The trick, for him, is to look at every member of the audience and to try to make a connection-the perennial new-kid stance. Touring has helped Khalid shed some anxiety about performing. Photographed by Ed and Deanna Templeton, Vogue, July 2018 “I had a lazy son, you hear me? He was lazy.” (“But I’ll keep your number saved/’Cause I hope one day you’ll get the sense to call me,” Khalid sings.) “I would hear him singing in the bathroom-very, very, very loudly,” Wolfe tells me, “but I had no idea he was writing songs, that he had that capability, until he let me hear ‘Saved.’ ” Wolfe was floored. Like “Location,” the song gestures to love and dating and the digital detritus of an expired relationship. Then he recorded “Saved,” a melancholy “one that got away” ballad inspired by the girlfriend he had left behind in New York, in a garage studio in El Paso. He began posting raw voice notes, captured with the voice-memo app on his phone, on Twitter. Khalid wrote throughout his senior year, pouring into his compositions the loneliness and longing-but also the exuberance and hope-of being a high-schooler. I looked up to her and wanted to do what she was doing.” “I just sat in that hospital bed and I thought, Damn, I need to do something to change the way my life is going.” He started writing music-partly as therapy, he says. Then a car accident landed Khalid in the hospital, and while the incident wasn’t serious (or his fault-he was in the backseat), it made him think about how he was spending his time. “When all of the celebrities started putting it on their Instagram,” Khalid’s mother, Linda Wolfe, tells me, “we knew that it was something.” The single now has more than 280 million plays on YouTube. People began to recognize Khalid on the street. Within two weeks of her endorsement, the song blew up in El Paso. On graduation day, Kylie Jenner, who has been known to boost artists from relative obscurity to the top of the charts, shared Khalid’s song “Location” on Snapchat. In the weeks following prom, the momentum behind his music continued to build. “But I did it in a way I felt was deserving, because I’m a decent human being and not some superevil kid who just came in and was like, ‘Whoop! Now it’s mine!’ ” It’s a golden late afternoon, and Khalid is smiling and avoiding my eyes, both kidding and not. His photo shoot has wrapped, and we’re sitting inside the wardrobe trailer at a beach just south of Los Angeles. “I stole their joy,” Khalid, now 20, tells me. After he was crowned, the prom queen refused to dance with him. Khalid released some of his captivating, melodic songs online ahead of the big night and started getting the kind of music-industry attention not usually directed at high school seniors. Kids start angling for the honor in middle school, so when the singer-songwriter Khalid-then just an eighteen-year-old recent transplant from New York-joined the fray, it rubbed a few of his classmates the wrong way. Getting elected prom king in El Paso is a big deal.