanta after New Orleans. Then D.C. and Baltimore. Coco was from there and Ven had lived in Baltimore for a few years, so I let Coco, Ven, and Ethan drag me to tourist attractions, neighborhood bars, and favorite eateries. But I couldn’t wait to get back to my hotel room and have some peace. Not just that, but since Caleb and I had played our song, it was like a vast space had opened up inside of me—a well of ideas and possibilities for songs and music that rendered forth something new every time I had the opportunity to dive into it.

I was scribbling lyrics in a frenzy and recording bits of music on my phone voice memo so I wouldn’t forget them as we were wandering around, or when I was backstage. In the week after Caleb left, I’d written three songs. And they were different. Better, I thought, than anything I’d written before. I wasn’t writing them the way I usually did, like deep cross-sections where I imagined everyone else’s parts. I was writing them like they were wildfire sweeping through a stand of trees, or lightning ripping across an open stretch of desert.

We had a day off in Philly before our last three shows in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, and for all that Ven was convinced that Philly crowds were terrible (“They don’t cheer!” he insisted. He had strong generalizations about the crowds in nearly every town we played), I liked the city. The last time we’d been here, someone had told me about a curiosity museum, so I decided to ditch the band and go check it out. The Mütter Museum was full of medical anomalies, anatomical specimens, medical instruments, and a lot of super-weird shit, like a cabinet full of the foreign objects removed from people’s stomachs during surgery, and arranged in drawers—metal soldiers, nails, safety pins, buttons, dollhouse furniture, and on and on.

There were cross-sections of Einstein’s brain, medical texts bound in human skin, collections of gall- and kidney stones, skeletons of people who’d had rare diseases, and a whole room of fluid-filled specimen jars. I thought it was fascinating, but when I sent Caleb pictures of conjoined twin fetuses, he texted: Ugh, babe, I can’t look at this kind of stuff. Then, just as I felt guilty for freaking out my own boyfriend, he sent a second text: I’m glad you’re doing something fun in Philly, though. Eat a cheesesteak for me.

That evening, when I knocked on Coco’s door, she, Ven, and Ethan were lying around in sweats, eating delivery pizza and watching an episode of Law & Order.

“Theo!” Coco called, and raised a hand as if to say she was excited to see me, but was so comfortable right now that she couldn’t possibly move.

“Dude, have you seen this one?” Ven asked without looking at me. “There’s a guy in it who totally reminds me of that bassist from Orpheus Explosion—you remember?”

I hadn’t seen the show and I did remember the bassist, so I was caught between nodding and shaking my head, but it didn’t matter anyway because Ven didn’t look away from the TV.

“Want some pizza?” Ethan offered.

“Okay, thanks.”

I didn’t, really, but it felt nice to sit with them and just relax. The pizza tasted like nothing in my mouth, and I had no idea what was going on in Law & Order, but I could totally see what Ven meant about the bassist, a mousy guy who never made eye contact and didn’t really talk to anyone but the techies, but was magic with his instrument.

When the episode credits rolled and another one came on immediately after, I realized my bandmates were in it for the long haul. Ethan poured everyone orange soda from the two-liter bottle he’d crammed diagonally into the refrigerator.

“This stuff is disgusting and delicious,” Coco said, toasting us with her tumbler.

“Right?” said Ethan. “I haven’t had it in like ten years but the pizza guy was out of everything else except root beer.”

“I love root beer,” said Ven, still staring at the TV.

“I know.” Ethan’s voice was neutral, but Coco winked at him.

I drank the soda and, as with the pizza, tasted nothing, but it coated my teeth and fizzed up the back of my nose unpleasantly.

“So, um, I wrote a couple songs,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I thought we could play one live, to see how it goes over. Maybe at the Chicago show, since it’s our last?”

“Ugh, Chicago always hates new songs,” Ven muttered.

“Awesome,” Coco said. “Can we hear?”

“Yeah. Do you mind?” I reached out a hand for her guitar and she passed it over.

“Dude.” Ethan elbowed Ven, who was staring at the television intently.

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” He muted the TV and turned to me.

A sudden flare of nerves reminded me of how personal these songs felt. How different.

I started to play the song, closing my eyes so I could forget I was sitting on the floor in a hotel with an episode of Law & Order on mute in the background.

When I dampened the final chord with my hand, I opened my eyes slowly. They were all staring at me.

Ven’s eyes were narrowed. Ethan looked thoughtful, and Coco had her head cocked, which usually meant she was working something out.

“Uhhhmm,” Ven said. I got the sense that, for once, Ven was trying to be tactful. He looked at Ethan and Coco, clearly unsure what to say.

“It’s a beautiful song,” Ethan said.

Coco nodded. “It is. I loved it.”

But their faces didn’t match their words. Ven’s mouth was open like he was dying to speak but still holding himself back.

