All Shook Up Read online

  “It’s small. Look for the iron gate. And the bus shelter out front. If you can’t find it, ask somebody.” And that’s all the information I could get out of Ivory.

  So for the second time that day, I headed down Oakmont—although this time I was smart enough to bring along a jacket. It took me about forty-five minutes to walk all the way to the park with Chicago’s arctic wind whipping my face.

  Note to self: Learn how to ride the city bus.

  The park turned out to be pretty close to Murphy’s Shoes. Squeezed along the busy street and surrounded by a spiked fence, it didn’t exactly cry out “environmental paradise,” however. Two rusted swing sets sat in the middle of a dusty bowl of dirt. There were a few of those riding animals for little kids—the ones on those big metal springs that sway back and forth. One of the springs was missing an animal, as if it had decided the heck with this and taken off.

  Ivory was nowhere in sight. I began to wonder if sending me to sit in a deserted park was her idea of a cruel joke. But then I spotted somebody pedaling quickly down the street on a bicycle. From a distance, she looked like she had a white squirrel draped across her shoulders, but as Ivory got closer, I could see the squirrel was actually a fur-type collar attached to an old leather coat. Close up, her jacket reminded me of something Amelia Earhart would wear to fly across the Atlantic. All she needed was a pair of goggles.

  “Hey,” Ivory said, bumping her bike across the uneven ground and stopping in front of me. “You found it.”

  “Yeah.” I stuffed my cold hands in my pockets, feeling uncomfortable.

  “Where do you want to talk?”

  I shrugged. “Wherever. Your choice.”

  Looking around at the choices—(a) swing set, (b) giant metal spring animals, or (c) benches in need of a good paint job—Ivory picked the benches. She perched on the end of one and I sat on the end of another. There was a small canyon of dirt and leaves and people’s discarded cigarette butts between us.

  “So,” Ivory said, crossing her legs and giving me a frown. “What’s up?”

  Honestly, I still hadn’t figured out how much I was going to tell her. I started by explaining how I was having some problems with my dad (without going into any specifics)—how I’d written a letter that had made things a lot worse. “Now I’m kinda stuck about what to do next,” I finished.

  Ivory squinted at me. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Glancing at the old tree above us (which might have been prettier earlier in the fall, but now its leaves were a sad yellow-brown color), I decided I really couldn’t stand keeping the whole story to myself one minute longer. Even if the person who heard it turned around and told a hundred other people. Even if the person was Ivory.

  So I just spilled my guts right there in the middle of that empty, freezing cold park. I told Ivory everything: about the letter, the Grand Ballroom, the five-thousand-dollar prize, even the Aloha Eagle. After I was done, she didn’t say a word at first. Shaking her head, she finally said, “Wow, that is really twisted.”

  “Thanks.” I looked up and glared at her. “That helps.”

  Ivory picked up a leaf from the bench and twirled the stem in her hand. “I just can’t believe you would do something like that. I mean”—she paused and shrugged—“your dad seems like such a cool person to have for a father. I wouldn’t even think of doing something like that to my mom…,” her voice trailed off.

  “Thanks. That helps more.”

  After that, it was quiet for about five minutes. You could hear the cars zipping by the front of the park and a jet going overhead. “So do you have any ideas,” I mumbled finally, “about how to get out of this?” Trying to ignore the stinging sensation starting in the corners of my eyes, I pretended to be interested in watching the cars passing by on the street.

  “Other than telling your dad what you did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not that I can think of, no.”

  “So what do I say? ‘Sorry you blew fifteen hundred bucks on a costume, Dad’? He’s been practicing for weeks. He really believes he’s going to Las Vegas.” My voice rose and fell in odd, uncontrollable ways like a squeaky instrument. “He’s gonna hate me for the rest of his life when he finds out what I did. God”—I kicked at the patch of dirt and stones under my feet—“everything in my life is such a total freaking mess right now.”

  Ivory stood up suddenly and brushed the scraps of torn leaves off her jeans. “I can’t stay and talk any longer. I’ve gotta get back to the store and help out my mom.”

