Kings of B'more, page 3
Linus wasn’t envious. Envy was dramatic. Well, maybe he was a little envious. Or, more than that, just sad. But mostly he understood that sometimes people forget about you if you’re not there. And Linus couldn’t let that happen again.
Before his dad had made a complete mess of Linus’s life, Linus had decided he was going to try to hang out with some of the people he liked the most at his own school, invite them to hang with him and Harrison. Phil Truong, Fab Figueroa, Mazz Reber. A whole group. Now Fab was even texting him to see if he was hanging out that weekend.
“I don’t really understand why we’re talking right now, but this is cute, I guess.” Fab’s warm, laugh-filled voice was coming through Linus’s cell. He hadn’t had the energy to keep the phone to his ear, so he’d put it on speaker and was now lying back on his bed, staring at the ceiling again, and yelling into the air like Alexander Graham Bell testing out his first prototype.
“Oh!” he shouted into his empty bedroom and in the general direction of his phone. “I thought it would be easier if I called to answer your question.”
“Uh. Okay. Great,” said Fab. “Well, I’m glad to hear your voice. And I’m excited to get a live answer to my text question, which was: Are you going to Pride?”
“No.”
There was a long pause, and then Fab said, “Is there more to that answer?”
“No,” Linus replied.
“So glad we are speaking on the phone about it. What’s the deal? Your dad won’t let you?”
“I’m moving away!”
“What?! But it’s Pride!”
Linus could only moan in response.
“Oh, Linus. I’m going to miss you. I like you a lot. Where are you moving?”
“South Carolina.”
“Lucky for you, I have this girl that I was kind of dating who lives in North Carolina, so if you’re looking for local lesbians, I can hook you up,” Fab said. At the same time, a text came through, also from Fab, with a photo of a girl with braids piled high on her head. Linus presumed this was the girl from North Carolina, but really she could have been anyone.
“Did she use to live here?” Linus asked.
“No. We met because we just started commenting on each other’s fanfics, and you know how that is.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“Linus, shut up! Yes, you do. You read the one fic I wrote. Remember when Mr. Mirepoix was doing that unit on the forties and he let me turn in that story about two women falling in love while working at an airplane factory during World War II instead of, like, writing a paper? I put it up on my site and then she liked it and then I liked her thing about Storm from X-Men and Okoye from Black Panther falling in love. And it went on like that.”
“Have you met her? In person?” Linus asked.
“No! How am I supposed to get to North Carolina? That’s kind of why we broke up, to be honest. Long distance is hard. But it’s very much not a big deal, so don’t say anything about it when you meet her.”
Linus sighed loudly and sat up. He could hear his father boxing and taping again; he smelled dinner. Tonight’s Doing Too Much feast was shrimp and grits, another South Carolina staple. And another bribe. Maybe if he spent less money buying seafood for these big elaborate schemes, they could afford to stay.
“That’s the problem,” he told Fab. “I just want to keep Harrison in my life. People talk about long-distance relationships, but what is a long-distance friendship? Is that a thing? Friendship is kind of, like, whatever. What is there to hold on to with all this distance?”
“It’s not like you’re moving to Mars. I feel like it should be easier than trying to long-distance date because you’re not thinking about when you’re going to make out or whatever.”
“He’s got a whole life. And he’s going to go off to college. And he’s got all these friends at his school. And . . . he’s my best friend. But maybe he has a bunch of best friends. I don’t know.”
“Linus, this is so dramatic.”
“I know! It’s exhausting!”
“What does your friend say about it?”
“We ain’t talked about it.”
“Why?”
More questions Linus couldn’t answer. Or rather, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to say the truth. Fabiola sighed.
“Well, I gotta admit,” she said, “this seems chaotic. Just tell him what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t do deep feelings, is the thing,” Linus said.
“I don’t mean to upset you, but literally everything we’ve talked about on the phone has been the deepest possible feelings. Like, I never talk on the phone. You called me. On the phone! And jumped into the deep end. And I want to say thank you for trusting me and I def understand. But let’s be real now. Phil and I are best friends and if she ever moved away, I’d call her up and be like, ‘Yo, as you are aware, we’re going to be in each other’s lives forever.’ We’re like you guys: We don’t want to date; we don’t like each other like that, yet we want to talk to each other every day forever. Just tell him. Text him if you don’t want to call.”
