All Shook Up (9 page)

Checking my watch for the tenth or eleventh time, I decided the hands had definitely stopped. It was only three-thirty and Viv’s Vintage stayed open until five-thirty for all of those last-minute shoppers who needed a pair of plaid pants or a nice powder-blue polyester suit. It was going to be a long afternoon.

19. Signs of the Zodiac

As it turned out, Ivory’s prediction did come true two days later—which is exactly how horoscopes can pull you into believing in them. After you hear one, you can’t keep the little zodiac voice in the back of your mind from whispering maybe the moon and stars do know all.

On Monday morning, the gym teacher took us outside to play baseball. Puddles of water from the downpour we’d had on Sunday still dotted the clay of the ball diamond, but the sky was totally clear and blue. The trees on the far edges of the school property were beginning to change color and the warm air smelled like fall. It made me feel kind of homesick for Boston and my friends.

We lined up on the grass to pick teams. I was picked fourth by a guy named Dave, who looked like he was probably part of the vending machine crowd. First, because he appointed himself the team captain and nobody disagreed, and second, because he wore a sports jersey with his last name plastered across the back.

Fourth wasn’t a bad spot to be, I decided. It was better than being picked last—or after a girl. Or a fat guy. Digger, the dog-collar guy, was in the class and he was picked last for the other team. In fact, he wasn’t even really picked—the teacher just divided up the last few people with a “you here” and “you over there” arm move. Since nobody knew me that well yet and we hadn’t played baseball before, being picked fourth wasn’t too bad. Maybe I looked like I had potential.

In the second inning, with our team losing by one run and with two people on base, I went up to the plate. Behind me, I could hear the team captain and a few of the other guys call out, “Go on, Boston dude, hit one out of here.” I shaded my eyes against the sun and looked out at the field, which was pretty pathetic. The pitcher for the other team was good, but the outfield was dotted with their last picks, including Digger, who was standing in the farthest part of the field among the tall wet grass and fuzzy weeds. If I could smack one that distance, I was all set.

The ball came sailing toward me, like a fat and juicy grapefruit curving through the air. I swung hard. The crack of the ball meeting my bat sounded like a soda can exploding.

Note to pitcher: In Boston, I’m a very good hitter.

The ball flew toward the outfield, and Digger was just about the only person who had any chance at it, and not much chance at that. I watched him stretch upward so that sky and glove were connected for a brief minute, and then in one slow-motion frame it all began falling apart. Digger started tipping backward, landing heavily on his butt in the grass, and the ball sailed easily into the outfield. My team went nuts, clapping for me and laughing at Digger, who was just getting up and brushing off his wet, grass-covered gym shorts. Home run.

As I jogged around the bases, I could barely keep a big smile from cracking across my face. When you run the bases, it’s better to look as if it isn’t a big deal, as if this is something you do every day. People take you more seriously that way. So I kept my lips pressed together and my eyes focused on the brown dirt gliding under my feet.

Score one for Ivory’s horoscopes.

And then, a few hours later, another unexpected surprise followed the first one. I was reaching for some ketchup and napkins on the condiments table when somebody called out, “Hey, Boston dude.” I turned around slowly, half expecting some object to come flying toward my face, because the entire cafeteria experience at Listerine still made me jumpy. But instead, I saw the team captain from gym class strolling over with his tray.
Dave, right?
I tried to reach back in my memory for the name. I was almost positive it was Dave.

“Good hit,” he said.

“Yeah, thanks.” I put on my home-run straight face again and glanced down at my tray to make sure there was nothing embarrassing on it, like cooked carrots or a fruit cup. It looked okay.

And right there in front of Charles W. Lister’s smiling portrait, I was invited to sit at the vending machine tables. I mean, it wasn’t a formal invitation delivered on a silver platter or anything. Dave didn’t say,
Come join the popular kids next to the Cheetos.
He just nodded in the direction of the vending machines and said, “Some of us sit over there if you’re looking for a table.” And then he headed that way.

It took me a few minutes to decide whether or not the invitation was good for that particular day—or some future date. Kind of like those coupons you get at amusement parks:
good on your next visit.
Would I look desperate if I raced over to the table right after being invited? Or if I waited a day or two, would the guy forget he had invited me?

Note to self: If you wait, there is also the possibility that your next game could be a complete disaster. You could trip over home plate or something.

I casually headed toward the tables, hoping somebody would spot me and wave me to an open seat. Nobody did. Dave was sitting in the middle of a table directly in front of the soda machine. The words
ICE-COLD PEPSI
were right above his head. Six or seven other guys sat around him.

“Can I sit here?” I asked a guy on the end who was chugging a carton of chocolate milk and had four more lined up next to his tray.

“What?” The guy turned toward me with an annoyed expression. The kind of look you would give an irritating fly that had suddenly begun buzzing around your food. My hands began to sweat as they held tighter to my tray and I looked for a way out. Could I do a quick reverse and say,
uh, sorry, wrong table
?