  I looked up, kind of surprised by her sharp tone. “What?”

  “No matter what you talk about, it’s always about you, isn’t it?” Ivory glared at me. Her voice grew louder and more impatient. “What if your dad hates you, what if you have to pay him back for his costume, what if he embarrasses you, what if people find out he’s Elvis, what if your popular jock friends at Listerine don’t let you hang out with them anymore—everything is always about you, isn’t it?”

  Ivory yanked her bike up from where it lay on its side. “Maybe you should spend some time walking around in other people’s feet for a while,” she snapped over her shoulder, and then she abruptly headed out, with her wheels wobbling across the sparse grass and through the iron gate.

  Note to Ivory: The saying is “walk around in somebody else’s shoes”—not feet.

  Although the idea of walking around in somebody else’s feet kind of cracked me up the more I thought about it. A fat gray pigeon was pecking for food around the park benches, which made me wonder how it might feel to walk around on a pigeon’s skinny red feet. Or metal park animal springs: bo-ing, bo-ing. Or even—as a dog trotted past the park gate with its owner—fuzzy brown dog feet.

  Of course, deep down, I knew what Ivory was trying to say. I just wasn’t ready to admit to myself that maybe she had a point about seeing things from somebody else’s eyes—or feet—sometimes.

  But I figured she was right that it was time to tell my dad the truth about the letter. Before he bought another Aloha costume or blew his entire life savings because of me….

  Still, it took me another day just to get up the nerve to talk to him. Even then, I probably should have waited a little longer and not rushed in, because nothing came out the way I had planned.

  26. Elvis Has Left the Building

  It was about five o’clock on Sunday when I knocked on my dad’s bedroom door. He’d been rehearsing all afternoon.

  “Come on in,” his voice called out.

  Walking into his room was like entering an Elvis museum. You had to step over boxes of JERRY DENNY AS THE KING flyers and stacks of Elvis CDs and videos and piles of rainbow scarves. But the thing that got me every time was the life-size cutout of Elvis standing near my dad’s closet door. Cardboard Elvis had been a gift to my dad from one of his friends, but it was so realistic-looking it made me jump every time I saw it. Like the King had suddenly materialized out of thin air to strum his guitar in my dad’s bedroom.

  “What’s up?” My dad leaned over and switched off the music coming from the stack of stereo equipment next to one wall.

  “It’s something about school,” I said. Stretching out across my dad’s bed, I pretended to be interested in studying the ceiling. Better if I didn’t look at my dad or Cardboard Elvis while I was talking.

  Dad cleared aside some plastic CD cases and sat down on the edge of the bed. “What about school?” His fingers drummed against his legs as if he wasn’t really paying attention but was still thinking about the song he’d been listening to when I walked in.

  I tried to remember what I had planned to say, but once I started talking, none of the words came out the way I had practiced them. “Everybody thought I’d be okay with coming to Chicago and going to a new school, right?” I began in a fairly normal voice.

  “I guess, sure,” my dad said, giving me a puzzled look. “Why?”

  “I was fine with coming here to your house for
three or four months or whatever, until Grandma got better, right?”

  My dad nodded slowly. “Sure, yes….”

  After that, my voice began to grow less sorry and more angry. It was like another thirteen-year-old suddenly took over my body: Josh Greenwood, Now Being Played by His Evil Twin. “Everybody thinks I can handle anything. No problem—send Josh to a new city or a new school or whatever, he’ll be fine, right?”

  My voice rushed on, gathering steam. “Then, just when he’s starting to fit in with people and he’s made, like, two or three friends…why not have his dad go ahead and screw it all up? Because Josh can handle anything, right? Don’t even bother asking Josh his opinion—”

  “What?” my dad interrupted, sounding completely surprised and confused. “What have I messed up? Tell me.”

