Lemonade Mouth Puckers Up (36 page)
I trailed along until she found an empty table. She set her stuff down and took one of the seats.
“You come here a lot?” I asked. “Even during the summer?”
She nodded.
“What for? What do you do?”
“I read, mostly. I also like to write here sometimes. It’s big and quiet and it’s good for working on my journal. You know, figuring stuff out.” By then she’d reached into her backpack and pulled out two pencils and a spiral notebook. “Here,” she said, ripping a few blank sheets from the notebook and holding them out to me, “you should give it a try. Just jot down your thoughts, whatever they are.”
“I told you. I’m no good at that. I’m not really a writer.”
“You just gotta keep at it. It gets easier, you know, the more you do it.”
She was still holding the paper out to me, so after a while I took it. And then, for what felt like days, I sat at that table staring at those blank pages and wondering how on earth I was supposed to start. Beginnings are so hard. In the end I decided to scribble some words—any words—just to get me going. I wrote the first thing that came to my head:
Once upon a time …
And that’s as far as I got. Only four words into my story and already I was disappointed. In my mind I could see Lemonade Mouth doing all the things we did that summer, and I could hear our voices saying all the things we said. If I was going to write the story, then I wanted it to somehow be like that—like how I was viewing it at that moment. Weird as it sounds, I realized that this was really important to me,
that if I could do it, it could bring me the clarity I wanted. But how? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out what exactly I was looking for.
So eventually I gave up. I left the table and wandered around.
INTERIOR. PUBLIC LIBRARY—LATE MORNING
The library is almost silent except for Charlie’s echoing footsteps. He drifts between endless stacks of bookshelves, warily scanning the bindings. We see him meander through the home repair section. Now he’s exploring the art history section. He gazes at shelf after shelf but nothing grabs him, so he moves on.
Finally he comes to a little corridor of bookcases with an overhead sign that says
MOVIES, TELEVISION AND THE CREATIVE ARTS
. He stops. We see him read the sign.
CLOSE-UP ON: Charlie’s finger. One by one it slides across titles like
Hollywood Ghouls and Monsters
and
The Golden Age of the Television Sitcom
and
A Dictionary of Literary Terms
. Finally his finger comes to a book called
Screenwriting: A Beginner’s Guide
. It stops. After a pause, Charlie’s hand pulls that one from the shelf.
REVERSE ON: Charlie. He’s studying the cover. He opens it to a random page. He’s taking it in, concentrating. Suddenly the silence is broken by an energetic tombak drum beat. Soft at first, it builds in volume. It’s the opening riff of Lemonade Mouth’s “Blastoff Castaways.” After a while Charlie looks up, lost in thought.
We see him drift to an armchair and for a few measures we watch him sitting there, reading, with the book open on his lap.
A screaming electric ukulele joins the music—hot chords of triumphant energy. The bass and trumpet kick in too, and now the camera begins to slowly pull back. As the view widens away from Charlie, we see more and more of the library around him: An elderly couple peruses the shelves of a nearby bookcase. A
teenage boy types at a laptop. A middle-aged woman reads a newspaper while, at her side, a little kid sits cross-legged on the floor with a picture book.
Smaller and smaller on the screen, Charlie remains motionless in the armchair. He’s on the verge of a transformation. The world may be continuing around him unaware, but Charlie’s universe has just spoken, sending him on an unexpected new journey of exploration and discovery.
The music takes over.
FADE OUT.
The Great and Mysterious Conductor
The summer wasn’t over yet, but already it had been a time of meteoric highs and desperate lows. Our music was still getting downloaded (Lyle told us “Zombietown” was starting to do especially well), but giving away music isn’t exactly a long-term business strategy, and it wasn’t like we were household names or anything.
Let’s just say we didn’t feel so overexposed that we needed disguises to leave the house.
Olivia once told me that everything that ever happens was always meant to be, that life’s events, no matter how large or small, are like train stops on a journey where nobody but some great and mysterious conductor knows the route, let alone the final destination. Things might
seem
random and maybe even a little unfair at times, she said, but if we wait long enough, the grand purpose will eventually reveal itself. I never used to believe that, but when I look back at that chaotic time and
its aftermath in the months that followed, I can’t help but be amazed at how things played out in ways none of us could have predicted but that seem to have been inevitable.
Take Franco, for example.
After our appearance on
American Pop Sensation
, the backlash against him grew until finally, sometime in October, somebody somewhere uncovered an old video clip of Franco singing a Broadway tune called “Send in the Clowns” at a karaoke competition. It turned out that Franco had a singing voice like a drowning duck with a nasal problem. Both jaw-dropping and hilarious to watch, the video shot to the top of the most-watched rankings. Whoever uploaded it even took the trouble to add choice
APS
clips of Franco giving some of his most cutting insults, so he seemed to be tearing his own performance apart. After the revelation that Franco was no better than the acts he’d cruelly ridiculed, he became a national punch line and eventually resigned from the show in humiliation.
I actually felt sorry for the guy.
