All Shook Up (4 page)

8. The Domino Effect

Elvis was one problem. School was another. Before coming to Chicago, I’d been to only two schools in my life, both of them in Boston. Which is why I’d been dreading the whole possibility of going to a new one, even if it was only for a few months. What if it turned out to be one of those tough schools—the kind of place they show on the evening news where kids get clobbered by school bus thugs?

I held on to the slim hope that maybe my dad would completely forget about enrolling me in seventh grade like he forgets his car keys, his sunglasses, his cell phone, and his mind on a daily basis. If I was lucky, maybe I could spend four months in Chicago free and clear of teachers and homework. Unfortunately, I’d only been at his house for about a week when he brought up the subject. We were eating lunch one afternoon and he said, “I need to buy some more milk and get you signed up for school, don’t I?”

In case you’re wondering about the connection between buying milk and enrolling me in school, it turns out that the Dairy Barn grocery store where my dad buys his milk just happens to be across the street from the school. So if we hadn’t run out of milk, would he have totally forgotten about signing me up for seventh grade?

Possibly.

However, before I set foot in any school building with him, I had already decided he was going to make a few changes. Like wearing a hat. And socks with his sneakers. And a normal, non-parrot (or any other type of wildlife) shirt. I wasn’t taking any chances that somebody would see my dad’s Elvis hair or his weird clothes and start rumors about me before the school year even got started. I could hear it now:
You know that new kid? His dad thinks he’s Elvis. Ya-hah-hah….

Talk about an easy target.

“You gonna wear your Cubs cap?” I suggested as we were leaving for the Great School Sign-up Experience the next morning. Except for his hair, everything else about my dad looked fairly normal that day.

“Something wrong with my hair?” he said, reaching up to check.

“It’s sunny outside.”

My dad glanced out the window at the sky, which was totally cloudy. “No, I’ll be fine.”

“It’s supposed to get sunny.” I knew my voice sounded desperate.

My dad gave me an odd look, but he pulled his Cubs cap out of the jumble of coats and shoes in his hall closet and tugged it on his head before we left. “How’s that?”

“Great.” Actually, you could still see the bottom edges of the sideburns, but they didn’t draw as much attention under the hat. I figured the other advantage I had was the fact that my last name was different than his, so people probably wouldn’t make the connection between our names. Normally, I wasn’t too crazy about my last name, which was also my mom’s last name: Greenwood. Sounds like a golf course. But at least it would take people longer to figure out that Jerry Denny, the winner of the Summerland Mall Elvis competition, was related to me.

As we pulled up to my new school, I was surprised by its size. The sign said Charles W. Lister Intermediate. Different wings of the school spread out in various directions like a giant game of dominoes, and we had a hard time finding which part actually held the main office. After wandering around a bunch of empty, squeaky-clean hallways, we finally spotted the main office across from a large plaque showing Charles W. Lister’s face. In bronze. At the top of the plaque, it said
CHARLES W. LISTER (1851–1927).
At the bottom were the words
PIONEER—EDUCATOR—LEADER—FRIEND.

While we were waiting in the office, I started thinking about the various words that might go on a plaque about me:
Josh Greenwood: friend—soccer player—thirteen-yearold.
What else? I couldn’t come up with anything besides
divorced kid,
which didn’t seem like the right kind of phrase for a plaque. And maybe it was better not to have a label that would go on a plaque anyway. There were a lot of bad ones out there: brain, loser, geek, wacko, freak….

“And who’s this?” a voice asked.

My dad tugged on my arm, and we walked over to the tall counter where a handwritten sign said ALL VISITORS MUST SIGN IN. The secretary was a blond lady who looked like she had spent way too much time in the sun over the summer. Her skin reminded me of the color of those boiled Atlantic lobsters they sell in Boston grocery stores.

“This is my son Joshua Aaron Greenwood,” my dad began. “His mother and I are divorced, and he’s been living in Massachusetts for the past eight years….”

Note to Dad: You don’t need to tell this lady our entire life story.

But my dad didn’t seem to get my subliminal message. He went through the complete medical description of my grandma’s injury and explained how I would be staying with him for the next few months or so. When he began telling how he had recently lost his job at Murphy’s Shoes, I could see he was getting dangerously close to bringing up Elvis. I glanced around the office, desperately searching for something to ask a question about. There was a large trophy sitting on the windowsill, and I asked the lady what it was for.

“Our show choir,” she answered, giving me a hopeful look. “We have an excellent music program here. Do you sing?”

I could feel a red warmth creeping slowly up my neck as I told the lady no, I played soccer and baseball back in Boston—knowing, of course, that my dad was just waiting for the chance to jump in and announce how he was the first-place winner of the Elvis singing competition at the Summerland Mall.