  This was the point when one of those possessed, forced laughs came out. “Jeez, Dad, how can you not see it?” My voice rose, sounding embarrassingly like a girl’s at one point. “Walking around pretending you’re Elvis and buying thousand-dollar costumes—that’s normal? And then you go and sign up to be Elvis at my school? I mean, what do you think I’d be upset about?”

  None of this conversation was going the way I had planned.

  “You know the letter you got about the Chicago Elvis contest?” I said. There was no stopping now.

  My dad nodded. “Sure, yes.”

  “Well, I was the one who made up that letter, because if I hadn’t, you would’ve just gone ahead and shown up at my school, right?” My arms gestured angrily at the air. “Who cares about asking me what I think? Nobody ever worries about that. Not you. Not Mom. Just go and embarrass me in front of the whole entire place.”

  I could hear Ivory’s accusing voice in my head repeating: It’s always about you. I knew that’s the way it sounded, but I couldn’t help it.

  “You made up the letter about the contest?” My dad’s voice was full of disbelief and something else I couldn’t name, something deeper and more painful. I felt a thick lump rising in my throat as I said yes.

  “There’s no contest, no Las Vegas? Nothing? It was all a joke?”

  “Not a joke—I just—”

  “Just what?” My dad stared at me. “Thought you’d see what you could do for fun? Man”—he ran his fingers through his hair—“I thought you and I were way past this, Josh. I thought we were getting along better these days. I thought things had been kind of okay lately.” Leaning over, he picked up his coat from the floor. “But I guess I was wrong, wasn’t I?” Shaking his head, he said in a hurt voice, “Guess I was totally wrong.”

  And then he stood up, walked out of the room, and pulled the door shut behind him. He didn’t just walk out of the bedroom, either. He left the house. I heard the front door slam and the sound of the car pulling out of the garage. The garage door thudded closed and then it was silent. Sitting by myself in his Elvis room, I couldn’t keep my mind from replaying the whole scene—what he had said, what I had said, over and over—as if there was something I could change about it now. Only there wasn’t. I had completely and totally screwed up this time. A book of Elvis sheet music was lying on the floor near my feet. It was open to the song “Heartbreak Hotel.” Which seemed to fit the moment perfectly.

  27. Just Pretend

  I was still sitting in my dad’s bedroom when the doorbell rang about a half hour later. I think part of me hoped it was my dad and maybe he would wrap me up in one of his garlic hugs and say everything was okay, like the ending to a sappy Disney movie. You know, with “Hakuna Matata” playing in the background or something, and we would both tell each other we were sorry and things would get better.

  But it wasn’t my dad. It was a three-foot-tall devil and a fairy princess in a pink raincoat. Seriously. I stared at them, trying to decide if I really had gone crazy or if this was some kind of bizarre punishment for what I’d done.

  “Trick or treat,” the midget devil said in a squeaky voice, holding out a black plastic garbage bag.

  That’s when I realized why the kids were dressed up. I remembered how the school cafeteria had served pumpkin cookies (hard as rocks) on Friday and a few teachers had worn costumes. This weekend was Halloween. And there I was, standing in front of an open door with absolutely no candy to give out. What a complete moron I was.

  I told the two kids to hang on.

  “What?” The midget devil didn’t seem to understand what I meant and glanced back at somebody who was standing in the darkness behind him, holding an umbrella.

  “Hang on,” I said louder. “I’ve gotta get some candy.”

  By some miracle, my dad had a bag of Snickers bars stashed in the back of his cereal cabinet. Who knows how long the candy bars had been there. Last Halloween? Christmas? I ripped open the bag and headed back to the front door. The devil and the fairy princess were in the middle of asking the adult behind them if they should go to the next house. “Maybe he’s not coming back,” the princess insisted.

  Pulling out a handful of candy, I mumbled, “Happy Halloween.”

  As the Snickers bars landed softly on the heavy pile already inside their bags, the midget devil asked me where Elvis had gone.

  “What?” I asked, not sure I’d heard him right.

  The boy glanced back at the adult. “My dad says Elvis lives here.”

  I thought about answering that Elvis had left the building and probably wasn’t ever coming back because of me, but instead I told them he was at a gig. “He’s got a show tonight, I think.”

