Kings of B'more, page 8
Linus was not a musicals person, or really a theater person at all, although he always came to see Harrison’s performances with the rest of the Merediths and he’d even brought flowers one time, even though Harrison had not had a big part and had flubbed the one line he had. Of all the musicals Linus had seen Harrison in, the only one that he seemed to have taken any interest in was Fiddler. He’d gone with Harrison and the cast to the diner after the opening-night performance and then curled up in the booth with Harrison’s phone, googling “Jewish life in Ukraine,” “the history of pogroms,” and “the painter Marc Chagall.” This was Linus really connecting with the magic of theater.
Years earlier, Harrison’s aunt Bella had taken him and Corrine to New York one summer to visit the American Museum of Natural History and to see Hamilton on Broadway. Before he and Linus had reunited, before everything. Harrison had quickly become obsessed, learning the lyrics, drawing fan art, spending a semester with Aparna designing and lobbying the school to let them paint a “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” mural. (They were not successful in this pursuit.)
When Linus came back into his life and their friendship was cemented, Harrison cycled through a number of onstage friendships before figuring out who he thought they were. Elphaba and Glinda? No, they didn’t hate each other at the beginning. Elle and Paulette from Legally Blonde? Oh my god, but who was who? Finally it came to him: they were Revolutionary War besties Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens from the musical Hamilton about Hamilton. Yay, Hamilton! He couldn’t wait to tell Linus, who of course did not get it. Harrison told him to just listen to the album. Linus said, “Thanks, but no thanks, baby boy!” Harrison sent him links to scholarly articles he didn’t understand and a conversation between Ron Chernow and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Linus wrote back, “Interesting!” And then Harrison gave up. He would just know it was true in his own heart, without the validation.
And so it wasn’t until the movie night when Harrison had chosen Hamilton that Linus finally saw what Harrison was talking about and with it the intensity of feeling—the rarity of being seen by someone else, the way they were total badasses. (Harrison had conceded that this last bit was not necessarily true to the friendship he and Linus had, but it was important to have goals.) Harrison remembered now the moment when Hamilton and Laurens say goodbye that is not included on the cast album. When it happened onscreen, Linus had gasped and grabbed Harrison’s arm. “They mean so much to each other!” he cried.
Corrine snorted.
Linus said, “This part isn’t on the album.”
Harrison shot back gently, “You said you didn’t listen to it.”
Linus shushed him and went back to watching the film. It had been a perfect moment. Harrison had everything he needed in that room.
Yes, they would watch Hamilton again today. And Linus, who was still not a musicals person and had gone deep on the fact versus fiction of it all, would love it just as much. Harrison wouldn’t say anything about Ferris Day, in case Linus’s dad was listening. He was so close. It could all go so wrong. But what if it all went right?
He checked the time on the kitchen iPad. They had all evening. They had the rest of their lives. They had—Wait, the kitchen iPad. This was the last piece for the plan. No one ever used it, it didn’t have a lock code, and, most important, it was not connected to Check In. Harrison could borrow it and use it to communicate with Aparna on Ferris Day. He’d found his burner phone, he’d cleared all his obstacles, and he still had enough time for a two-act musical. Harrison was killing it. “Nothing’s gonna stop! Me! Now!” he thought happily, quoting Dreamgirls. Then he revised himself, scanning his brain for a more on-theme lyric. He found it in Hamilton, of course. “Tomorrow they’ll be more of us,” he sang to himself. More of him and Linus, more of life, more. Tomorrow.
Saturday
7:00 a.m.
Ferris Day was beginning, bright and beautiful and top-secret, and Harrison was a mass of nerves. It certainly didn’t help that Corrine was taking roughly nineteen hours to prepare her power bowl. He needed the iPad for his plan with Aparna, and to get it, he need Corrine to finish making her breakfast.
Oblivious to the torture she was inflicting, Corrine hummed to herself as she pulled out the quinoa she’d left soaking in yogurt overnight. She felt him watching her and looked up.
