Kings of bmore, p.10
Kings of B'more, page 10
Linus piped up, “Which is why we should hang out together! Adventure! Adventure!”
Harrison pulled Linus in the direction of the train station.
“I promise you, I am going to have the most unremarkable day!” Aparna exclaimed.
STAGE MANAGER’S REPORT #1
SM: Aparna Aiyar
CAST: Harrison Meredith, Linus Munro (no callouts)
WEATHER FORECAST: 73 degrees, sunny
PROP NOTES: Harrison’s phone screen is so cracked, it’s barely legible.
STAGE MANAGER’S NOTES:
As planned, I met Harrison at the west entrance of the Light Street Pavilion at Harborplace at 8:00 a.m. I took Linus’s phone, Harrison’s phone, and Harrison’s backpack; I downloaded a new messaging app onto my phone to communicate with Harrison’s parents’ iPad. I suggested we synchronize watches, but Harrison didn’t know what that meant, and as it turns out, none of us were wearing watches.
The tour company home base is nestled into one of two long, bi-level buildings called Harborplace. Go out one of the long sides and you’ll find the water of the Inner Harbor ringed with a brick boardwalk and dotted with ferries, historical ships, and paddleboats. If you go out the other side of Harborplace, you encounter a street, and beyond it, a few blocks of tourist attractions, like hotels, restaurants, and a mall called the Gallery. The Gallery is where the Harbor location of Potions is located. I briefly transferred to the Gallery store last Christmas to help out, and so I’m familiar with the harbor and therefore well-suited to this day of walking around the area being someone else.
Cool Aparna once told me that I was a good stage manager because I’m good at being invisible. I don’t think being good at stage management is about being invisible. Everything I do is about visibility. All the work I do makes what you see onstage, in front of an audience, possible. Who do you think tells them to raise the curtain? Plus, the show is visible because I took notes during rehearsal, and marked places on the stage with gaffer’s tape, and called cues, and launched Cool Aparna out of the closet so she could launch into her song as Fruma Sarah, a ghost woman who doesn’t want Tevye’s daughter marrying her still-living husband, Lazar Wolf, in Fiddler on the Roof.
The same is true of copyediting for the school paper. The evidence of my work is clean copy. When a word is misspelled or the grammar is wrong or the meaning of a sentence isn’t clear, the reader gets tripped up, they get confused, or they stop reading altogether.
My work is always visible, even if my hand in it isn’t. Being inconspicuous is a superpower in stage management and in copyediting. Maybe in life, in general. TBD. What I know now is that if I do my job right, what’s conspicuous is the quality, the story, the spectacle, the copy that helps you understand the world in a new way. None of that is invisible work.
But today, I am invisible.
8:40 a.m.
“How much do I owe you?” Linus asked as Harrison made a guess at which door they should take to get to the train platform. They made their way down a staircase. The silver two-level regional train, the MARC, idled on one side, and two conductors waited at the bottom. A good guess! Harrison produced their tickets, handed them to the conductors to be torn, and then handed Linus his stub.
“Don’t worry about it,” Harrison said. “They were cheap. Plus, I’m dragging you along.”
“We work the same job; I can pay my own way, though,” Linus said.
Harrison looked at Linus. I know that, he said silently.
Linus responded out loud, “So, how much?”
“I don’t know—we’ll figure it out later.”
They boarded the train and climbed the stairs to the upper level. Half of the seats faced them and half of the seats faced away from them. The different sets of seats met in the middle, facing each other.
“Which way is forward, do you think?” Harrison said.
A man, previously unseen, leaned his head out of a row in front of them and turned around. “They’re both forward,” he said, never pausing the aggressive manner in which he gnawed on a plastic straw.
“Sir,” Linus said, “that can’t possibly be true!”
Linus looked at Harrison: Here?
Harrison: Sure.
They slid into a seat. They heard someone jog up the stairs behind them. The doors on the train closed. They felt themselves start to move backward. Linus stood up and looked at the man.