However, by some miracle, it turned out that the secretary’s son played the same two sports as me. Thankfully, she launched into a long story about her son’s problems with his baseball coach, and by the time she was finished, the whole topic of singing had been left safely behind.

As my dad stood at the counter filling out the endless school forms, I tried to avoid being noticed by the kids who walked in and out of the office. Even though it was the middle of August, the building was full of kids who must have been there for sports or summer school. Whenever the loud
thwap, thwap, thwap
of their flip-flops came toward the counter where we were standing, I turned slightly to one side and pretended to be studying an important-looking piece of paper taped near my left elbow, titled
MANDATORY FIRE EVACUATION PROCEDURES
.

In between reading useful evacuation advice like
DON’T PANIC
,
PROCEED TO THE NEAREST EXIT
, I also tried to check out what people were wearing, since I didn’t want my clothes to scream “weirdly dressed new kid” on the first day. My usual school style in Boston could be summed up as jeans and T-shirts in some shade of brown, blue, black, or, occasionally, orange because it was my Boston school color. Nothing with stripes or prints. Ever. Which always drove my mom crazy. From what I saw the guys wearing at Charles Lister, I would fit in just fine.

After the paperwork was finished, the secretary handed us a Lister Intermediate School bumper sticker and a gold metallic folder with Charles W. Lister’s portrait on the front.
Pioneer—Educator—Leader—Friend.
“Welcome to Lister.” She smiled. “We’re glad to have you here, Joshua.”

Note to secretary: I am not glad.

As we left, the realization that I was actually going to be walking through the doors of this place in about two weeks began to sink in. My stomach felt slightly sick—like when you are going up to the plate in baseball and there are already two outs and you have the feeling you are about to be number three. That’s the way my stomach felt. Nervously sick.

“You want to take a drive past the old Murphy’s building?” my dad suggested. “See what’s happening there?”

“Sure, okay.”

Anything to get my mind off starting over at a new school, but I didn’t say that.

9. Jerry’s Blue Suede Shoes

Murphy’s Shoes was on State Street, in a small city block of old brick buildings and neighborhood businesses that looked as if they had been there for the last hundred years. On the corner was a pharmacy called Kent’s Drugstore, which always had large and rather scary advertising signs taped to its windows:
HALF-PRICE HEARING AIDS, WHEELCHAIRS, BLOOD PRESSURE CHECKS,
and
COLD RX.

Harpy’s Video came after the pharmacy, followed by a little music store with a dusty-looking guitar display in the front window. Murphy’s Shoes was the fourth, and last, store in the block. My dad drove by it slowly and parked in one of the empty spots out front. The big white-and-green Murphy’s sign was still hanging on the building, but the windows were covered with brown paper and a thick chain was wrapped through the two door handles. It seemed strange to see the building locked up, looking as if somebody had recently died there.

My dad rested his arms across the steering wheel and squinted through the windshield. “Doesn’t seem like anybody has done much with the place yet, does it?” He was silent for a few minutes, just staring at the building. “Lotsa good memories there, right?” he sighed, shaking his head. “Still miss that old place.”

Sometimes I couldn’t figure out my dad at all. One minute, he could be going on and on about how much he liked being Elvis, and the next minute, he could be talking about how much he missed his job as a shoe salesman. It was another one of the things my mother said was a problem with him. He bounced from one idea to the next. It was hopeless to try and keep up.

“I thought you didn’t like selling shoes,” I replied, playing with the window button, pushing it up and down.

“I never said that,” my dad insisted. “I liked Murphy’s. I just wanted to be more of a big shot—you know, running my own store someday.”

“Your own store?” I couldn’t picture my dad running a store.

Dad tossed his baseball cap into the backseat and rumpled his Elvis hair with his fingers. “Let’s get a closer look at the place,” he said, jumping out. We walked up to the windows, hoping to see between the sections of brown paper. “You know what I’d call my own place?”

“No,” I said, trying to check out if the old Chiclets gum machine was still by the door.

“Blue Suede Shoes,” he replied, turning toward me with a big smile. “Isn’t that a great name?” He gestured toward the Murphy’s sign. “Can’t you see it on a big sign right up there? Jerry’s Blue Suede Shoes. We could play Elvis songs and the salesmen could wear gold sunglasses and big sideburns. Imagine buying your shoes from Elvis.” He grinned. “Wouldn’t that be something people would talk about?”

It was a pretty creative idea, I had to admit. Better than going around town singing in shopping malls and restaurants. But how was he going to buy a store without a job?

“How much does Murphy’s cost?” I knew this question sounded like something my practical mother would point out. She worked in the accounting department of a big company. Numbers were her thing.

“Too much.” My dad laughed. “Way too much for me. But hey, it doesn’t hurt to have dreams, right?” He turned away from the windows and glanced down the street. “How about an ice cream?”