But then Dave stood up and pointed in my direction. “It’s Boston dude,” he hollered. “Have a seat. Everybody move over so he can sit down.” The chocolate milk guy used his arm to slide his milk cartons over and clear a space on the end. I squeezed in with my tray balanced precariously on the edge of the table, half on, half off. With my right arm clamped firmly down on the side of the tray to keep it anchored to the table, I had no idea how I was actually going to eat anything on it.

Dave Ernst (that was the last name printed on the back of his jersey) introduced me by saying I was the guy who had hit a baseball straight at Dog Face. Everybody at the table busted up laughing. “Really, you hit one at Dog Face?” The chocolate milk guy turned toward me, suddenly interested.

“Over his head,” I answered. “Not really at him.” I’m not sure why I thought this was an important point to make because nobody else really seemed to care. Just the fact that the dog-collar guy ended up on his butt in the grass and I scored a home run was all that mattered, it seemed. So, after a while, I just went along with Dave’s version of what happened.

It felt strange to be the center of attention all of a sudden, though—to be asked about Boston and the teams I played on back there—but it was kind of reassuring, too. In Boston, I was used to sitting at a table of guys and talking about normal, everyday stuff. A few weeks of sitting by myself and having silent conversations with my lunch had been enough for me. Although I had to admit I was a little surprised by how
easy
it had been to get to the vending machine tables. Only one well-placed home run and I had somehow landed in the prime seats at Listerine.

It would have been a lot tougher at my Boston school. You had to be on the right teams and have the right friends. Just smacking a few hits in gym class wouldn’t cut it.

Glancing around, I noticed how things looked different from the vending machine vantage point, too. For one, it seemed brighter and cleaner. This may have been due to the fact that there was a glass-enclosed courtyard close by. The doors of the courtyard were propped open slightly, so breezy gusts of air and a few dry leaves swirled inside.

Being next to the machines also had other advantages. It seemed to be the custom for the guys at my table to buy a few snacks to share with the rest of the group. So a shiny brown bag of M&M’s or a pack of mini Oreos could come shooting past you at any moment, scattering pieces as it traveled. If you sat at the end of the table, you were the one who had to be prepared to catch the item and keep it from plunging into oblivion. Then you sent the bag sliding back down the length of the table for everybody to take seconds.

I was so focused on not messing up my snack-catching job that when the bell rang at the end of lunch I realized I hadn’t eaten any food on my tray except for a handful of potato chips and part of a chocolate chip cookie. Still, I felt as if things had gone almost perfectly. Let’s just say Ivory’s horoscope book probably couldn’t have predicted a better day for Josh Greenwood. First, a home run. Then an invitation to become the newest member of the vending machine tables. The planets and stars were definitely on my side.

Until I got home. Then I got a third unexpected surprise. Which may have been the one the zodiac book was warning me about after all.

20. Watch Out for an Unexpected Surprise

My dad was mowing the lawn when I got home from school. This, by itself, was not unusual. September in Chicago had been pretty warm, so the grass was still growing fast. As I walked down the street, I could hear the uneven roaring of Dad’s old mower going back and forth. Every time the ancient mower seemed on the verge of conking out, Dad had to speed up to keep the motor going.

He was finishing a row and getting ready to continue down the next patch of grass when he must have spotted me out of the corner of his eye. As I came walking up the driveway, he stopped and turned off the motor—which was something he almost never did, if he could help it. The sudden silence made my stomach lurch a little toward my throat, and the first thought that popped into my head was that my dad had some bad news about my grandma to share. Had she gotten worse? Had something else happened to her? But as my dad came closer, I was relieved to see his expression didn’t look like anything serious had happened.

“How was school?” he asked, mopping his face with the bottom half of his shirt.

“Okay, fine,” I said with a shrug, although I felt like shouting that it had been A GREAT DAY. That I wasn’t a loser. That I had hit a ball out of the park. (Okay, into the weed-infested outfield at Charles Lister.) That I was now sitting at the vending machine tables. That Dog Face had fallen on his butt. However, none of these details—well, except for the home run—were the kinds of things a parent would understand and bringing them up would probably lead to more questions than I wanted to answer. That’s why I kept my mouth shut.

“Guess what?” My dad rubbed his hands together. “I’ve got good news.”

I eyed my dad cautiously, knowing it had to be something about Elvis: a new gig or a special event because that was the only good news he cared about.

“The music director called me today about something at your school—”

And this was the moment when things began to get hazy, literally. The sun suddenly felt blazing hot on my face and I could feel a trickle of sweat start creeping down my back. “What about school?” I said, dropping my backpack beside my feet.

“They want me to perform there.”

A boulder of dread slammed into my stomach. “What?”

“They’re going to be doing some kind of fifties concert at your school in November, and Viv told the music director about me, so he called this afternoon to ask if Elvis would be part of the show.” Dad crossed his arms and grinned. “I said to him, ‘Son, the King of Rock and Roll would be real proud to come and sing a few numbers for your program. Just gimme the word and I’ll be there.’”