“Yo! I told you!” Linus said. The man didn’t feel the need to acknowledge this.
Baltimore slipped away in reverse.
“So what’s the plan? What time do you think we’ll be back? Just out of curiosity,” Linus asked, watching the row homes turn into dark tunnels and then into trees as the train moved.
“Don’t you want to be surprised?”
“Never that,” Linus said. “So?”
“Okay, so the first thing we’re going to do is meet up with Dario.”
“DARIO?” Linus said, a little louder than he intended. Harrison got antsy. What was the volume situation on this train? He glanced around but didn’t see any conductors charging down the aisles to kick them off for noise violations. All clear.
Out of the corner of his eye, Harrison caught the top of a woman’s head a few rows back. She had a twist out, and his first thought was Oh, there’s Corrine. He turned around, realized what a weird thought it was, and turned back. He couldn’t see the woman’s face. He thought about getting up and looking, but he honestly could not justify standing up, scooting past Linus, being seen by the straw-gnawer and everyone, and going to look this stranger in the face. It couldn’t be her. He saw three little curls and decided that all Black people look alike. Ridiculous. He turned back around.
“What’s wrong?” Linus asked.
“I thought I saw my sister,” Harrison said with a laugh.
“Smalltimore,” said Linus.
“Exactly.”
“Okay, hold up. What’s the deal with Dario?”
“He’s staying at his dad’s place in DC, and we’re going to meet up with him so you two can hang out.” Harrison giggled despite himself. Mess. Linus’s eyes got wide.
“Harrison. What did you do?”
“You guys get along. Dario’s been pestering me about hanging out again. That’s all.”
“Say more.”
“There’s not more to say, Linus! I just thought it would be fun.”
“Did you really think it would be fun, though?” Linus said. Normally this would’ve been one of their unspoken comments, a raised eyebrow or a grimace. Linus must have really wanted to know.
“It’s Ferris Day!” Harrison cried, his voice ticking up an octave. “You know how in the movie they do things that are new and scary? That’s this.”
“So we’re going straight to the part where they kick a car out of the window?” Linus said.
“Seeing Dario is not the same as kicking a car out of a window. He likes you.”
“Now it can be said!” Linus crowed. “You are setting us up.”
“I’m providing an opportunity.”
“An opportunity to what?” Linus asked. Harrison shrugged. “You’re so corny.” Over the course of their friendship, Harrison had been characteristically less than talkative about boys. His crushes were numerous, but he thought he wasn’t being obvious about them. He was wrong. Linus would ask him why he never acted on them, and Harrison would wave him off any time he tried to broach the subject. “I’m a virgin who can’t drive!” Harrison would say, paraphrasing a quote from one of the movie night selections.
It’s from Clue, Linus thought.
“You’re not Mrs. Clue,” Linus had said once, over Harrison’s objections. “You need to cut that nonsense out. First of all, you can technically drive. You just can’t pass a test.”
“That claim is disputed,” Harrison said.
“And didn’t you hook up on vacation?”
Harrison waved his hands in front of his face. “It’s not the same thing! We basically just smooched.” Harrison refused to use un-ridiculous words when talking about boys. Making it into some kind of joke robbed the whole subject of its bite, its ability to wound, its way of finding that place inside you that hopes.
When Linus had declared to Harrison back in May, “This summer, I’m gonna smooch,” who else could he have been thinking about if not Dario? Now it occurred to Harrison that maybe Linus had been thinking of someone else, though. Or maybe he hadn’t been thinking of anyone at all. He’d just been feeling himself, feeling the big open sky of the Harbor on a break from work, feeling free or something like it. Feeling carefree, at least. Feeling silly. He was just being silly. Perhaps the fact that he used the word “smooch” at all was a clue. Harrison had missed another one of Linus’s hilarious jokes.
“I wouldn’t hate hanging out with Dario,” Linus said.