We picked up two cones from the little custard stand across the street from Murphy’s and sat on the bench outside, eating them and watching the traffic go by. “Probably tough going to a new school, huh?” my dad said.

I took a big bite out of my cone. “Kinda, yeah.”

“You’ll do fine, don’t worry.” He paused and I could see a slow grin creeping across his face. “But what was up with all those gold sculptures of that Lister guy, huh? Talk about being in love with your looks.” He pretended to copy Charles W. Lister’s serious pioneer expression on the school plaque, which was funny, even though I tried not to laugh.

At times like this my dad was all right, you know—kind of like a normal dad. If I closed my eyes, I could almost convince myself this was something we did together all the time—hanging out and eating chocolate-dip ice cream cones, with little blobs of ice cream landing like meteorites around our feet.

10. Trouble

My dad may have believed everything at my new school would work out fine, but I wasn’t taking any chances. For my first day at Charles W. Lister, I had three simple rules for myself: 1. Do not say anything stupid. 2. Do not do anything stupid. 3. Do not get lost.

As I got ready for school on the first day, I went over the rules again in my mind. Rule # 3 was going to be the toughest one, I figured, because of the size of the school—if you weren’t careful, you could probably wander around the domino hallways for weeks.

I managed to get lost in the first ten minutes.

I was trying to find my first-period class, seventh-grade English, and somehow ended up in the science wing. After circling through a bunch of lab rooms like a lost rat in a maze, I finally spotted a poster of William Shakespeare hanging next to a set of stairs leading to the second floor.

To be lost, or not to be lost: that is the question….

Once I found the right floor and the right classroom, I tried to look as unpanicked as possible as I slid into an empty seat near the wall. Binders and notebooks got shoved under the chairs, so I shoved mine under my chair. Nobody got out their pencils or any other potential writing utensils, so I didn’t.

However, I couldn’t decide what kind of expression to have on my face. While I wanted to look friendly, I couldn’t exactly sit there smiling like a goofball at nothing. For instance, a lot of kids around me were pointing out how the English teacher had some dried white toothpaste stuck in the corner of his lips. Showing I was interested in being included in the toothpaste conversation meant looking at whoever was talking, but I couldn’t stare at them for too long, especially if they weren’t paying attention to me. And I definitely couldn’t smile AND stare, or that would make me a complete loser. So I spent most of my time looking at things that would not look back, such as the ballpoint pen marks on my desk or the inspirational posters tacked up on the bulletin boards:
ACHIEVEMENT
.
EFFORT
.
IMAGINATION
. They reminded me of the ones on my bedroom walls at home. Same idea. Different advice.

When the teacher started taking attendance, I could feel my heart hammering as the
G
s got closer. I hated having my name called by adults. It always made me nervous. “Joshua Greenwood,” the teacher called out, glancing up uncertainly.

“Over here.” I only half lifted my arm, trying not to be too eager.

“You’re new, yes?”

All of the eyes in the room turned to stare. Imagine being an ape in a zoo with thirty faces pressed up against the glass gawking at you. That’s what it felt like.

“Yeah,” I answered, trying to lean back a little and suddenly realizing the back of the chair was farther away than I thought, so I was stuck in midlean, with nothing but air behind me.

“Where do you hail from, Josh?” the teacher said, in one of those joking ways some teachers use when talking to kids—which you don’t want to get caught in.

I pretended to have no clue what he meant. “Hail?”

When everybody in the room laughed, I knew all of my rules were working out well so far. The teacher gave me a disappointed look, as if he had been hoping for the second coming of Shakespeare and instead got a new kid who didn’t even know the meaning of the word “hail.”

“Where do you come from is what I meant,” he repeated in a clipped voice.

“Boston.” I was careful to pronounce it the way my dad did and not “Bahh-ston,” which is the way they actually say it where I come from.

“Well, welcome to the Midwest,” the teacher finished, as if I was not very welcome, and thankfully moved on to the next person on his list.

One class down.

I only had to repeat I was from Boston five more times, in five more classes. By the time I got to my third class, some of the kids were jumping in to answer the question before I did—which I took as a good sign that I was fitting in okay so far. “He’s from Boston,” they told the World History teacher, who looked as if she had lived through most of the world’s history herself. “Boston, really?” she said, pausing to look over her pair of strange, multicolored bifocals. “How interesting.”

The way she said it made everybody snicker around me, and I could tell I was going to be hearing “Boston, reeee-ally, how interesting” for a while, but it could’ve been worse, I decided.

Lunch went okay, although the cafeteria at Charles W. Lister was huge, way bigger than my school’s cafeteria in Boston. It reminded me a lot of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport—only with a greasy pizza smell wafting through it and people rushing around carrying flimsy cafeteria trays instead of their carry-on bags.

