Kings of B'More: List 5

Would it be too much?
If it was, he decided, at least he knew what he wanted on his fancy gravestone at Baltimore Cemetery. He wanted a big pristine rock that read OPEN ME CAREFULLY.

The door rumbled shut behind them, and they were plunged into the darkness of a long vestibule.

And around them, other vibrant beings were suffused with light, lingering in doorways, coming and going. People moving up and down the stairs, glowing like sunrise and sunset.

The inside of the Evergreens looked like it had been restored to the stately grandeur of its original 1800s form—all wood and brass and white light pouring in from huge square windows across velvet furniture.

The sound, the tenor, the tone; the fixtures, the decor, the knickknacks secreted on a shelf that nobody would even see; the energy, the vibrance, the comfort.

Over the din, Harrison could make out a nearby instrument plucking out a familiar intense rhythm.

She held a bouquet of gold roses in one hand, which she was using to gesticulate wildly.

They're a mogul in the making. Took that big money and plunked it down here.

Harrison and Linus stood side by side in the middle of the room, in front of a large gilded mirror that stretched to the ceiling.

He would just sit here, in the hip-hop room, and manifest the spirit of dancing.

"Your face will always tell the truth, Harrison. When you and me were in the kitchen this morning, you kept looking from me to the tote bag, and I said to myself, 'He's up to something.' So shifty! And, lo and behold, I looked and you were stealing the kitchen iPad."

They found the group clustered in the middle of the roof-deck, a de facto dance floor slowly forming around them.

And now another song, bass-heavy and gritty. A Baltimore club remix: shouted refrains over old-school samples, all to a relentless beat.

He turned to Mazz and tried to communicate the same thing. That electric connection that he and Linus had didn't quite translate, but Mazz seemed to get the gist nonetheless.

There was no such happening, although a drag queen and a drag king were engaged in a walk-off near the booth and the crowd had parted to give deference to royalty.

The roof went wild; people were delirious with rapture.

She looked so new then, with her freshly shorn locks and her glamorous jumpsuit and the power of the party and the song and some other mysterious life force pulsing through her.

The Quatch clique burst through the barn door, a noisy jumble, and started walking up the street.

"You wanted to see the world," Linus's dad said. An accusation. A barb.

He wondered if, in these moments, his parents were finding their own words or tamping down their frustration, or worse, ratcheting it up so that their children knew they were serious.

Here and there, he saw people in rainbow clothes or bright wigs or branded company Pride shirts, the flotsam and jetsam of the dissolving day.

One of them brandished a plastic sword triumphantly.

Harrison wiped his nose and held his hand there, wrist pressed into his cheekbone hard to staunch the flow.

Sheree nodded like she could hear the myriad sentences running through Harrison's head.

Linus had always wondered why his dad was so precise in the car, so polite, so careful. It wasn't that he acted some other way in real life, but there was a delicateness to the way he drove his car that didn't carry over anywhere else.

But what he wanted was...whatever that ridiculous list that Harrison had shown him on the train said. Or, no, not even that. Because that had been a plan that quickly went awry.

He thought back through the day as if scrubbing a video in reverse—dancing on the rooftop with Mazz and Harrison and all of Baltimore, sailing down the waterslide in tandem, getting a goodbye gift from Mr. Mirepoix, the cat who did not want to give them change at the ATM, and the self-portraits—the sight of himself, a version of himself, a dream of himself, on the walls of the museum.

Linus blew his nose into one of his father's complimentary rideshare tissues.

Linus cried harder, his head lolling against the window.

But Brother Aldo was not there; it was just him and his mom as he drove down an empty road near the pool, going ten miles per hour and yet sweating profusely.

Her hand was definitely gripping the door handle like it owed her money, but everything else about her was chill, and she'd kept up a monologue as circuitous and unending as their trip around the park in a performance that rivaled Motormouth Maybelle in Hairspray for stamina.

"Profound talks from Mom," she said.

One of the boys had Iocs, and the wind and the force of his movement pulled them up and back, like the sky itself was tousling his hair.

As if pulled by the same tether, the boys hunched forward, grabbed the handlebars of their motorbikes, and zipped in front of the car, crisscrossing and changing places. Two sentinels rotating their stations.

And then, with that same unfathomable silent communion, the boy with Iocs reached two hands down; the other boy reached one hand down; they steadied themselves; they sped up; and they sailed off into the night, weaving in and out of lanes, as if all of it—the traffic, the city, the world at large, was just water to be traversed.

They swooped around the Baltimore version of the Washington Monument—shorter and rounder than DC's, but still imposing.

"Oh, good!" Wally said with the kind of nonchalance used for finding a movie you like on TV or discovering there was still leftover pasta in the fridge.

His demeanor dropped into a more serious place.

One of the tables at the restaurant burst into the chorus of "Press the Sky Higher," screaming and singing with abandon.

Harrison opened the photo again. It was just a simple, timeworn gravestone, not fanciful or ornate like the ones in the cemetery where they'd spent so many afternoons talking and wondering and worrying and hoping and living.