“Okay, good,” said Harrison. “I mean, duh.”
“Stop it. What’s after that? Lemme see your agenda.”
“It won’t make any sense to you.”
“I want to make sure you don’t got me doing something I don’t want to do.”
Harrison’s feelings were a little bruised by that. Why would he ever set up Linus to do something he didn’t want to do? The whole point of this day was to prove that to him, but frankly, Harrison thought Linus already knew. He thought Ferris Day would be a reminder. Maybe a wake-up call that they weren’t just two guys who knew each other when. Maybe Linus didn’t know it after all.
“I just made a list of things that we can do that will be memorable,” Harrison said.
“Coming out the gate with Dario is a strong play,” Linus said with a laugh. “What are we building to? Dancing naked on a Pride Parade float?”
Oh God no. Wait, did Linus actually want to dance on a Pride float? Was it too late for Aparna to work her magic? We definitely couldn’t be naked, but we could dance, he thought.
No, this plan couldn’t withstand last-minute adjustments. Everything had to go exactly the way he’d envisioned it, or there would be total disaster.
“Lower your expectations,” Harrison tried to say. What he actually said, by accident, was “Lower your respectations.”
“Did you say ‘lower your respectations’?’ ”
“No. Why would I say that?”
“That’s what I want to know. That’s what everyone wants to know. The whole train is asking.”
Harrison looked behind him again for the woman with the twist out, but now the rest of the train appeared to be empty.
“I got flustered,” Harrison said. “I meant ‘expectations.’ ”
“Are you nervous about this?” Linus asked.
“Don’t ask me that.”
“Why?”
“Because if you ask me if I’m nervous, I’m going to have to tell you that yes, I am nervous, since you can always tell when I’m lying.”
Linus paused for a beat and then said, “Well, I definitely won’t be asking that, then.”
Harrison wondered what Linus was thinking. It wasn’t like them to be at crossed purposes. He didn’t understand why Linus wouldn’t just trust him. What was Linus’s plan for the day? Go to work, go to the library, say goodbye forever. Absolutely not. Harrison decided that whatever weirdness there was between himself and Linus was just a by-product of their circumstances and the change of plans and the general uncertainty of being alive. But he had a plan, and he had to focus on that with the plucky determination of a musical theater leading lady, usually played by Cool Aparna. He fished his notebook out of his tote bag, flipped it open, and showed his list of agenda items to Linus.
Linus read the page and blinked a few times. “Okay.”
“Wow. So excited.”
Linus couldn’t help but laugh. “I mean . . . it’s going to be great.”
9:50 a.m.
Harrison called Aparna in a panic. Called. On the kitchen iPad. He stood outside Union Station in Washington, DC, with an entire iPad pressed against the side of his face. He did not even care.
“Dario is not in this state and now we are here and everything is ruined and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he said all in one breath before launching into the full crisis. He’d texted Dario as they were pulling into the station, as they had previously agreed would happen. Dario had even downloaded the messaging app they’d agreed on the night before, and they’d tested it out. Harrison had thought of everything. There was a small-to-medium flaw in the plan, and that was that Dario hadn’t been sure if his dad would be home or not. But now Harrison and Linus had exited the train station and waited in the area in front of it, which Linus had informed him was called a portico. No response from Dario. Harrison had texted again. He did not know where he was supposed to be heading. They’d decided they could wing it. Harrison had not wanted to wing anything. HE WAS NOT A BIRD.
Dario finally responded. Everything in my life is falling apart at the same time, darling, he wrote. My father and his ogre of a brother woke me at 5 a.m. so that we could go fishing! Male bonding. What a nightmare! I am so exhausted and I am in Virginia! HELP!
