All Shook Up

by Shelley Pearsall

  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.

  11. Trouble, Continued

  As if getting sarcastic “Elvisly Yours” notes on my locker wasn’t bad enough, I had to come home to find an Elvis crisis happening there, too. I had just stepped into my dad’s house and closed the front door with a frustrated slam when I heard his voice calling me from upstairs. “Is that you, Josh? Crap, I’ve got big problems. Can you get up here fast?”

  Right. You’ve got problems? Try mine.

  I took my time untying my shoes and kicking them off. When I didn’t show up as fast as he wanted, Dad shouted again. “Josh, did you hear me? I need you to get up here quick and help me out.”

  Upstairs, I found my forty-year-old dad standing in the bathroom covered in an entire bottle of black hair dye. Yes, I’m being totally serious. Picture somebody who looks like a character in one of those old black-and-white horror movies: Jerry Denny and the Attack of the Bathroom Zombies. He was standing there barefooted with a beige towel wrapped around his waist and Hair Color for Men dripping everywhere. His face, his shoulders, even his feet had hair dye on them. The white linoleum looked like an inkblot test.

  The whole scene might have been hysterically funny if I hadn’t already been mad. Mad about what had happened at school. Mad that my dad was always doing something embarrassing or stupid. Mad that somebody at Charles Lister had figured out who he was and it wouldn’t be long before the entire school knew.

  “Read the directions, Josh,” my dad said in a frantic voice, jerking his head sideways toward a box sitting on the back of the toilet. His hands were stuck inside two ridiculously large plastic gloves (also covered in black dye), so he couldn’t reach for it himself. “How do I get this stuff off?”

  I picked up the Hair Color for Men box and skimmed through the words, which seemed to say a lot about how hair color could make you look younger, more successful, less gray, and less self-conscious—but not much about removing it if you screwed up.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t give any directions that I could find.”

  My dad shot me a frustrated look. “Just gimme the box, Josh. Jeez, I’ll read the directions myself.” He snatched it out of my hands and more hair dye dripped on the extra towels that were crumpled on the floor around his feet.

  “Right here.” My dad jabbed his finger at the side of the box. “What does that say? Read that to me.” I read the microscopic print about using Vaseline or cold cream to remove the dye if it made contact with the skin. “Check in my medicine cabinet and see if I have any Vaseline.” My dad pointed in the direction of the tall wooden cabinet behind the bathroom door. “It’ll be in a plastic jar.”

  I found some in the back of the cabinet after digging around a bunch of shaving cream cans and toilet paper rolls and old shampoo bottles. My dad smeared the stuff on a washcloth and began wiping his face. “I don’t know what the heck happened. I must’ve mixed the formula wrong or something. It just ran all over the place. I thought I could do the color myself—you know, give the sides a little touch-up instead of going back to the salon—but man, was that a mistake.”

  I leaned against the bathroom doorway, not answering him. There was no way I was going to offer to help with any of the cleanup. Let my dad fix his own mess. I had enough of my own. “Can I leave now?”

  “Sure,” Dad said, his voice muffled by the washcloth. “School go okay today?”

  “Yeah, great.” I pulled the bathroom door shut behind me.

  When my mom called an hour later, I told her the same thing. “How was your new school?” she asked. I told her it was fine, figuring when I eventually got beat up by the Post-it note people, she’d find out the whole story, right? And if she asked me why I hadn’t said something sooner about my dad, I’d tell her I’d been trying to handle my own problems now that I was thirteen and all. Then she would definitely send me a plane ticket to Florida.

  Later on, I pulled the yellow note out of my backpack to study it again. Who knew about my dad? And how did they know? I wondered. Had they seen him at the Summerland Mall contest, or did somebody recognize him when we signed up at school? It didn’t take a genius to realize that whoever had found out about my dad wouldn’t keep the information a secret for very long. It would only be a matter of time before all four hundred seventh graders at Charles Lister knew who I was.

  The words on the note were printed in large, bold-looking letters, as if the person writing them hadn’t felt any fear about announcing what they knew. But it appeared rushed, too. The dot over the i in “Lister” was more like a slash, so it was possible the writer had scribbled the note quickly and slapped it on my locker in a hurry.

  I squinted at the smiley face. Would a guy sign a note with a purple smiley face? It didn’t seem like something a guy would do, so maybe that meant the note writer was a girl. But if the smiley face was supposed to be a mocking face—which is how the half-curved mouth looked—then maybe it was a guy.

  God, this was crazy.

  I crumpled the note in my hand and tossed it toward the garbage can across the room. It missed. I got up and nailed it the second time.

