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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.