Harrison sent a barrage of texts, asking all the very pressing questions that came to mind: when would he be back, what were they supposed to do until then, how far was Virginia from there, what kind of fish, and what about Ferris Day? Dario did not respond. He was sleeping with the fishes. Wait, Harrison was certain that didn’t mean what he thought it meant. In any case, there was no Dario and they were in DC for no reason and he had failed, utterly, already. The sun hadn’t even fully committed to the day yet and he was already done for.
“Harrison,” Aparna said, “let’s pull back and figure out what to do. You’re coming back for Pride; that’s still on. But the next train back to Baltimore is, unfortunately, not for two hours.”
Harrison moaned. They were actually trapped in the nation’s capital like a bunch of British soldiers.
“What is Linus doing now?” Aparna asked.
“He’s inside, reading the information panel about Union Station, of course. He has said six times how he wished that he had his phone with him so he could google questions he has. He’s mad and this sucks and I’ve ruined it.”
“The upside is that you get to hang out now, just the two of you,” Aparna said. “You should . . . you should be tourists.”
“Like, see the Lincoln Memorial?”
“If you want. What does Linus like?”
“Graveyards.”
“Arlington Cemetery is a little far, I think . . . hold on.” Aparna put him on speaker and went silent for a moment. “You could do it. The Metro will get you there and back, but it’s really going to be a tight turnaround. . . .”
“I cannot handle navigating any more public transportation. I took one train; that’s enough for the day. I should get an award.”
“Scratch that, then,” Aparna said. “Look, if I know Linus, and I think I do, the most exciting thing for him would be going someplace where he could read every word of an informational panel.”
“You think I should take him to a museum like we’re on a field trip?” Harrison asked. He was starting to sweat. He vaguely remembered a teacher on a field trip once commenting that DC was built on a swamp. Or was that just something that problematic politicians said? Was it literal or was it figurative? He needed answers. All he knew was that he was very interested in finding air-conditioning relatively soon.
“I mean, would he hate going to the Smithsonian?”
“But it’s not a thing that scares us. That’s the point of Ferris Day. It’s new adventures and lifelong memories and conquering our fears.”
“You sound like a brochure for a cult. There’s plenty of day left. I’ve got you tickets to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.”
“What’s that?”
“The Black Smithsonian.”
“Oh! Oh, that’s a good idea.”
“I know. I just texted them to you. Go get some history. Or some culture!”
Linus emerged from the train station, fanning himself. Harrison hung up the iPad.
“Did you know that before this place got built, this neighborhood was called Swampoodle?” Linus said.
The plot thickens, Harrison thought.
Linus continued, “That sign was really interesting, but I wanted to know more about the architecture, actually.”
“You have so many interests.”
Linus laughed. “I literally have two interests. So—no pressure—but what’s the plan?”
“I don’t think we’re going to see Dario today.”
“Man, that boy is too much. I know you had your heart set on us making out.”
“I did not!”
“You did. Sorry, Charlie,” Linus said.
“Imagine being Charlie,” Harrison said. “Constant disappointment.”
“Wouldn’t be me.”
STAGE MANAGER’S REPORT #2
SM: Aparna Aiyar
CAST: Harrison Meredith, Linus Munro, Dario Lushovsky
PROPS: Digital Smithsonian passes (2)
STAGE MANAGER’S NOTES:
We had a little bit of a rocky first scene, but fortunately I was able to help Harrison avoid a premature end to Ferris Day. He called me, freaking out, and to hear him better, I crossed the street from the Harborplace boardwalk and ducked into the Gallery. I got them set up with tickets to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I waited for a moment to see if there’d be another crisis. I don’t expect crises, but I do anticipate them. That’s the difference.
Out of habit, I rode the escalator up to the second floor and wandered into the Potions location, which was teeming with tourists. Every tourist at the Harbor is looking to be wowed by something enormous and historical and close to a gift shop and a bathroom while on vacation from themselves. You would think that the presence of Potions, the same lotion and soap store as they have at home, might be jarring. But I think the ability to buy a pear-yuzu hand sanitizer from a familiar place is crucial to the adventure.