  The adult in the darkness said, “Well, tell him the neighbors across the street—the ones that have the big cookout every year—said hello. Tell him we want tickets to see his act one of these days.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I will.”

  After the devil and the princess disappeared into the rain, I closed the door and tried not to think about how my mom and I used to be just like those little kids and their parents. How we used to walk around on Halloween with our raincoats and our plastic garbage bags of candy.

  I had been a baseball player for trick-or-treating in fourth grade. Which was the same year my mom had insisted that if I didn’t feel comfortable wearing a “real” costume (she didn’t consider my baseball uniform a real costume), I was getting too old for trick-or-treating. So fourth grade was the last year I went out for Halloween.

  But honestly, I would have given anything to go trick-or-treating again. I could still remember how it felt to collect loads of candy and then spend hours sorting it into piles on the living room floor: the good candy, the okay candy, and the candy (black licorice) nobody would ever eat. I mean, those were the times when it was fun to be a kid. The older you got, the more the fun disappeared. Every year, something else was taken away. Halloween had been one of the last things to go. What was left? Thanksgiving?

  Even parents changed from nice, umbrella-toting people who held your hand and walked around with you in the dark (not that I wanted my hand held!) to complicated people who did things that didn’t make sense anymore. They got divorced. They turned into Elvis. They went to Florida without you to take care of your grandma and her broken hip.

  Standing there in the hallway with my bag of old and possibly expired Snickers, I just wanted to go back to the way things were. I was sick of being in Chicago. I was sick of being thirteen years old. I was sick of being Josh Greenwood.

  My glance fell on my dad’s new pair of Elvis boots sitting in the hallway. They were still in the same spot where he’d left them after coming back from a show the night before—one boot slightly ahead of the other, as if he had taken them off in midstep.

  What was it Ivory had said? You need to walk around in somebody else’s feet for a while…. And I thought—what theheck.

  Call me completely insane, but even though I had nowhere to go, and nobody to go with, I decided to try being Elvis for Halloween. Just for fun. Just to pass out candy to the little kids. Why not? My dad already had the costume stuff, right? I would walk around in hi
s shoes for a while. Literally.

  Upstairs, I found a pair of my dad’s gold Elvis sunglasses to wear. Using a brown eye pencil from his bathroom, I drew triangle sideburns on each side of my face and colored them in with little slashes to look like hair. Then I pulled on one of his black leather Elvis jackets. However, there was no way I was showing any part of my thirteen-year-old chest to the world, so the jacket went on over a dark blue T-shirt.

  With the slightly large leather coat and the huge sunglasses, I thought I looked like a cross between Elvis and some bizarre insect. Yes, Praying Mantis Elvis, that’s me. But the next little kid who came to my dad’s door didn’t seem to notice. When I opened the door, he cracked up and said, “Are you Elvis?”

  Weirdly, I never had to explain who I was when people came to the door—everybody always knew. Even though I was a thirteen-year-old kid with gold sunglasses and fake sideburns drawn on my face with brown eye pencil, they thought it was a great costume. Some of the little kids even turned around and waved at me as they headed back into the darkness. “Bye, Elvis….”

  That’s when I began to realize something about being Elvis: that who you are isn’t as important as who you are trying to be.

  28. Cheerleaders and Cowboys

  When I was down to my last five Snickers bars, two people came walking up the rainy sidewalk to the house. Standing by the door, I didn’t recognize them at first. I just thought they looked too tall and too old to be trick-or-treating. (My mom wouldn’t have approved.) The guy was dressed like a cowboy, with a Western hat and a large red bandanna tied around his neck. The girl was wearing a cheerleader costume, complete with green-and-silver pom-poms. It took me a minute to realize that the two people coming up to my dad’s porch were actually Digger and Ivory.

  But I think Ivory was way more shocked than me.

  “Josh?” She leaned forward to stare at me through the screen door and her voice fell to an incredulous whisper. “What are you doing?”