Lemonade Mouth Puckers Up (2 page)

The song had kind of become the unofficial anthem of our lemonade machine rebellion at school that year, and that day I watched as an entire field full of people, most of them total strangers, saluted us by raising lemonade cups, some real and some imaginary, into the air. For our fans this had become the sign of unity and revolution. I couldn’t help feeling a swell of pride. After that I was having such a good time that by our third or fourth song I forgot to be nervous. But I also remember noticing a blond lady in a bright pink business suit near the back of the crowd. She stood out because of her clothing and because she was just standing there, watching us. Every now and then she seemed to scribble something on a pad of paper as if she was taking notes
.

With so much chaos going on around her, it seemed weird
.

When our set ended, the five of us started breaking down our equipment. As I often did, I went over to help Charlie with his drums. He uses so many of them—a giant wall of congas and timbales and cymbals and other percussion instruments I can’t even name—that it always took a while to pack it all up. Anyway, as I was helping him I noticed the pink-suited lady walk up to the edge of the stage
.

“Nice show,” she said to us. “The crowd really liked you.”

“Thanks,” Mo answered, lowering her double bass into its big gray case. We were trying to move fast since there was another act scheduled to play after us
.

“No, I mean I’m truly impressed,” the woman said. “Your music is wild and different, and it’s not often I see a band inspire this much devotion from its fan base. They know all the words, and they follow your every move. Do you always draw such a big crowd? And do you always get fans who show up in costumes?”

I looked out at the field again. The place really was packed, and a bunch of people had shown up in funny outfits—zombies, houseplants, cats, toilets and other crazy things. I remember a bunch of burly guys dressed as rubber duckies, and one couple that looked like a cookie and a giant glass of milk
.

Mo shrugged. “Yes, usually,” she said, still struggling with her case. “Our first real performance was at a Halloween dance. After that it sort of became a tradition at our shows. It’s just fun.”

“It’s impressive,” the woman said again. “The vibe from your audience makes your performance feel like more than just a local show. What I just saw felt bigger—much bigger.” She reached into her blazer and pulled out a business card. “My name is Jennifer Sweet. I work for Earl Decker at the Decker and Smythe talent agency. Mr. Decker is interested in Lemonade Mouth.”

“Decker and Smythe?” Stella asked. Until then she didn’t seem to be paying much attention to Mo’s conversation, but she now moved nearer and looked over Mo’s shoulder at the card. She stared at it. Wen, Charlie and I stepped closer too. I have to admit, at the time I didn’t understand the significance of what was going on. I’d heard of Decker and Smythe, of course, but I didn’t really know much about it
.

Stella must have noticed my confused expression. “Don’t you get it?” she asked. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Olivia. Decker and Smythe? It’s only one of the most important talent agencies in the history of the music industry. They’ve represented some of the biggest, most successful bands ever. Devon and the Hellraisers? Monica Maybe? The
Deadbeat Fingerwaggers? Exhibit A? The Church Ladies? You’ve heard of them, right?”

I nodded. These were all rock-and-roll giants
.

“Well, there you go. Earl Decker was there when it all began. He’s like … well, he’s a legend.”

The woman nodded, but her serious expression didn’t change
.

“Mr. Decker saw the video clip of what happened at Catch A RI-Zing Star and he sent me down to check you out in person. You guys are on to something here. If you’re interested in seeing how far you can take this, call the number on that card. We’d like to set up a time to talk.” Before any of us had a chance to respond, Ms. Sweet had already left the edge of the stage and was disappearing through the crowd, hurrying toward the parking lot as if she was late for another appointment
.

The five of us were left standing there staring at the little white card. It was only a piece of paper, and yet, like a pebble tossed into a pond, its effect was about to send ripples across our universe. We didn’t know it yet, but things were not about to go in a direction anybody expected. Certainly not us, and not Decker and Smythe either
.

Lemonade Mouth had just begun a bumpy journey to a place none of us could have predicted
.

My friends, the good news couldn’t have come at a better time for your own Sista Stella. Up until the moment Decker and Smythe dropped out of the sky and into our lives, my summer started off looking drearier and more frustrating by the day.

There were two major reasons for this.

First, despite the brief period of commotion and media attention that our recent Catch A RI-Zing Star appearance had brought to my little band of misfits and our lemonade machine cause, very little of that attention had focused on our
music
. As a musician with lofty aspirations, this was burning me up. Mrs. Reznik, our septuagenarian music teacher and Lemonade Mouth’s spiritual mentor, often said, “The music is everything. It’s what matters above all else.”

So of course I was frustrated.

The second reason was this: My summer, young as it was, had recently been hijacked. Against my wishes, my mother had volunteered me to spend my weekday mornings filling in as a receptionist at her biochemical research laboratory. True, I was getting paid, which meant I had a chance of going to the Take Charge Festival in August. Take Charge was a giant daylong concert event in Vermont, with a dozen big-name bands promoting worldwide youth activism. It was organized and headlined by the one and only Sista Slash, my guitar-slinging activist hero, so even though tickets were expensive, I really wanted to go.