“What?” she said.
“Is that good?”
“Obviously,” she said.
Harrison thought it wasn’t so obvious, considering it had the appearance of regurgitated baby food.
Corrine smirked. “You don’t have to approve, bighead. You can try it if you’d like, but you don’t need to stand here and judge me while you put a bunch of chemicals and complex carbohydrates in your body.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“You never say anything, Harrison. But what you don’t seem to understand is that your face gives you away left, right, and center.” Harrison suddenly felt exposed by every benign thought he’d ever had and implicated by the less-benign plan that he was desperately anxious to enact.
“We have plenty of time,” Corrine said, now methodically picking the best raspberries out of a container.
“Huh?” Harrison said.
“We’ve got plenty of time to get you to work and me to boxing. You keep checking the clock.” She pointed at the kitchen iPad. Caught again! That settled it: He had to get rid of his face.
“Stop stressing out,” Corrine said, slivering almonds and cutting into Harrison’s fragile mental state. “And take your hands off your cheeks. You’re going to irritate your skin.” She sprinkled the almonds on top of the truly unwieldy mound of grains, fruits, seeds, and mush in her bowl, and headed out back. “I’ll be ready to go in twenty minutes,” she said.
As soon as she closed the screen door, Harrison grabbed a grocery tote from under the sink and slid the kitchen iPad into it. He started to pull open drawers in search of a charger cable.
“What are you looking for?” Harrison’s mom had come in at some point without him hearing her. His eyes flitted from her face—currently not suspicious, but one never knows—to the tote bag on the counter—not necessarily iPad-shaped but not not iPad-shaped. This actually settled it: He would have to meticulously go over every interaction he’d had with his family during the past week and ask himself what they knew and how they knew it.
“I’m not looking for anything,” Harrison replied.
“Just taking a tour?” Sheree raised her eyebrows. Good, she was amused by him. This was a positive sign. Unless it was a trap. She put the kettle on and pulled out a tea bag. “You know,” she said, not facing him, “that when an emergency vehicle comes down the road behind you, you need to pull the car over to the side to let them pass, right?”
What . . . was this? Was this code? Was this some kind of a test? Harrison stared at his mother’s back as she unwrapped the tea bag. He pondered for so long that Sheree got tense and turned around to look at him. One of her micro braids slipped out of the bun on top of her head, and she caught it and started fiddling with it to set it right.
“Did you know that?” she asked.
Did he know that? Frankly, it sounded like a good idea, but the truth was that Harrison really didn’t know what he knew when it came to the rules of the road. In the spring semester, he’d endured six tension-filled driving lessons with Brother Aldo from church. He ran a side business called Jesus Is Lord Driving School. Brother Aldo had taught Sheree to drive years before, and then had taught Corrine to drive, and the plan was for him to teach Harrison as well, but what ended up happening was they spent a few weekend mornings together, with Brother Aldo pounding the dashboard and yelling, “Hands at ten and two!” and Harrison screaming into the windshield. It had not been a success.
“I did know that,” he said.
“Oh, good,” she said. She turned back to the counter and grabbed a bottle of honey. What was this mind game? “I couldn’t remember if Brother Aldo included that in the lessons or not. You know it’s been a minute for me. But it’s important.”
“Uh-huh.” Harrison had failed the driver’s test twice and hence had decided that vehicular movement, like other forms of choreography, was not one of his talents.
“When he taught me to drive, Brother Aldo swore, swore that the police have a way of knowing how loud the volume in your car is. I said, ‘Brother Aldo, are you talking about ears?’ He got so mad.” The muscles in Sheree’s shoulders shook as she chuckled. “He was insistent that they had some kind of radar. ‘But they only use it on Black folks,’ he said. I mean, he was probably right. Anyway, when you drive, don’t listen to the radio. I know how you do.”
The teakettle started to fuss.
“What do you mean, how I do?” Harrison asked.