“I don’t like texting.”
“Then call.”
“He doesn’t really talk on the phone.”
“You got a real star-crossed friendship here, Linus.”
Thursday
10:30 a.m.
Sunlight invaded Harrison’s room, which was rude. He woke up late—what was there to get out of bed for?—and kicked at his comforter savagely, sending a pile of clothes flying off the bed. He briefly considered that he might not be handling this whole thing about Linus leaving very well. But what did handling well mean at a time like this? Everything everywhere was, objectively, terrible and would be terrible for, pretty much, ever. Harrison slammed his head against his pillow and squeezed his eyes shut. He knew he was veering dangerously close to the point where he started to annoy himself with how bad a mood he was in. It happened often. He’d be really digging into a sulk, basically bathing in an internal tantrum, when the whole thing would dive off a cliff and it suddenly wouldn’t be satisfying to be upset anymore, but rather just frustrating.
He knew that if he stayed in bed much longer, he would have no hope of rescuing his mood. He had no idea where his phone was, but judging from the context clues of the sun shining in his window and the absence of the sounds of his parents getting ready, he knew it was after 8:30. He didn’t have to work at BaltiTours—the place where he and Linus worked together but mostly just talked to each other all day. This made things even worse, since it meant he wouldn’t have an excuse to lobby Linus in the ticket office between customers. They usually hung out on their days off, but Linus’s words “a clean break” floated back up to the top of Harrison’s mind, and he wondered if that break had already started. If Linus had wanted to hang out today, why wasn’t he already there? What was he doing? Packing? Practicing his southern accent? Forgetting? Anything was possible.
He supposed he could invite Linus over to the Meredith family’s “mandatory fun” movie night, as he usually did on Thursdays, but something in him resisted this thought. Was it possible he was angry at Linus? He was hungry. The crises were mounting, obviously. The night before, he had considered dramatically refusing to eat until Linus agreed to stay. Now his stomach growled, and he decided that the hunger strike could start maybe after breakfast. And lunch. He’d skip dinner. Well, he’d pick at it, perhaps. He wouldn’t enjoy it. No act was too bold if it meant saving his friendship. Wait, movie night meant they were ordering pizza. He’d start the hunger strike tomorrow at the latest.
Should he cry about it? Would that help? Maybe! He scrunched up his face and tried. Nope. How did actors cry? He’d watched roughly six hundred bootleg YouTube videos of people performing “She Used to Be Mine” from Waitress onstage, and like 90 percent of them seemed to be crying. It wasn’t easy to see, though, because a lot of times the video quality wasn’t good or the camera was far from the stage. But Harrison felt pretty confident that most of the actresses were crying as they sang. Shoshana Bean? Absolutely bawling.
He fished around in the tangled mess of his comforter until he found his phone. Left uncharged the night before, it had only 8 percent battery, and his charger was . . . maybe in the sheets, too? He didn’t know. Ah, the desperateness of this time. There was a text from Linus: Hello. What was that supposed to mean? In person, Linus never shut up, but over text he was basically a mime. Harrison decided he couldn’t handle the terseness at the moment. It was all too much. He did the only thing left for him to do in the moment: He cued up “She Used to Be Mine” and played it over and over again until his phone died.
* * *
After a breakfast of a slightly under-toasted waffle, eaten standing up, by hand, with no syrup, Harrison decided that his next healthy coping mechanism would be to sit in the backyard and be miserable in public. Or semipublic, since his neighbors never used their yards and the only person he ever saw when sitting miserably in public was the junkman pushing a shopping cart up the alley.
But, of course, because nothing could go right for him, he discovered Corrine already sitting out there, sunbathing next to a bowl of rocks. Harrison’s trials, it seemed, were unending.
