Lemonade Mouth (12 page)

Wen knows the words to every Wham Bam Racer song. He sang some of them even though (as he freely admits) he has the worst voice ever, even worse than mine—like a mountain goat in a death throe (his words, not mine)! He made me laugh so hard that for a few minutes I stopped obsessing about Nancy (who’s doing better now). Wen’s even a P. G. Wodehouse fanatic like me, can you believe it? The truth is, I believe I’m starting to have a crush on him. And that’s a problem. After all, I’m sure he doesn’t feel the same way about me. How do I know? Well, for one thing, he’s obviously in lust with Sydney. All afternoon, whenever she was around he practically tripped over himself trying to look in the other direction.

Poor boy.

Anyway, the good news is that by the time I left Wen’s house he and I had five new songs. I’d brought my accordion to help us, but we seemed to work best with Wen coming up with most of the music and me writing the lyrics. The songs are just outlines, really, skeletons of words and melody that the others can fill in next time we get together. Still, I think they’re okay.

Stay tuned.

Your Biggest Fan,
Olivia

P.S.

I lied when I told you Nancy is doing better. Sorry. I wasn’t going to get into this because I figured there was no point in bringing you bad news, especially when I’m not even sure about it. But I was about to lick the envelope when I had a change of heart. She was originally your cat, after all, so withholding the truth wouldn’t be right. The fact is, she’s still hardly eating. Brenda and I are in a state about it. We’ve been trying everything: hand feeding her warm tuna, even giving her potassium supplements. So far nothing seems to work. The earliest vet appointment we could get was for this Wednesday. We’ve been putting on brave faces for each other, trying to convince ourselves it’s a stomach flu or something, but in my heart of hearts I’m not so sure. Needless to say, I’m losing sleep over it. But of course, whatever Nancy needs we’ll get her. Apart from Brenda and you, my girls are the closest friends I have in the world.

I hope I’m doing the right thing by telling you.

I’ll write when I know more.

STELLA:
A Puzzling Interruption

Picture, if you will, your beloved Sista Stella, her short locks now a blaze of glorious green, carrying her ukulele everywhere she went. It wasn’t exactly
her
ukulele, of course, but Mrs. Reznik said she could use the one from the music room as long as she needed. And Stella wasn’t carrying it around to show off or anything, it was just that she liked to keep it close. Imagine our musical maverick carefully removing the instrument from its case several times a day just to look at its shiny red finish, its perfect silver frets. Our former directionless loner suddenly felt like she had a purpose, a raison d’être, and she was determined to take good care of the beautiful instrument, to keep it protected, polish it and change the strings often.

Now picture a bunch of self-important juniors and seniors giving her the evil eye as she walked the hallways. Not that they didn’t stare before, secretly studying her like she were a curious specimen, keeping their distance as if worried she might spontaneously burst into flames. But suddenly now it was even worse.

How did this baffling new heat from passing glances affect me?

Well, I won’t lie. I found it all pretty freaky. Still, who could blame me, a naïve newcomer at the time, for assuming I was getting these dark stares only because kids thought I was some kind of music dork? According to Wen, though, that wasn’t it at all. He told me it was because somebody had spread the word that I was responsible for cutting the Mudslide Crush show short. Naturally, I was surprised to hear it was that big a deal. Apparently this band had quite a following. Its fans even had a name for themselves: the Mudslide Crushers. Sure, I’d heard some of Mudslide Crush’s music, and it really
was
a good band in a power-pop kind of way—but who
were
these people, some sort of suburban cult?

But I tried to ignore the looks. Just because Mudslide Crush was popular didn’t mean they couldn’t share the stage for one solitary night.

That Tuesday afternoon my own neophyte band met again for our second practice.

“I see everybody brought their official underworld membership badges,” Wen said as we were setting up.

I wasn’t sure at first what he was talking about, but when I looked around I realized. Today, not only did Mrs. Reznik have her usual Mel’s cup from the nearby machine, but each of us, myself included, had brought one too. Before moving to Rhode Island I’d never even heard of Mel’s Organic Frozen Lemonade, but during my visits to the basement in recent days I’d developed a taste for it. The icy cold slush was a welcome change from soda. But in my short time at this school I’d also learned that drinking Mel’s was something people around here usually associated with the oddball kids who hung out in the basement. If somebody was carrying the signature yellow and green paper cup, that usually meant they were in one of the school’s less glamorous organizations.

Everybody seemed to recognize what Wen meant. Mo laughed. “I guess this means we’re an official basement club now.”