“I’m not saying anything mean. You like music. It’s going to be hard to resist the temptation to blast My Evan Hansel or what-have-you when you’re in the car on your own.” My Evan Hansel?! What world did his parents live in? This was why he didn’t speak: Nobody listened. “You’re off early today, right?” Sheree asked.
Harrison was brought back down to Earth. “Yes,” he said quickly, “but Linus and I are going to the library afterward.”
The teakettle had worked itself up to a low whine.
“That’s fine,” Sheree said. “I’ve got a breakfast meeting and then choir rehearsal, but after that I thought it might be nice for you and me to practice your driving.”
The teakettle started screaming.
“It’s Linus’s last day,” Harrison said.
“I know. That’s why I’m suggesting it. I’ve seen how down you’ve been this week. I thought that working on getting your license might be a nice thing to take your mind off it.”
“We’re going to hang out, though!” Harrison cried. Sheree turned at the sound of his voice. The kettle kept hitting key changes like it was performing “Love on Top.”
“Linus can come! We’ll just be in a parking lot. It won’t be illegal for him to be in the car with me there, I think. Oh! Look at you. Baby, I know you’re scared, but you can absolutely do this. Brother Aldo has a very particular style, and maybe that was a mistake, to pair you two. But I know we can figure this out.”
Harrison dove forward, turned off the stove, and moved the kettle to another burner. “I had to stop the screaming,” he said to his mother.
“Oh, sorry!” she said.
She poured hot water into a mug that read didn’t you have BIG FUN in baltimore? (Harrison had no clue what this meant, but when his father had given it to her mother for her fortieth birthday and said, “This is you now,” she’d laughed so hard, she’d cried. Okay.)
“So, whatcha think?” Sheree said.
Harrison was panicking. He tried to tell his face to stop panicking, but he felt like maybe that was only making his face panic more.
“I was just hoping we could have our last day together just . . . to hang out,” he said, finally.
“You don’t want to say goodbye with a fun and educational driving lesson?” She winked at him.
Corrine came back in and put her empty bowl in the sink even though the dishwasher sign said dirty. She sat down behind Harrison at the counter.
“Suit yourself,” Sheree said. “We’ll do the driving lesson some other time.” She looked past Harrison to speak to Corrine. “You saving this dish for later?” She pointed at the sign.
“Oh my goodness.” Corrine sighed as she got up from the counter. “Harrison, are you ready to go?”
“I gotta get my backpack,” he said. He eyed the tote on the counter between himself and Corrine. If he took it, there’d be questions; if he left it, they might notice it, or they might not. What was the move?! Should he text Aparna for guidance?
“Well?” Corrine said.
“I . . . don’t know where it is.”
“I’ll be in the car. Get it together, if you please.”
As she left, Harrison heard his father play a few notes on his keyboard in the living room.
“That’s my cue,” Sheree said. She kissed him on the forehead. “Have a wonderful day. Feel better.”
“What are you doing in there?”
“We’re just going to run through my solo before your dad goes to work.”
“Okay, so I thought the point of choir practice was to practice,” Harrison said playfully.
“My beautiful boy, the way you get the solo is talent. The way you keep the solo is showing up prepared.” She raised her mug to him in salute and walked into the living room.
Harrison stared after her for a moment before realizing that the kitchen was finally empty. He snatched the tote bag bearing the iPad off the counter, plucked his backpack from under a chair, and rushed to the front door. He couldn’t say for certain that he had the talent to pull off Ferris Day, but he was a Meredith and he was going to show up to Linus’s house prepared.
7:31 a.m.