Corrine had come back from college “woo-woo.” Harrison’s sister had always marched to the beat of her own drum. Or, as Harrison might have put it during some of their more contentious battles, Corrine always did exactly what she wanted. But when she’d suddenly returned home a year and a half earlier than expected and taken up residence again in the bedroom next to Harrison’s, something had changed. The posters of Cardi and FKA and Meg came down; a new paint color—purple—went up on the bare walls, and with it an abstract silver mural she’d created herself. She started talking about an app that told her her horoscope every single day, something that neither of their decidedly non-woo-woo parents seemed to take issue with, surprisingly. And, perhaps most vexingly, Corrine had gotten really into rocks. Harrison knew there was another name for the rocks, or a series of names, a whole dictionary of rock words, but he didn’t learn them and he wasn’t trying to. So when he found his sister sitting in their tiny patch of backyard and cement, leaning back in a plastic chair, untwisting her hair, with a kitchen mixing bowl full of rocks sitting on the ground between her feet, that’s what he called them.
“You tanning your rocks?” he said, shutting the screen door behind him. Corrine didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure she heard him or was even aware of his presence, as her eyes were shielded by a huge pair of amber sunglasses. She continued dutifully unwrapping her hair, bundled in tight knots from the night before and soon to be coaxed out and released again into the curly twist-out halo she usually sported. Harrison stepped in front of her, accidentally kicking the bowl. Nothing too hard, but Corrine snapped forward and pulled the bowl back.
“They’re crystals, dummy.”
“Oh, so you did hear me.”
Harrison paused, expecting Corrine to explain why she had a bowl of rocks—excuse me, crystals—hanging out in the backyard with her like it was some old breakfast oatmeal. Corrine’s hands had returned to her hair, searching around her head in a well-practiced order, like she knew every strand by heart. Her shaded eyes, however, had made a brief jaunt to appraise Harrison before returning to a spot on the chain-link fence or maybe some bit of errant grass in the alley or maybe something far beyond that. Harrison rolled his eyes with his whole body and tried again.
“Why are you tanning your crystals?”
Corrine didn’t stop staring into the middle distance, but she did pause her untwisting. “Last night was a full moon,” she said. As if that was illuminating. Thanks for the astronomy lesson. All questions answered. Very thorough. Please get up from the lawn chair now; I need it to sulk. Harrison was so consumed by his own annoyance that he almost missed the fact that Corrine had started speaking again. “I set them out to charge in the moonlight, and now they’re sunbathing for a bit before I take them back inside.” See? That? Woo-woo.
“Woo-woo” was not a phrase that got thrown around all too often in the Meredith household. It was old-timey, like something senior Black folks would say. Which is why Harrison liked it. He’d first heard it from his grandfather on his father’s side, who they called Pop. Pop was always talking about his roommate, Phyllis, who liked incense and said she was a little psychic. There was nothing especially weird about that—Phyllis had predicted that Harrison would not get cast as Tevye in Fiddler, after all. But to be honest, that was clear to everyone. Nevertheless, sometimes her habits got on Pop’s nerves. It was mostly the incense. “I have sensitive sinuses,” he’d explain. And then he’d go on to say that he had no idea why he chose to let someone as woo-woo as Phyllis move in to his house and how he didn’t even need the money, it was just the company, and on and on and on. “Woo-woo,” it seemed, could mean something as simple as accurately casting a high-school play or as complex as casting a spell. Or whatever it was that charging crystals in the moonlight was meant to accomplish. Harrison had no idea.
“What happens after they recharge?” he asked.
Corrine sighed and looked at him. “Do you really care?”
“I mean, I did, but if you’re going to be a jerk about it, never mind.”
Corrine shook out her hair, all finished. “They push out bad energy. And they bring in good energy. And I need as much of that stuff as I can get. It’s like anything—praying or yoga or setting an intention. But it doesn’t just come from inside you. You’re tapping into something powerful in the universe. We’re all so small; why wouldn’t we want to do that?”
Sometimes Corrine actually made sense to Harrison. They had always seen the world differently, their whole lives, but since she’d come back, that had been a problem. She might say they had different energies. He might agree. But when she talked about connecting to something larger in the universe, something pricked up in him and he remembered the thing that hadn’t been far from his mind since he heard Linus’s news. Would that Harrison had a way to harness some power in the universe to stop this move. Would that he had any power at all. The world of adulthood and adult decisions swirled around them, moving them like chess pieces. Everyone said that he had big choices to make coming up—classes, tests, college, literally the rest of his life—but all of it seemed so removed from his current life, where other people made choices around him and he just had to react. He just had to deal with it. He just had to accept it and move on. He hated that. He needed a plan. Maybe he should get a crystal!
