Kings of B'more - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R. Eric Thomas is the bestselling author of Here for It, or How to Save Your Soul in America, a Read with Jenna book club pick featured on Today and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is the co-author of Reclaiming Her Time, a biography of Rep. Maxine Waters. He is also a television writer (AppleTV+’s Dickinson, FX’s Better Things), a playwright, and the long-running host of The Moth in Philadelphia and D.C. For four years, he was a senior staff writer at Elle.com where he wrote “Eric Reads the News.” Kings of B'more is his YA debut. Learn more at rericthomas.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Wednesday

2:00 p.m.

“Now, this is living,” Linus said, standing in the middle of the empty cemetery.

Harrison ignored him.

Linus swooped into Harrison’s eyeline. His height made his animated face unavoidable even though Harrison had developed a sudden intense interest in a cloud. Harrison stared back as if to say You’re really trying it.

Linus wiggled his eyebrows. Do you get it?

Yeah, Harrison got it. Hilarious. Gets more hilarious every time we visit.

“Now, this is living!” Linus repeated, this time calling out triumphantly into the endless June sky. His voice carried over sprawling green hills and into the city beneath them, startling a couple of nearby crows into flight.

Baltimore Cemetery was a huge, old-timey hillside burial ground packed to bursting with elaborate historical grave markers and, tucked among them, two sixteen-year-olds pretending to be annoyed with each other. Their trip, as always, was Linus’s idea. The main purpose of the space aside, Linus’s affinity for this cemetery wasn’t morbid. They always came in daylight, and Linus was primarily interested in the space between the dates on each marker and what had happened within it. To Harrison’s mind, the thing that kept them coming back was the fact that it didn’t feel creepy or forbidding, but rather that it was one of the most wide-open, awe-inspiring spaces they’d ever encountered. Here amongst the stone and the crows and those who belonged only to history, they felt like they’d stumbled into a dazzling new perspective on a city they’d always called home.

Now, this was living.

“There’s no place like this,” Harrison conceded, still refusing to acknowledge that he was in the presence of a comedy genius. Linus thrust his arms out now and spun in a slow circle. Very Sound of Music, except these hills were not alive. If the hills were alive, he and his friend would be in some trouble, and the next bus wasn’t coming for another twenty-five minutes. Linus plopped himself down onto a patch of grass and gazed up at a twelve-foot blue-gray angel standing on top of a gravestone. Harrison stepped over Linus’s legs, wandered around the base of the gravestone, and made his way to the asphalt driveway. He cast a look back; Linus was the one staring up at the clouds now, not a care in the world, it seemed.

“You going somewhere?” Linus called.

“Just—Nowhere. I’m still here.” He couldn’t stop moving, fidgeting, futzing with his glasses. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t going anywhere, but he sure was in a hurry to get there.

Harrison turned and faced the horizon. The cemetery rose up at the end of flat North Avenue like it was built upon the back of a poorly disguised dragon. From the top, you could see all the way downtown to the Harbor south of them, all the way to the tall, narrow houses of West Baltimore, where Linus lived, north to the slightly nearer neighborhood with the wider, shorter homes, where Harrison lived, and out to the docks and highways in the East, through which the city dribbled out into the water in rivulets. If it weren’t, you know, a final resting place, Harrison would have thought it rather serene, like a statue garden. Or maybe that was why it was serene. He didn’t know. It unnerved him, but the fact that it didn’t unnerve Linus gave him license to see it in a different way.

No shade to all the souls gathered there, but they did have a favorite amongst all the statuelike gravestones. It was the one against which Linus was leaning—a tall angel atop a grave from 1860. She had a bowed head, and from one raised hand she pointed her index finger skyward. The first time they’d seen it, Harrison had said, “She looks like she’s at a party, going, ‘Yes! They’re playing my song!’” Linus had laughed so hard, he fell over. They dubbed her “DJ, Turn It Up!”

Though the cemetery was open to the public, that summer it felt like it belonged only to them. An old station wagon sat by the gate most days, and initially the boys held their breath, waiting to be chased away, as if their mere presence were evidence of a crime. But no one ever came. A rarity, a respite. And so they would take the bus from the middle of the city to trek up the hill more and more frequently. They came to wander and to talk and to gaze into the horizon from the only place where they could find it in every direction.

Now Harrison gnawed on the corner of his thumb as he leaned over to look at the name carved on a squat rectangular stone. It seemed everyone in the past had a fanciful name, like something out of a folktale. He wondered when names got so boring. He wanted to live in a world that was just a bit more eccentric. Not the past, he’d correct himself quickly. The past was not exactly ideal for two Black queer boys. But a version of the present that had a bit more magical potential.

This particular stone left a little something to be desired in the name department. It was just a block that bore the word father. Simply father. Father to us all. Next to it was a block of the same size and shape that readmother. So, that’s the family. Linus came over and sat next to father. Family meeting. Harrison forced himself to sit down, too. They were surrounded on all sides by statues—many ten or twelve feet high—columns, and figures, and vases, and plinths carved to look like they were shrouded in cloth. Some stones had become discolored—brown, black, gray, with a splash of mustard-yellow moss on a few. Often the graves were slightly tilted, leaning forward or to the side, as if the dragon had stirred in its sleep ages ago. Harrison looked over at Linus and decided that he was uncharacteristically quiet today. Or maybe it was just that Harrison was full of internal chatter. There were times, Harrison thought, that they were totally in sync, like when they communicated without bothering to use words. But there were still times when Harrison wondered about the mystery of his friend and the mystery of himself. Linus always had a lot to say—more questions, more ideas, more grand plans, more jokes. This was the way Harrison preferred it. Most of the time in life, Harrison felt like he could never find the right words despite everything going on inside. He realized that the moving, the fidgeting, was the same feeling he got right before going onstage in a play at school—like there was a motor sputtering somewhere between his chest and his stomach. Like there was more energy inside than scientists recommend. Like, well, like he was anxious. More than usual. He stopped gnawing on his thumb. That was it—Harrison was anxious, and if there was ever a person not to be anxious around, it was Linus.

Harrison’s strategy for avoiding being anxious mostly consisted of declining to have outside thoughts, only inside thoughts. During rehearsal at school once, it had been explained to him that the reason there are songs in musicals is because when characters can’t find the words to express themselves, they sing. The songs aren’t happening in real life. They’re the interior life, the better life, the bigger self. That was Harrison. He was a song, he thought. He would never say as much, of course. Or sing it, as it were. Judging by the parts in which he was cast, his musical talents were something of an open question. But it was a fact he carried inside himself, like the fact of his and Linus’s friendship, that had finally felt cemented that summer.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I have an idea,” Harrison said, at last giving voice to...