I had already decided to buy lunch on the first day because I didn’t want to risk being the only person at Charles W. Lister walking around with a brown bag dangling from my hand. Unfortunately, the lunch line was located at the far end of the room, and to get there you had to walk through a minefield of kids, teachers, garbage cans, food flying into garbage cans, and custodians pushing around those big gray cafeteria mops. Then, if you made it to the food line in one piece, you had to weave in and out of two sets of doors—one line for ordering, one line for paying—to get your food.

Just to keep from looking totally clueless, I tried to follow whatever the people in front of me were doing. Whatever they ordered, I ordered. Whatever they picked up, I picked up. However, I somehow missed the fact that the cafeteria essentials like plastic silverware and ketchup and mustard were kept on a table
between
the two sets of doors, below a painting of who else:
Good old Charles Lister, Friend of the Condiments.
Since I didn’t figure that out on the first day, I had to eat my boiled hot dog and soggy crinkle fries plain.

One of the moments I had been dreading the most was finding a place to sit after I came out of the cafeteria line. Imagine playing musical chairs with a few hundred people and you have to find an open spot before the music ends. Or before everybody starts noticing you are still standing there by yourself, desperately looking for a place to sit.

Foolishly, I’d been hoping somebody might wave their arm and shout,
Hey, Josh, over here.
Since that didn’t happen, I sat at the end of a table of guys who looked fairly normal. The guy who was closest to me glanced over and said, “Hey” when I slid into my seat. He was wearing a Myrtle Beach T-shirt and eating his fries in bunches of three or four at a time. “You came from Boston, right?” he asked me through a mouthful of fries. Actually, he reminded me a little of my friend Brian, who talked to just about everybody. Brian was like a one-man Wal-Mart greeter.

“Yeah,” I answered. “A few weeks ago.”

“Cool.” Another handful of fries disappeared into his mouth. “I’ve been there twice. I don’t remember much about it, though. Just Fenway Park and that old boat they have—what’s it called?”

“Old Ironsides.”

“Yeah, that was it.”

Nobody else at the table seemed to be paying the slightest attention to our conversation, and the Myrtle Beach guy looked like he had run out of Boston things to talk about. He turned back to his friends, who were now jamming wadded-up candy wrappers into a plastic cup, as if he figured he’d been friendly enough. It gave me the chance to scope out other possible places to sit in the cafeteria.

There was a row of vending machines against one wall, and you could see this was the area where the popular kids sat. Don’t ask me how I guessed that from halfway across the room, but I could just tell. In front of the vending machines were several tables of guys in sports jerseys who looked older, and bigger, and more—what was the word…important? confident? in charge? (Like if you wanted something from the vending machines, you had to get their approval first.)

I seemed to be sitting in the part of the cafeteria where the average kids had their own little cliques: band kids, computer geeks, runners, wrestlers—you get the picture. Against the farthest wall, nearest the garbage cans, were what I would call the leftovers. They were easy to pick out by their clothes, which did not fit in with anything or anybody around them. I swear one of the guys by the garbage cans looked like he was wearing a real dog collar around his neck, with the leash dangling down his back.
Could that be true?
Somebody else had spiked purple hair. And one girl was wearing orange suspenders and camouflage pants.

Note to self: Do not, under any circumstances, sit near those people.

I polished off the last of my mushy hot dog as the bell rang. Glancing in the direction of the vending machines, I decided that one of my goals over the next few months would be to make it somewhere closer to those tables at Charles Lister. I sat in the prime seats with my friends in Boston—so why not in Chicago? It couldn’t be that difficult, right?

Corn chips and Cheez Doodles, here I come….

Heading back to my locker after my last class, I felt pretty good about how the day had gone. All of my rules had worked out okay: I hadn’t done anything stupid, said anything stupid, or gotten totally lost, except for the English class. Nobody had recognized me as being related to the Summerland Mall’s first-place Elvis. And I hadn’t been beaten up on the school bus or harassed for being the new kid, either. Overall, things hadn’t gone too badly, in my opinion.

I was walking down the seventh-grade locker hall, trying to pull the card with my combination out of my pocket, when I noticed the yellow Post-it note stuck to my locker. To be honest, my first thought was my mom and her notes, and my heart jumped a little. I glanced at the kids who were slamming lockers shut around mine, but nobody else seemed to be paying any attention to my yellow note. Or they were pretending not to.

How long had it been there?
With my heart pounding nervously, I yanked the message off my locker and held the square of paper on the other side of my textbooks to read it. This was the moment when the whole first day of successes evaporated right in front of my eyes. Scrawled in purple marker on the note were these words:

Welcome to Lister, Josh Greenwood.

Elvisly Yours,

And instead of a name, there was a sneering purple smiley face.