“Just say it, man,” I told him, and he looked immediately relieved.

“It’s really good, dude. But…what the fuck? For Riven? That’s not our sound, it’s not…it’s nothing like our brand.”

“Our…brand?” I said. “We’re a band. I think we get to decide what kind of music we play.”

“Yeah,” Ven shot back, “we are a band. We’re not the Theo Decker Experience, where we just play whatever the hell is rattling around in your head because you start dating country musicians or whatever!”

“Oh, we don’t play whatever’s in my head? Really? ’Cause I was pretty sure that I wrote the songs and then we played them. Or is that not what’s been going on for the last three albums? And Caleb is a fucking blues musician!” I added, cheeks burning.

Ven rolled his eyes. “Oh, well, excuse the fuck out of me for improperly classifying the music of the dude you’re fucking. Point is? That song’s not a Riven song. So we aren’t gonna play it.”

“Okay, hold on a damn minute,” said Coco. “Ven, you’re basically in a Law & Order–induced trance, so you’re not making any decisions right now.”

Ethan barked out a laugh and the tension in the room eased slightly.

“So, okay, Theo,” she went on. “That is a really different sound for us. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We can make it sound more like the rest of our stuff—change the time signature, add in the other parts…it’s not hopeless. We just need to massage it a little. Right?” She gave Ethan a pointed look.

“Yeah. I can totally work with that,” he said. “Besides, didn’t you say you wrote more than one? Maybe the others would be a better fit right away, for us to play live, and then this one we can start working on when we get home?”

“Great,” said Coco. “Good point. Can we hear?”

My stomach was in a knot.

“Um, you know what? I think the others probably aren’t ready yet. I’ll, uh, keep working on them and then I’ll just let you know. Forget it, okay? This song…it’s…Ven’s right. It’s not a Riven song.”

My heart was pounding, and suddenly all I could taste was that sickly sweet orange soda, and all I could smell was the pizza grease. I had to get out of there.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “I’m gonna take a nap, I think. I’ll, uh, I’ll see you guys later.”

I set Coco’s guitar gently on the bed and forced myself to keep my steps even and slow, so it wouldn’t be quite so clear I was running away like an animal, to find a porch to hide under where I could lick my wounds in private.

The second the door closed behind me, I heard a sound, and then Ven yelled, “Ow, what the hell!?” I ran to my own room before I could hear the response.

Later that night, curled up in bed after talking to Caleb, I tried to pick apart my extreme reaction to the band’s words. It was true that I wasn’t always the best at letting criticism roll off my back. Maybe I tended to take things a little too personally. But I was used to bouncing ideas back and forth with the band. I’d learned to strip away Ven’s abrasiveness to get at the root of his comments, to be patient with Ethan because he liked to work everything out in his head before he weighed in, to not snap at Coco for considering every single possibility before settling on something.

So, yeah, I wasn’t always the best at hearing criticism of my songs, but I definitely didn’t usually feel this wounded. I felt like I had shown them my tender, unguarded belly and they had pecked it to blood with sharp beaks.

Like they had drawn a circle around what Riven was, and in doing so had put me on the other side of the line.

I fell asleep with the lights on, the blankets pulled over my head, and when I woke up the next afternoon, to catch our flight to the Cleveland show, I could hardly drag myself out of bed. When we got picked up in Cleveland, I watched the familiar landscape out the window of our limo, and the minute I saw signs for I-90, my stomach clenched.

Coco and Ethan were sweet to me, offering to order me an ice cream when they sent someone out to get one, since they knew I hated when we played in Ohio. But I couldn’t feel anything. I wasn’t nervous for the show. Or excited. I wasn’t dreading it. Wasn’t even upset thinking about shit from when I was a kid, living here. I just felt…blank. Zombie blank.

I finally got my shit together in time for the performance, but the magic wasn’t there. The crowd didn’t seem to notice. The band didn’t seem to notice. But I felt like I was floating somewhere, nudged a half-tick outside my body and unable to realign.

I had texted Caleb from backstage before we went on, 2 more days <3, but he didn’t write back until much later, and by then, we’d already done the show. I’d sung my music in front of a screaming crowd—the thing that usually brought me so much joy—and it had felt like dust.

---

The first time Riven played a big show in Cleveland, I called my mom and told her that I’d put aside tickets for her and my dad at the box office. After all, my parents had always come to my piano recitals, and my orchestra performances during high school. I’d understood they weren’t interested in coming to see me play my own music in some smoky open mic night hundreds of miles away, but this was a real show. An arena show, less than an hour from their front door.

She paused a beat before answering, and I barreled forward, telling her I’d really like it if they would come see me play, and how cool it was to be playing the concert hall where I’d first seen all the bands that I’d loved in high school. She said they would certainly try, then rushed me off the phone because she had to finish making dinner.