  That night, I dreamed about the Charles W. Lister cafeteria. Only, in my dream, my dad’s neighbor Gladys was one of the cafeteria ladies and, strangely, a lot of my Boston friends were in line with me. Everything else seemed fairly normal until I came out of the line and began looking for a seat. I was holding my tray, which had turkey and mashed potatoes piled on it, when I realized the room had suddenly gotten quiet and still. I turned around to ask my Boston friend Brian what was going on, and he said, “Look at yourself, freak,” and I looked down and realized for the first time that I was w
earing a black leather jumpsuit—and I know this sounds pretty disturbing for a thirteen-year-old, but I had black chest hair. Like yarn. Yarn chest hair. In the dream, I kept moving from table to table with my lunch tray and my yarn chest hair, and nobody would let me sit down.

  12. City Street Blues

  The next note appeared on Friday.

  All week, I had been checking my locker after each class. This wasn’t always easy to do, since most of my classes were at the opposite end of Charles Lister. Clutching my books against my chest, I would leap out of my seat the minute the bell rang and zigzag down the hall the way people do when they have about three minutes to catch a plane. If I got to the point where I could spot my locker in the distance and there were no yellow squares stuck on the green metal, I would do a 180 and race to my next class.

  But on Friday, I stopped at my locker right before lunch and there it was—another yellow square stuck crookedly at eye level. My armpits started to prickle as I pulled the note off the locker.

  A large peace symbol was scrawled on the paper in orange marker, along with the same “Elvisly Yours” signature and a smiley face in the corner. Was the peace symbol some kind of warning? Did it have some sinister meaning at Charles Lister that I didn’t know about yet?

  That afternoon, I decided not to take the school bus home. I wanted time to think, that’s what I told myself, but I’ll also admit maybe I was feeling slightly paranoid. When you’ve only been in a new school for a week and people you don’t know are obviously watching you and leaving cryptic notes on your locker, I think anybody would feel a little jumpy.

  But once I started the couple-mile walk down State Street, lugging two textbooks the size of boulders in my backpack (courtesy of my homework-obsessed World History and Algebra teachers), I felt like an idiot. It had only been a peace symbol, for cripes sake. It wasn’t exactly a death threat.

  Cars zoomed by me and the air smelled like hot tar and exhaust. I tried to think about Florida instead of focusing on how much farther I had to walk on the shimmering hot sidewalks of Chicago. It was the fifth of September, but the temperature felt like July. I pictured myself in swimming shorts, playing Frisbee on a sunny ocean beach with a cool breeze blowing. If I had gone to school in Florida, that’s probably what I would have been doing, right? No Elvis. No hair-dye disasters. No weird Post-it notes. Just sun and sand. And a cooler full of sodas and chips.

  Note to self: Stop it. This isn’t helping.

  If I made it to the Murphy’s Shoes block of State Street, I decided I would stop at Harpy’s Video and pick up a can of soda from the machine inside the front door—unless I died of heatstroke before I got there, in which case the whole story of how a peace symbol killed me would probably make the national news.

  I was so focused on wrapping my fingers around an ice-cold drink I almost missed the sign taped on the door of Harpy’s. As I pushed open the door, I happened to glance down and that’s when I saw it. In neatly printed block letters, the sign said: WANTED—DEPENDABLE NIGHT MANAGER. WEEKENDS AND WEEKDAYS. HOURS: 4 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT. GOOD PAY AND BENEFITS. APPLICATIONS INSIDE.

  Maybe my decision to walk home had been fate after all.

  13. I Forgot to Remember

  When I got back to my dad’s house after my marathon hike from Charles Lister, he’d already left. Not to go in search of me (although that would have been thoughtful)—he’d left for an Elvis show instead. A note was sitting on the kitchen table underneath a jar of spaghetti sauce and a box of pasta. It said he was performing at a wedding and he’d be back late. Make spaghetti for dinner.

  As I dumped my backpack on the kitchen table, I had to admit I was a little disappointed my dad wasn’t around because I’d been kinda pumped about showing him the Harpy’s application and solving all of his job problems in one easy swipe. The hippie-looking guy who’d been working at the counter of Harpy’s Video told me they were desperate to hire somebody.

  “Can’t take kids, though, because of the hours,” he had said as I pulled one of the applications from the pile by the cash register. When I told him it wasn’t for me, it was for my dad who had worked at Murphy’s before they closed, the guy shook his head. “Murphy’s…yeah, that was a bummer. Seems like everything’s going down the tubes these days. It’s the economy,” he said, rolling a quarter back and forth across the counter. “Tell your dad to come in and talk to us. I’m sure Harpy would hire him in a heartbeat. He could probably start this weekend if he wanted.” But Harpy would have to wait, I guess.

  The phone rang while I was in the middle of cooking my spaghetti that night. Standing at the stove, I was feeling like one of those TV chefs: Cooking with Josh Greenwood.

