Kings of B'More: List 1

His voice carried over sprawling green hills and into the city beneath them, startling a couple of nearby crows into flight.

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.

"There's no place like this," Harrison conceded, still refusing to acknowledge that he was in the presence of a comedy genius.

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.

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!"

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.

It seemed everyone in the past had a fanciful name, like something out of a folktale. He wondered when names got so boring.

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.

They were entering the eleventh grade and were on the precipice of, well, everything. The horizon of standardized testing and college and, beyond that, adulthood was filled with terrifying unknowns and looming pressures, and every time they talked about it, they got overwhelmed. The future wanted to eat them alive.

Linus's dark skin wouldn't fit in at the cemetery, but everything about his look, even the way his purposefully oversized clothes seemed to hang off his wiry frame, seemed like art.

"Now you sound like my dad." Linus looked at him askance.

Prior to Mr. Mirepoix, Linus and Harrison's regular afternoon phone calls had mostly consisted of Harrison filling Linus in on the drama from the Plowshares drama department. But with the advent of AP World History, suddenly Linus had urgent daily updates. It was clear that Linus idolized Mr. Mirepoix.

He said that when Mr. Mirepoix talked about world events, all the trivia and little-known facts and ideas in Linus's head organized themselves in a way that felt revelatory.

Mr. Mirepoix had offered that there was a point when he was young when the Titanic was literally all anyone talked about. Linus was agog.

One minute you're learning about rebuilding Europe after World War II, and the next minute Mr. Mirepoix is casually dropping an anecdote about the merchandise counter at London's O2 Arena.

She'd blasted off from high school, a rocket of promise, and then, midway through her sophomore year of college, came plummeting back to their parents' house, a strange and surly version of herself.

Was it unusual to think one's friend was beautiful? Uh, maybe. Depends on who your friend is, Harrison surmised.

They were in middle school at that point, and when the pandemic hit, their lives collapsed into their respective homes and whatever they could find online.

He stole Harrison's entire line! No credit given! Grand larceny!

Every time they hung out, Linus felt like he understood life differently. Everything felt more expansive. More possible.

Harper was one of the better schools in the city, but it seemed to exist on a totally different world from Plowshares, the intimate private school in the suburban county that Harrison's parents drove him to every day.

Tonight's Doing Too Much feast was shrimp and grits, another South Carolina staple.

Everything everywhere was, objectively, terrible and would be terrible for, pretty much, ever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nevertheless, sometimes her habits got on Pop's nerves. It was mostly the incense. "I have sensitive sinuses," he'd explain.

"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).

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.

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.

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.

She set the bowl on the railing. It looked precarious, but maybe it was being balanced by space power.

She swept into the house and let the screen door slam behind her—a huge transgression if their parents were home.

Harrison heard it so many times wafting through the air over the scuttle of the neighborhood that he knew all the lyrics by midafternoon. He finally gave up and retreated to the air-conditioning. He could put up with the oppressive heat, but the ubiquitous song of the summer was a bridge too far.

Normally Harrison would respond to one of Linus's oblique messages by just calling, which was what Linus wanted anyway.

He went to another pile of clothes, picked up a shirt, sniffed it, and put it on. It was snug and uncomfortable and clung to the parts of his body that he, honestly, felt ambivalent about but which seemed to be a point of commentary for everyone else.

I don't know what kind of entertainment they have down in Charleston. Do they have movies? I don't know. Like, for all I know, it's cotillions and Jack and Jill dancing or some such.