Lemonade Mouth Puckers Up (35 page)

I didn’t even know how to answer. It was the first time anybody had ever said anything like that to me. It was a huge honor.

The little boy waved me closer. He wanted to whisper in my ear. “Somebody told me the revolution is over. It’s not true, right?”

“No, buddy,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I really thought, which was that Lemonade Mouth’s brief moment in the spotlight was probably behind us.

Eventually my friends and I went to our instruments and the crowd settled down to hear us. I can honestly say that that afternoon was one of the most fun concerts we ever played.
Ever
. From the first notes of “Humanator,” our opening song, the crowd started to cheer like crazy, and as soon as the chorus kicked in, pretty much everyone was dancing. Charlie did an extended funky solo in “Ninja Earthquake,” and for “Monster Maker” Mrs. Reznik joined us onstage with a cello and harmonized with Mo’s bass. The crowd went nuts. For an old lady, Mrs. Reznik can totally rock. Olivia had never sounded better either, and for the first time ever, she hardly seemed anxious at all. I’d never seen her so
relaxed in front of a crowd. Now, I’m not saying everything was perfect from then on, or that she never got nervous in front of people again, but something had obviously happened to make her better able to deal with her feelings. And that was good.

I can’t tell you how glad I was to see her this way, just singing and having a great time without worrying so much about everything.

After we finished our first set Lyle made an announcement to unveil the boxes of our new, completed recordings—our second official release. We’d all chipped in to have the CDs made, and we’d decided to call the album “Pucker Up!” Sydney had designed an eye-catching cover: a simple extreme close-up on pursed yellow lips against a checkered background. When you looked closely, though, each of the dark checkers was a black-and-white image of one of our five faces.

We were thrilled.

Okay, so this album wasn’t going to get the Decker and Smythe national marketing treatment we’d once hoped for, but at least it was finally done. And the people at the picnic were gobbling it up.

As Olivia and I stuffed our faces with barbecue and corn on the cob, a few kids wandered through the crowd in some of the costumes from our appearance on
After Midnight with Chet Anders
. They looked hilarious. It was then that I caught sight of my dad, who was busy with the hot dogs, and I couldn’t help remembering how he would soon be back to his old job again. But my thoughts didn’t linger there for too long because all of a sudden a drumbeat was pulsing through the air. Ray and Scott were at their instruments.

Mudslide Crush was about to perform for the first time in ages.

The crowd started moving toward the stage again. Olivia and I were as excited as anybody else. Ray was at the microphone. It felt odd to admit it to myself, but it was good to see him up there again, and I was happy for his sake and ours that he’d agreed to do it. (He’d even toyed with the idea of bringing Bacon Sandwich to the festivities, but in the end he didn’t, maybe because a barbecue wasn’t the best place to bring a pet pig.) We cheered along with the rest of the crowd as Ray strutted back and forth like an oversized rooster with an attitude and a mud-brown Stratocaster. Acting cocky had always been part of his onstage persona, and it worked. He was fun to watch. Since Mudslide Crush’s original bass player, Dean Eagler, had already moved away to Ohio for college, taking his place was Lizzie DeLucia, who gripped her new pink bass like she was holding on for dear life. Nervous as she looked, she was doing just fine. And then Ray kicked in a rocking guitar lick that made the crowd roar. There was no denying that this new Mudslide Crush lineup sounded terrific. At his drums, Scott looked like he might keel over from sheer happiness.

All this made me think of what Mo had said about time marching on. Back before the school year ended, who would have thought I’d ever be cheering for Scott Pickett, let alone Ray Beech? But I guess my dad was right about people changing. And I’m not just talking about Scott and Ray.

I looked again in my dad’s direction. He was watching all this from the window of the wiener van. Seeing his grinning face, I realized he looked more relaxed than I’d seen in a long, long time, and all at once it struck me that maybe, just maybe, I understood why. After all, my father had done something few people ever dare to do. He’d taken a chance. He’d made a decision to step off the path everyone expected
him to follow and had taken a shot at going after his dreams. How many people can say that? And sure, his new business hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped, but that didn’t mean the experience had been worthless to him. There I’d been feeling bad, thinking his life was going back to the way it once was, but now I understood that it just wasn’t true. His life would
never
be the same again because
he
wasn’t the same. While I’d been busy complaining, my father had been working his butt off to do something meaningful in his life. Something that was important to him.

And he had. Despite everything, I could see it on his face. He absolutely had.

More than ever it struck me that my dad is an amazing guy, and that I’m proud to be his son.

It was a couple of days after the picnic, and I was on the front steps of my house with Olivia’s book and a tuna sandwich. For a long, long time, I just sat there. I do a lot of my best thinking on my front steps, and that morning my thoughts kept coming back to two things: Nietzsche and the meaninglessness of the Universe.

Look, I’m not saying we didn’t have a great experience at the picnic. We did. It was amazing. But come on, that was just a town picnic, a small-time gig if ever there was one. After all that had happened that summer, I kind of felt like Lemonade Mouth had come close to something really, really big, only to have it snatched from us at the last second. Where was the meaning in that? It would be depressing to
think Nietzsche was right, but what else was there to conclude? If the great forces of the cosmos were trying to say something, I sure as heck didn’t know what it was.

Plus, the feeling that there was something I needed to find, something important that would help me sift through all the chaos of what had happened and somehow find order in it, was still needling me. The answer seemed so close, and yet weeks of trying to figure it out had brought me nothing.

Zippo.

Nada.

So if I was starting to feel a little like the center of futility in a pointless world, could you really blame me?

I guess sometimes I get so lost in my thoughts that I tune out everything around me, and I must have done that then, because after a while of sitting out there on the porch, I suddenly realized somebody was standing right in front of me. Somehow they’d come up close and I hadn’t even noticed.

Okay, so they say descriptions of screen action shouldn’t include too much about a character’s thoughts or backstory or stuff like that, but that’s exactly what I want to put here, so that’s why I’m breaking the rules and mixing different formats and stuff, which I’ve kind of been doing all along. (I guess I’m a rebel that way. Ha ha.) Plus, it just feels right switching to regular sentences for this next part.

So we finally got to the library, and that’s when something weird happened to me. I don’t normally get panic attacks or anything, but for some reason, being surrounded by so many shelves stuffed high with books and magazines, a sea of words in all directions, left me feeling like the walls were pressing in on me. The air smelled of homework, and all at once my mouth felt like sandpaper and my pulse was going like a burglar alarm.

I forced myself to keep cool.

Whatever was happening was weird, but I knew it was all in my head.

“I don’t get what you see in this place,” I whispered as we passed through the maze of bound paper volumes. “Hasn’t anybody here heard of the digital revolution?”

“If you don’t get it, then I’m not going to try to convince you,” Olivia said.