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Informationen zum Autor R. Eric Thomas Klappentext Propelled by his best friend's impending move out of state and inspired by Ferris Bueller's Day Off, sixteen-year-old Harrison plans a farewell through Baltimore that includes a road trip, their first Pride, and a rooftop dance party. Leseprobe 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 ...