  Good evening, fans! Tonight I’m going to show you my secret recipe for making really great spaghetti if your dad is away being Elvis. First, fill a saucepan with water. While you’re waiting for the water to boil, pour a large jar of extra-chunky spaghetti sauce carefully into another pan—

  The phone interrupted my show. I picked it up.

  “Josh,” a voice said loudly. “This is your dad. I’m in the middle of the dang hotel lobby and my cell battery is shot so I had to use one of the lobby phones. Can you hear me or not?” My dad seemed to be shouting over some mumbling background noise I couldn’t identify.

  “Yeah, it’s okay, go ahead.”

  His voice kept shouting. “Well, I was in this big rush to get here and had all this crap to remember—the speakers, the mike, the music—and then I got to the hotel and realized what I had completely forgotten.”

  “What?”

  “My daggone costume,” he hollered. “They didn’t want people to see me before the wedding because I’m supposed to be a surprise, so I didn’t come in costume like I usually do,” he continued babbling. “I had the costume hanging right beside the front door so I wouldn’t forget it, and then what happens? I walk out and leave it behind—jeez.” He let out a long frustrated sigh.

  I pictured him going onstage in his old jeans, faded T-shirt, and grass-stained sneakers: Um, howdy folks, forgot my costume tonight, hahaha. Just imagine me as Elvis, okay?

  “Do you have a piece of paper and pencil handy?” my dad continued yelling in my ear.

  My spaghetti sauce was splattering all over the top of the stove in little lava-like explosions, but I grabbed a pencil and paper. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to call Viv—”

  There was that name again. Viv. The lady I’d meet “eventually,” my dad had said. The woman who had called the first night I arrived in Chicago. The potential new girlfriend.

  “She’s probably working late in her store. Here’s how to get in touch with her.” He rattled off a phone number. “Just give her a call and ask if she’ll come over and pick up the stuff I forgot and bring it to me. Tell her it’s a big emergency. Tell her I’ll buy her an expensive dinner anywhere she wants in Chicago—”

  “I’m not telling her that,” I interrupted. “Why can’t you give her a call?”

  “Because I’ve used up every last cent I’ve got on this dang pay phone. I had to borrow a dime from the desk clerk just to get through to you, and I’ve still got to do a sound check and everything else. Don’t argue with me, Josh, okay? It’s been nothing but a disaster so far tonight. Tell Viv to bring the stuff to the Highland Hotel on Winchester. I’m in Ballroom #2. Got that? Highland. Winchester. Ballroom #2.”

  I considered telling my dad he could relax because I’d found the perfect job for him. He could go ahead and give up being Elvis that night if he wanted to. But I didn’t feel like shouting all of the details into the phone with who knows what happening in the background. Plus, if the wedding people had already paid him, he probably couldn’t pack up his show and walk out, right? I’d save the news until the next morning as a surprise. Ta-da, I’d announce. I found you a job two doors down from Murphy’s. Isn’t that great?

  “You’re going to call Viv, right?” my dad asked one more time.


  “Sure,” I answered in a reluctant voice. “What if she isn’t there?”

  “She’ll be there. Trust me,” he said, and then hung up.

  I was pretty annoyed as I dialed Viv’s number. Once again, it was me bailing out my dad. Josh to the rescue.

  A girl answered the phone, and I asked if I could speak to Viv.

  “Who’s calling, please?” the voice said coolly, as if she was Viv’s official phone call screener. I didn’t really want to give my name, but what choice did I have? After I said, “Josh Greenwood,” there was a strange pause.

  “Hello?” I repeated, in case the phone had gone dead.

  “I’ll get her,” the voice said quickly.

  The woman who came to the phone after that was definitely the same one who had called the first night I arrived in Chicago. “How are things going for you in Chicago, Josh?” she gushed. “Are you settled in yet? How do you like your new school? How’s your grandmother doing?” It kind of gave me the creeps that the woman knew so much about me. I gave the shortest answers I could, hoping she would get the hint that I wasn’t very interested in blabbing about my life to a complete stranger.

  When I finally did manage to get a word in about my dad leaving the house without his Elvis costume, the woman gave an overly long, overly loud laugh. “That’s just like Jerry, isn’t it? Always forgetting something. Give me about fifteen minutes to finish up my work here at the store, and I’ll be right over, hon.”

  So I was about to meet the mysterious Viv.

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was also going to come face to face with Elvisly Yours.

  14. Peace, Love, and Vegetarian Spaghetti

  About fifteen minutes later, Viv appeared on my dad’s doorstep. She was close to my mom’s age, I guessed, but she was a lot shorter and her hair was a fake coppery shade that reminded me of the color of pennies after they have gone through the washing machine a few times. Everything about Viv was shiny, I noticed. Shiny lipstick. Shiny jewelry. Shiny penny-colored hair.