On the other hand, I hear he’s doing all right now. He started a one-man lima bean farm in eastern Wyoming far from other people, where he practices meditation as a way of overcoming the inner anger he’s carried since childhood. I’m told he’s never been happier or more relaxed.
And then there was SNaP. That autumn I began to notice less-traditional models showing up in advertisements. Beautiful full-figured women in glamorous poses. Skinny academic-looking guys relaxing on the beach or posing as construction workers while attractive women eyed them appreciatively from afar. Kids with actual acne that hadn’t been airbrushed away, and it wasn’t being treated as something
horrifying or even remarkable. At first it was hard to get used to but, boy, did it feel good.
It felt like Lemonade Mouth had been heard.
Perhaps the most gratifying moment for me, though, was seeing the smiling faces of Ruby, Glenda and Glenda on the magazine cover of
New Music Weekly
. The article inside told the story of how, after their
APS
appearances, Earl Decker had taken the three of them on as clients, combining them into a single act. The writer implied that signing the scrawny, birdlike girl and those stocky teen twins was just Earl’s way of riding the new “Get Real” wave, but I didn’t think so. Earl Decker may have been many things, but there’s no denying he was a genius at recognizing musical potential, so when I read that article it hit me that he’d done it again. By blending little Ruby’s incredible voice with the creative musicianship and backup vocals of those banjo-playing twins, Earl might just have created yet another pop sensation for the ages. And time proved him right. As everyone knows, that first album by Ruby and the Glendas went platinum and is already considered a classic. My friends and I couldn’t be happier for them.
But all that came later, of course.
Compatriots, when I recall myself in the waning weeks of that momentous summer, I see a different girl from the one whose fingers trembled the first time she dialed the offices of Decker and Smythe. While it’s true that I secretly still yearned for the elusive glory that comes from general acceptance, it’s also true that playing gigantic stadiums or otherwise rising to the top of the music charts was no longer my central concern. No, my attention had moved on to more important matters, and even small-seeming moments now sometimes glittered with real, lasting significance.
Case in point:
A couple of days after the Lemonade Mouth picnic, I returned home from band practice to find my older sister and my two little brothers huddled around a large package that sat on the kitchen table. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, all three eager gazes moved from the package to me. Right away I knew something was up. It was as if they were expecting me to turn into a platypus or something.
“Um … what’s going on?” I asked.
“This just got delivered,” Clea informed me, barely hiding a smirk. “It’s addressed to you.”
I still didn’t understand. I wasn’t expecting a package and, in any case, so what? What was the big deal? But Tim cleared up that mystery by contorting his face into a fourth-grade version of a suggestive leer and saying, “We think it’s from your
boyfriend
! Open it up, Stella! We want to see what it is!”
His equally sophisticated twin, Andy, started making loud kissy noises, which triggered peals of laughter from his brother. Even Clea seemed to fight back a snicker.
Now, by that time I was pretty much immune to their childish taunts, and anyway, I was too curious to care what they said. I ran to the box. There was no return address, but even before I recognized the familiar handwriting I noticed that the postmark said
Lubbock, TX
, which for me was evidence enough of who had sent it. My heart leapt.
Rajeev!
The package was big enough to hold a cocker spaniel but not heavy. I shook it a little. Nothing inside seemed to move.
“Go on,” Clea urged. “What are you doing, savoring the moment? Open it.”
So I did. I grabbed a pair of scissors from the kitchen
drawer, and a few seconds later all four of us were staring eagerly into the darkness of the box as I peeled back the top flaps and saw what it was.
A cowboy hat.
Dusty black with a weathered look, a pinch-front crown and a wide brim, it was like something you might see on a lone-wolf drifter in an old western.
There was also a handwritten note:
Howdy, pardner
,
Please accept this token of esteem from me and the great state of Texas, where the sky goes on forever and the tumbleweeds drift free
.
Yours even across a great distance
,
—Rajeev
I lifted the hat from the box and held it in front of me. It was by far the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my whole life. I sent out a silent thank-you to the boy I missed with a fiery passion, the one who seemed to know me so well it was scary. And then, for the first time ever, I placed that amazing hat on my head and felt its untamed power settle over me.
Even my sister and stepbrothers were wowed into respectful silence.
The world is a mysterious place.
The very next night, with only two weeks before we had to return to school, when there was little reason to expect the summer would have anything else in store for us, my friends
and I were hanging out listening to music in my basement when my phone rang. I almost hit the ceiling when I saw who it was.
Sista Slash.
Blunt and friendly as ever, Sista told us she was glad she’d reached us, and that she was sorry things hadn’t worked out for us at the festival. She added that things hadn’t worked out too well for her either. (Which we knew, of course, since it had been all over the news how she’d sunk a lot of her own money into that festival and had ended up losing it.)
“Believe it or not, my blasted accountant is telling me I’m practically broke, at least on paper,” she said with a calmness I found hard to understand. “But that’s rock and roll for you. One day you’re soaring like a jet and the next day your engines burst into flames. No worries, though. I’ve been down once or twice before and I’ve always come back. No doubt I’ll do it again. In the meantime,” she said, “I have another idea, if you guys are interested.”