“Can I hold one?” he asked, already reaching down.
Corrine swatted his hand away. “Harrison, you have atrocious energy! Absolutely not.” She looked at him in the face now. “Wait, what’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s something going on with you.”
“Oh God, who are you? Phyllis?” he said. Corrine laughed at that, big and loud. A burst of energy.
“Next thing you know, Pop is going to start calling me woo-woo,” she said. Nobody tell her that Harrison had already gotten there first. “No, seriously, though. You look miserable. What’s wrong?”
Harrison kicked a pebble into the alley behind the house. “Linus is moving away. To South Carolina.”
“Oh no! That sucks. I’m sorry.” She sounded genuinely sad for him. “When is he moving?”
“Sunday.”
“God, that sucks even more. Aww. I know y’all are close. I see you two huddled up all the time in the living room, clucking. It’s nice to have a best friend.” She shrugged. “He is your best friend, right? I can never tell. The Phalanx of Sad Boys has so many rotating cast members.”
The Phalanx of Sad Boys was Corrine’s nickname for Harrison’s general group of friends. He wasn’t even sure who was supposedly in the Phalanx (whatever a phalanx was). Definitely Linus. And Dario Lushovsky. Dario, one of Harrison’s classmates, was the king of Sad Boys—handsome like the White Boy of the Month on a cable-TV show about morose teenagers, Dario was full to the brim with abs and emotion. He would often send text messages that were just the entire lyrics of a particularly emo song, including all the choruses. He loved crying. The world was not big enough for Dario’s feelings, but he didn’t seem to notice. One of Harrison’s favorite facts about Dario was that Dario had a fainting couch in his bedroom at his mom’s house. Harrison had seen it. It was, to be honest, just a regular couch, but Dario had collapsed on it in a flurry of limbs and groans one afternoon after one of the lacrosse players he was in love with took too long to text back.
To be honest, Harrison actually did like Dario. It was nice to be with someone who was prone to drama but not formally involved in the theater department. Dario was real-world dramatic. They’d hung out a lot freshman year and the summer after, but then Linus had met Dario and quickly developed a crush on him. Harrison got tired of hearing Linus casually (but not casually) asking about Dario when Harrison and Linus would call each other after school, and he certainly had had enough of Dario daydreaming about Linus every minute he was in school. Why didn’t they just text each other and leave him out of it? Annoying! By sophomore year, Linus had stopped asking, which was a relief. But the last time Harrison had seen Dario before the school year ended, Dario cornered Harrison by the Meditation Room and declared, “I am desperate to see your handsome melancholic friend with the bird body. I think Linus may be my husband!”
“Okay,” Harrison had said.
Who else was a Sad Boy? Possibly Aparna Aiyar. She was not a boy, but she was who Harrison hung out with the most besides Linus, so it’s possible that Corrine was just lumping her in with the rest. She had a lot of dark clothes, and Harrison’s dad had once called her Lydia Deetz, so that was a clue. Harrison was fairly certain that Aparna wasn’t sad, though, despite her sometimes intense way of seeing the world. She was “realistic,” she said, which was kind of true, except that her reality always seemed to swan-dive into hijinks. She would definitely have objected to this characterization—“Things just happen around me, Harrison! I am literally just trying to have a normal life.” Still, he lived for stories about how her attempts to beat her work nemesis at the lotion and soap store where she worked after school somehow spiraled into all-out battles that left the break room covered in glittery bath-bomb dust. As their school’s best stage manager, Aparna always had some manner of backstage farce to disentangle. And, as the child of two consummate do-gooders who had jobs Harrison didn’t quite understand, Aparna was always getting herself caught up in social-justice drama involving petitions and invisible fences and some app that half the neighborhood used for snitching on others that, according to Aparna, was rife with terrible punctuation. Harrison thought Aparna was too busy to be sad.