Still, being the receptionist for a small research laboratory had to be the dullest job in the world.

Picture, if you will, your musical maverick sista, her
formerly green cropped hair now an inferno of glorious pink (a fresh color for a fresh summer), sitting at a metal desk surrounded by filing cabinets and cardboard boxes. Imagine your misused heroine parked on a chair from eight to noon, Monday through Friday, in a dark-paneled space where the phone hardly ever rings, with little to do except twiddle her thumbs, surf the Internet and occasionally write her name on an electronic pad when the package delivery guy needed a signature.

“Oh, don’t exaggerate, Stella,” my clueless mother said at the time, dismissing my complaints with a wave of her hand. “It’s not
that
bad!”

But how would she have known?

As I suffered in bored silence, she and her team of biochemical trailblazers were twenty feet away doing the geeky mad-scientist things they loved most, which at the time meant searching for a way to make cheap, biodegradable plastic from vegetable cells. While my mother and her genius buddies were busy trying to create a planet-saving Frankenstein plant, I was wasting my life away. The one thing I had to look forward to was recording music with my friends. I was forever counting the hours and minutes until the next time Lemonade Mouth got together again.

As you can imagine, the surprising news that the Decker and Smythe Talent Agency, that music-industry colossus, that promoter of rock-and-roll superstars too numerous to count, wanted to talk with
us
—well, it came like an unexpected beacon of hope in a dark sea of tedium and despair.

I remember the next morning, my palms sweating as I gripped the little business card. Out of the five of us, I’d been chosen to make the call. Looking up from the telephone number, I could see Beverly DeVito, one of the lab
assistants, on the other side of the glass window that looked into the main lab. Plump and twentyish with short brown bangs and glasses, she was hunched over a microscope. She must have sensed me watching because she looked up, but my mind was so occupied that it took me a moment to realize she was waving at me through the glass. Finally I waved back, embarrassed that I’d been caught staring. She didn’t make a big deal of it. She just smiled and went right back to her work.

I liked Beverly. She was all right.

The thing was, I was in a tizzy. It was 8:45 a.m., too early to contact Decker and Smythe. It was too early for
any
sane person to have to be up and about, especially since it was supposed to be summer vacation. It weighed on me that this might be the most important phone call I would ever make in my entire life. First impressions mattered. Call too early and Lemonade Mouth might seem overeager. Leave it too late and the agency might get the idea that we weren’t serious about the band’s future.

Needless to say, I’d been thinking about this all night.

The best approach, I’d decided, was to wait until later in the morning—ten o’clock or so—and then ask to speak directly to Earl Decker himself. The goal was to project confidence. I’d been imagining the conversation over and over again:
Hey, Earl
, I would say (I’d agonized about what to call him, but in the end the informal approach seemed best),
you guys said you wanted to talk, so let’s talk
.

But first I would force myself to wait.

To kill time I grabbed the stack of fashion magazines Beverly had left on the coffee table for visitors—as if anybody other than me ever sat in that room long enough to look at them. I flipped through each magazine one at a time,
page after page of rail-thin models in tight dresses. They looked starved, every one of them, and it occurred to me that someone ought to make a thick, healthy stew to feed these poor women.

At last it was 10:02 and I couldn’t stand to wait a moment longer. I dialed the number. In my mind I pictured the office somewhere in a tall building in Boston. In some other reception area—one no doubt grander and more exciting than the one I was in—a phone started to ring.

It rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

My heart was in my throat. At the end of the fourth ring my call was sent to voice mail. Somehow I hadn’t expected this. I should have just hung up. I should have given myself the time to think through what to say to a machine and then called back. But the outgoing voice prompt was surprisingly short, just the name of the agency and a quick request to leave a message. By the time it was over and I heard the beep, I was still holding the phone to my ear.

My friends, the fact is I froze.

“This is Stella … Stella Penn,” I blurted out. “Jennifer Sweet gave us her card. She said to call this number so … so, that’s what I’m doing.” I gave the callback number and quickly hung up.

The moment I did it, I realized with a flash of panic that I’d left out something vital. I’d forgotten to mention I was from Lemonade Mouth! How were they supposed to know what I was calling about? How many pointless messages did they receive on that voice mail line every day, unknown musicians trying to sneak or charm their way into the fame machine that was the world-renowned Decker and Smythe
Talent Agency? Plenty, I guessed. Did they even know who Stella Penn was? I doubted it.

I dropped my head onto the desk and pressed my forehead to the cold metal. What an idiot! From a few feet away I heard somebody knocking on the glass partition. I looked up.

“You okay, Stella?” Beverly. She was staring at me.

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Just resting.”

She nodded sympathetically and went back to her work.

Sitting up straight, I tried to pull myself together. Calling back now would make it obvious that I’d screwed up, but there was no getting around it. I grabbed my phone again and hit the redial button. I hoped nobody would pick up this time. If someone did, I felt sure I’d be too embarrassed to talk. There was no need to worry, though. Voice mail, just like before.