I’d played my heart out, felt anticipation similar to what I’d felt when I used to play recitals at my parents’ urging: the impulse to do a good job, to impress them, in the hopes of making them proud of me. Only it wasn’t just them, it was the whole crowd. If I could impress the whole crowd, touch them with our music, and my parents saw that—were surrounded by it—how could they fail to be proud of me?

The next morning, I called my mom from the hotel and asked what she’d thought of the show. Before the whole question was out of my mouth, I realized my mistake.

“Oh, Theo,” she’d said, a hint of irritation in her voice, as if she were angry with me for making her tell me this. “Your father had a long day at work and you know how late these things start. It just wasn’t a good night for it. Next time, all right? Maybe next time you can come play over the weekend.”

“Yeah,” I agreed hollowly. “Sure. I’ll make sure that our tour manager arranges the whole tour so that next time we can play a weekend show.”

Tears had burned my eyes. Shame and anger and resentment and self-pity. But I’d burned with something else, too. Determination. To prove to them that I was worth something. That hundreds or thousands or millions of people wanted me. Wanted to listen to my music, and come to my shows, and talk about me online, even if I never saw what they said. To prove that while, to them, I might have been a burden, an unexpected and unwanted hassle that they felt obligated to shoulder, to the world, I was something else.

They would appreciate me. They would see me. They would love me.

Well, the world had done all those things.

And I’d hated every single fucking minute of it.

Somewhere over Pennsylvania, on a late flight home from Chicago to New York, I was running that memory over and over in my head. I was alone in my row, staring out into the night, watching as wisps of high-altitude cloud swept past my window, gauzy white in the dark sky. I hated that it still hurt me to think about my parents. That had been years ago, and with every measure of our success, I’d thought I could leave a bit of the pain behind. Paint it over with something bright, shining, happy.

But, instead, here I was, choosing that memory to wrap around myself, knowing how much it hurt.

Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you. I don’t need to try and earn your love, because I found someone who gives it to me freely. Fuck you. I don’t need to prove shit to you anymore, because I’ve flown as high as anyone could fly and it didn’t make one bit of difference.

I watched the fury on my face reflected in the window, and then I watched it soften as my conscious mind caught up with my ranting one. I started to realize why I had chosen that particular memory at this particular moment. And I started to realize what I could do about it.

---

I parked my rental car outside Caleb’s house and didn’t even bother to grab any of my stuff. I vaulted up the stairs and knocked on the door, desperate to see him.

“Hey!” he said when he opened the door. “I didn’t think you’d come right here. You’ve got to be exhaust—”

I jumped on him, kissing him before he could finish the sentence. Then I threw my arms around his neck and just hugged him, hard. His palm slid up my back, his other arm wrapped around my waist, and he buried his face in my hair.

We clung tight for a few minutes, reassuring each other we were there. Caleb couldn’t have been awake for long, since it was still early. There was no smell of coffee brewing, always the first thing he did upon rising, and the smell of sleep clung to him. I hadn’t even showered after the Chicago show, then had gotten on a plane and come straight here, so I was sure I didn’t smell great, and I hadn’t eaten anything in about twenty-four hours but handfuls out of a tub of staling pretzels backstage.

Still, I couldn’t bear to tear myself away from Caleb, and I tugged him down on the couch with me and tangled our fingers together. I was buzzing with adrenaline and no sleep, but it felt so much better than the numb blankness I’d felt since I played my song for the band in Philly. My head was all fuzzy and my eyes were dry.

“Hey, hey, take it easy,” Caleb said, smiling and squeezing my thigh. “You’re vibrating.”

I nodded and made an effort to calm down, but it didn’t really work.

“I figured it out,” I told him.

“Figured what out?”

“I was miserable after you left. And before you got there, but worse after you left. And then we were in Cleveland—fucking Ohio—and I was thinking about my parents, and about the band, and I realized—I realized, why? Why the fuck am I doing this when I hate it?”

I pressed in closer to Caleb, whose brow was furrowed, and grabbed his forearm.

“I hate it, Caleb,” I insisted. “It makes me miserable eighty percent of the time. Who would want to do something they only loved twenty percent of the time? Like, if that’s how you told people you felt about your job, you know what they would tell you?”

“Uh, to quit, most likely.” He sounded nonplussed.

“Exactly. To quit. To fucking quit! That’s what I want.”

I threw my leg over him so I was facing him on the couch and his hands came up to curl around my hips.

“I want to quit Riven. I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s so obvious, you know, but I just had all this noise in my head, of all the people being like ‘Everyone wants to be famous,’ and ‘People would kill to have your life,’ and, like, ‘You’re living the dream,’ and all that. But just because other people want something and like something and wish for something doesn’t mean that I have to.”

Caleb’s grip on me tightened, but he didn’t say anything.