I wanted to die. Really, if a bolt of lightning would have come out of the clear blue sky right then, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the way. I would have stood there with a big metal pole in my hand and said,
just hit me.

21. Words

Who was to blame? Lying flat on my bed staring up at my bumpy white bedroom ceiling, I decided the concert had to be Ivory’s idea. Or partly her idea. Her mom had made the phone call to the music director, right? And Ivory was the one who had told me to watch out for an “unexpected surprise.” She and her mom had probably planned the whole thing.

Well, it wasn’t going to work. I swung my legs off the bed and headed into the kitchen to get the Viv’s Vintage number from the scrap of cardboard that served as my dad’s “important phone numbers” list. After a few rings, Ivory answered the phone. She sounded busy, as if there was a mad rush on disco pants or tie-dyed shirts. “Viv’s Vintage, where you never go out of style….”

I didn’t even bother to say who it was. Let her figure it out. “You knew about my dad being invited to be Elvis at school, didn’t you?” If a voice could be cold, mine would have been like those mammoths they find frozen in the ice in Siberia. A frozen mammoth voice.

Ivory pretended to be clueless and said she had no idea what I was talking about.

“Well, thanks, I appreciate it,” I continued. “I spend a whole Saturday helping in your mom’s store. For
free,
by the way. And then you go and tell everybody at school about my dad, so now the whole entire place will know about him being Elvis. I mean, why not?” My voice was getting louder and I had the feeling that maybe I wasn’t making as much sense as I wanted to, but I kept going. “Just go ahead and make me look like a complete freak, just like you and all your dog-collar friends—”

Ivory interrupted again to say she had no idea what I meant.

“Ask your mom,” I said, and slammed the phone down.

This was the first time I had ever hung up on somebody because I was mad. My mom would say it was totally out of character for me. Maybe it was. I mean, my friends and I goof around on the phone all the time and cut each other off in the middle of our conversations. Brian is especially famous for doing that—you’ll be telling him a story and he’ll say, “Another call, gotta go,” and
click,
he’s gone. Half the time he doesn’t bother to call back, either. But I had never hung up on somebody on purpose. Until now.

The phone rang again about five minutes later.

“Did we get cut off?” Ivory asked sharply.

“Sure,” I answered.

“Okay, well then,” she continued, “I’m calling back because if you were referring to your dad and the school concert, I didn’t have anything to do with it. My mom was the one who suggested it to the music director a while ago—not me, so don’t blame me.” She hurried on without even taking a breath. “And I don’t appreciate you talking about my friends that way. Digger said you were a real jerk to him today in gym class. I don’t know what’s up with you, but I’m just calling to tell you that I don’t care if your dad is dating my mom. I don’t deserve to be treated like this and my friends don’t, either, so just”—the voice paused as if searching for the right words—“get a life.”

Then I think Ivory hung up on me, because there was a click and a dial tone. I tossed the phone onto the pillow and flopped back down on my bed to stare at the ceiling again. It hadn’t changed much. Same ceiling fan. Same bumpy white plaster that looked like a really bad rash.

What were my options now? Clearly, calling Ivory had solved absolutely nothing. If she was telling the truth that the whole thing was Viv’s idea, what could I do? Call Viv and ask her to uninvite my dad? They were “dating,” so there was no way Viv would tell him he couldn’t be part of the event.

What if I told him instead?

I tried to picture myself jogging out to the yard and telling my dad that I had given it a little thought and, hey, I didn’t think it was a smart idea for him to perform at my school—that it would be best if he backed out of doing the show for his own good, for my own good, and just for the general good of society.

God.
I rubbed my eyes in frustration. I didn’t want to hurt my dad’s feelings, I just wanted him to get a clue. I mean, why couldn’t he see how this would humiliate both of us? Didn’t he remember what middle school was like?

I could just imagine the entire Charles W. Lister auditorium full of kids staring at my forty-year-old dad as he came strutting onstage with his black leather outfit and gold chains and chest hair and orange makeup and sunglasses. He would start twisting his hips and singing “Hound Dog” or something like that, and the kids would collapse into hysterics. Or worse yet, what if they started booing and yelling things at him like,
Get off the stage, loser
? Think about how it sounds when an entire gymnasium is booing the ref during a basketball game. Now imagine it isn’t a basketball game but your dad.

And once word got out that Elvis was my dad—because Ivory would probably blab to somebody who would blab to somebody else and soon the news would spread through the entire school—can you guess what it would be like to go to the cafeteria for lunch? Forget the vending machine tables, I wouldn’t even be able to sit at the garbage can tables.

I clenched my hands over my eyes and tried to force myself to think more calmly. There had to be a way out. A way to keep my dad from performing that wouldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings. A way to keep myself from being humiliated….

Looking back, I believe this was the point where I went wrong. It was impossible not to hurt somebody. There’s a line in an Elvis song about being caught in a trap with no way out. Just like in the song, I was caught. And there was no good way out. Somebody was going to get hurt by whatever I did. It was just a matter of who would be hurt the most.