Linus heard Harrison before he saw him. Well, technically, he heard a car blasting a song from the musical Newsies outside his house. He didn’t know most of the people in his neighborhood, but Linus was willing to bet that folks on this Baltimore street had never had their windows rattled by the sounds of “The World Will Know.” At least not before noon. Linus pulled his uniform shirt over his head and then stopped midway through. He’d actually identified the musical and the song? Harrison’s movie nights had been a real education. Maybe he’d take a theater class in South Carolina. No. No, that was doing too much. Maybe he’d just listen to the songs when he missed Harrison. Linus heard the car door shut and the music immediately switch to a talk radio interview. He pulled his head through his shirt the rest of the way and peered out his bedroom window in time to see Corrine’s car pulling away and Harrison watching it go before surreptitiously peeking into the two bags he was carrying.
Harrison looked up suddenly, seemingly aware of Linus’s gaze. He smiled brightly and waved. Linus waved back.
“Baby boy, what are you up to?” Linus muttered.
He wove his way through the mess of mostly full boxes on his floor. He hadn’t cared enough to fold, label, or tape anything shut. If he had to go to Charleston, he was going to get there a hot mess. He closed his bedroom door and went downstairs.
“Don’t act suspicious,” Harrison said when Linus opened the front door. “Oh, wow, everything’s packed up.” Harrison craned his head to look around Linus, who came out onto his marble steps and pulled the door shut behind him.
“Why would I be acting suspicious?” Linus said.
“You’re not. Just don’t!” Harrison grinned in a way that can only be described as deranged, though Linus was sure that Harrison would have described it as “triumphant.” This much he knew. What was he triumphing over?
“You trying to come in first?” Linus asked.
“No. Maybe. Do you have a change of clothes for after work?”
“Nah. I don’t care.”
“Can you grab some? Just in case?”
“Why?”
Linus felt the door tug open behind him. His father put his hand on his shoulder. “What’s up, Harrison?”
“Hey, Mr. Munro. It’s cool if we go to the library after work today and then to my house, right?”
Linus’s dad turned to Linus. “Is that on the notecard?” Really with this? Of course Linus had filled out the notecard—WORK, LUNCH, LIBRARY—and left it on the kitchen table for Dad even though he did the same thing every day and today would be no different and then after tomorrow his schedule would only have one entry: “nothing.” Linus thought about filling out a bunch of notecards in advance as protest. Instead he just answered the question. Sometimes that was easier.
“Yeah. Except the thing about going to Harrison’s house. I didn’t know about that.”
“You know the rule—”
“All right!” Linus rolled his eyes and brushed past his dad into the house. They didn’t have the easiest relationship, but even he had to admit that this here was on some other level. What other option did he have, though? He’d complained about the move; he’d said he didn’t want to go. He’d even called Aunt Bird, who’d told him, “You’ll have a TV in your room; you like video games? I’ll get Cedrick to give you his old system.” He didn’t want his cousin’s hand-me-downs. Why was everyone doing everything except the thing he wanted? This is the problem with the Munros, he thought as he grabbed the notecard and scrawled HARRISON’S HOUSE AS USUAL—they all have these big plans, they do too much, and it never works out. At least, it never worked out for Linus.
He bounded up the stairs and back into his room. He had no idea why Harrison wanted him to bring a change of clothes to just sit around his living room, but the two bags he was carrying were peculiar. Maybe Linus was being kidnapped. What should he take? He had a new shirt, white with silhouettes of birds on it, draped on the back of a chair. That was definitely coming. What else? He grabbed his MP3 player and headphones from the desk. He opened a random box, which held his old gym uniform, a stack of books, a plant that had seen better days, and a box of cookies. Things weren’t looking so hot.
From outside, he heard his dad talking to Harrison. “Old boy is pissed at me today,” Dad said. Linus knew that Harrison got extremely nervous any time an adult spoke to him or acknowledged his presence. He had to hurry. He pulled a plastic bag out from under his bed, grabbed the gym shorts, stuffed them and the white shirt in, and ran back down the steps.
Linus’s dad was folding himself into his car when Linus stomped out of the house. He handed the notecard through the open passenger window. Dad plucked it out of Linus’s hands and reviewed the amended schedule. “Thank you kindly! What time are you coming back from Harrison’s?” Mr. Munro asked.