“I think I didn’t get before how much I hated it, because I didn’t get why I did it to begin with, but then I was remembering, on the flight home. Remembering how bad I wanted to prove to my parents that I could be successful and wanted. And then, before I knew it, we were! And I didn’t even know what it would be. I never imagined what my life would be like. By that time, anyway, it was inertia. You get to be a certain level of famous and then the only thing to do next is for people to try and make you the next level of famous. And I just let it keep going, because…that’s what people did. Only I hate it because it’s not even about music anymore. The one part of it I love, and now the band doesn’t even want that from me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I played them a new song and they didn’t want it for Riven.” I shook my head. “But that’s the thing, see? That’s fine. They’re right. It wasn’t a song for Riven, just like I could tell that your songs weren’t for Rhys. Those songs were for you, and these songs are for me.”

I let out a bark of laughter because it was so simple and so clear now, that it was like going back and watching a movie once you know what the twist is. I could see everything that had happened, and how I’d gotten to this point through a different lens.

“I don’t want the fame, I just want the music. I know you understand that,” I said, and the look in Caleb’s eyes told me he did. “I love writing songs, I love performing, but I fuckin’ hate the rest, man. And I don’t need it anymore. I don’t need the world to love me and I don’t need my parents to love me. I just need you to love me. Because I love you.”

Shock and desire warred on Caleb’s face. Also fear. A lot of fear. But I pushed on because I had to make this a reality. I had to get it all out.

“I love you so much, Caleb, and–and–and I want to quit the fucking band and I never would’ve seen that I could do that without you. I never would’ve realized that it was an option without you telling me all the time how I didn’t need to take any of the industry’s shit, or play by their rules. And I never could’ve totally admitted that I want to leave Coco and Ven and Ethan if you didn’t show me how it feels to have someone who actually cares about me.”

I was breathing hard, so overwhelmed and excited and on edge that I could hardly see straight.

“You helped me make this all possible,” I said, my voice softer now. “Do you see?” I leaned down to kiss him because, fuck, I needed him, but he pulled back. His mouth was open and his eyes were wild and he scooted out from underneath me and stood, crossing his arms over his chest and shaking his head.

“Theo,” he said, voice a dark croak. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re tired and stressed—I know how it is right after a tour. You’ve gotta be so wiped. I—don’t make a decision this big like this. Do you wanna go to bed? Here, why don’t you go sleep, and I’ll—”

“Stop it! Don’t fucking patronize me, like I don’t know what I want.”

I stood up and reached for him, hoping he’d say he was joking, or being strangely overprotective, but he backed away from me. He looked so uncomfortable that I started to freak out. How could he not see the immense gift he had given me by showing me that I had freedom? That I had autonomy. That I had choice.

“Caleb, what the fuck?”

“I just don’t want you to make this huge decision just because we’re…you know. I never meant you should give up the band.”

“We’re ‘you know’? That’s…I…what?”

I was losing the thread of the conversation, but my mind was bouncing back and forth between two things. First, that Caleb’s eyes were wide with panic and they had been ever since I’d said I love you. Second, that he apparently didn’t think much of me at all, if he thought this was some childish caprice born of needing a nap.

“All I meant was you should take some time and talk this over with the band.”

“I’m talking it over with you. At least I’m trying to. I’m— I want this, Caleb. I want to be able to walk around with you, like we did in New Orleans, and not have to worry that it’ll end up in the tabloids. I want to have a life that’s about music, but also other things, not about being asked what parties I’m going to after the damn Grammys. And I want…I want you,” I told him, even though it felt like holding out a hand that had already been slapped away.

Caleb patted me on the shoulder, then pushed past me into his bedroom and started yanking on sweats and socks, and shoving his feet into his sneakers.

“I gotta go for a run,” he said, and his voice was tight, caught.

“Now, seriously!? I’m trying to talk to you about something important!”

“I—fuck, Theo, I hear you, okay. But you’re all jittery and manic because of the tour, and it’s not good to make these kinds of decisions in that frame of mind.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “And—and then you tell me it’s because of me, and I can’t. I cannot be the reason you leave the band and give up everything you’ve worked for!”

“I didn’t say that it’s because of you, I said you made it possible! And that’s just it—the band isn’t everything. I don’t want it to be. There’s you, and—”

“Don’t you see that you can’t fucking count on only me! You can’t do anything because of me. I have ruined every goddamned thing I’ve ever touched, let down every person who ever depended on me.” Caleb’s voice had been a roar, and he was clutching at his hair, his face white. He pushed past me to the front door, and when he spoke again his voice was shattered and he looked like a wraith.

“Do you know how likely it is that I’ll relapse? That no matter how hard I try it won’t be enough and I’ll fucking ruin everything? Because I’ve done it before. I’ve done it every time.”

He pulled the door shut behind him, and through the living room window, looking across the garden, earth freshly turned, I watched Caleb run away.