It suddenly struck me as strange that Mo would want to be down here with us. After all, unlike the rest of us, she had somewhere else to go. But then again, it seemed to me that Mo didn’t really fit in with that crowd of Barbies and Kens I sometimes saw her with. There was something off-kilter about her. For starters, she was a human pressure cooker. You could see in her eyes that the girl was always on the verge of panic. And then there was the bullheaded way she did everything—like insisting on lugging that bass around with her all the time even though it was practically bigger than she was. Being the only Indian kid at school didn’t help either. In any case, here she was—maybe not as obviously out of spec as the rest of us, but out of spec just the same.

I held up my cup, “We’re subterranean and we’re proud!”

Everybody grinned. They each grabbed their own cups and held them up, and then we all took a sip together.

The dark and windowless music room was not a particularly peaceful place to practice, though. Not only was it situated below the new locker rooms which were under construction, but it was also directly adjacent to the bathrooms so the pipes shook, loud as crap, every time somebody flushed—which always seemed to happen two or three times in a row.

“Down here, everybody’s an underachiever,” Wen quipped after the third or forth time it happened. “Even the toilets.”

Wen was all right.

Still, I didn’t care about the noise. To be honest, after everyone dissed my Sista Slash ideas at the last practice, leaving the group with only the one tune, I worried that we wouldn’t be able to get our act together on time. Plus, we still didn’t have a name. The subject had come up a few times already but nobody ever had any good ideas, and anyway, nothing seemed to fit. And this worried me. Mr. Brenigan had been pushing for a name to put on the fliers. The Bash was only in seventeen days.

But after practice got going, I realized that at least we had a handful of new songs thanks to Wen and Olivia. Who knew they had it in them? Olivia had even brought an ancient-looking accordion, which they hooked up to one of that Lyle kid’s distortion effects. Freaky cool. Out of all the new songs, the one that especially bowled me over was one called “Skinny Nancy,” a spooky tune with mysterious words:

That blew me away.

I asked Olivia what it meant but she wouldn’t say, only that it was personal. I kept pushing but the girl was a hard nut to crack. Finally, Charlie came to her defense:

“Leave her alone,” he said. “Why should it even matter what she says it means? Can’t everyone interpret the words whatever way makes sense to them?”

The first time I’d ever laid eyes on Charlie, all I’d seen was a big slow, disheveled kid with a monotone way of talking and an occasional psycho look in his eyes—a kid at the absolute bottom of the high school food chain. But now I recognized that he was actually a thoughtful, sensitive guy. He seemed to take everything seriously, and I liked that about him. I could understand why he and Olivia might see eye to eye.

I was also beginning to feel my own unlikely connection to our strange, taciturn singer. That very morning in Biology while everybody was supposed to be silently reading our textbooks, I, uninterested in chloroplasts or ribosomes, had instead been secretly reading an X-Men comic I’d hidden inside the textbook pages. But when I looked up I noticed Olivia on the opposite side of the room staring directly at me. Caught, I’d felt my face heat up. But that’s when Olivia quietly lowered her own textbook just enough to show what was inside. A paperback novel. A moment later, we were both having a difficult time holding back laughter.

In any case, after that fight during our first practice, I was determined not to let anything else threaten to split my fragile new band apart again.

“All right,” I said, hoping to end the tension with a smile. “It’s personal. As long as Olivia and Wen keep coming up with songs that good, I guess I don’t have to know what they mean.”

That’s when somebody pounded hard against the door. It was three loud thumps so sudden and forceful that they made me jump. And immediately afterward I thought I could hear footsteps sprinting away down the hallway.

“What the heck was that?” Wen looked as startled as I felt.

By the time we got to the door and peered down the hallway, there was nobody there except a couple kids from the French Club. Just like us, they were checking to see what the commotion had been.

Charlie scratched his cheek. “That was weird. I wonder what that was all about.”

Then Olivia said, “Look!” She was pointing up at the ceiling behind us.

Everyone turned. Hanging from a tile above the entrance way to the loading dock was what looked like one of those baby mobiles, those funny little circular arrangements of colored objects on strings that you hang above a newborn’s crib—except this one was made of five empty Mel’s cups.

“What is it?”

I wasn’t sure, but I had a sinking feeling that it wasn’t fan mail. When I looked closely, I noticed that underneath a layer of grime, each cup had a frowning face drawn on it in black marker. One of the faces had rectangular glasses. “I’m . . . pretty sure that’s supposed to be
us.
”

“Whoa,” Charlie whispered. “Bizarre . . .”

Everyone crowded closer. At the top of the mobile was a folded piece of paper. I reached up and picked it off the string.

“Come on, Stella,” said Wen impatiently. “What does it say?”

As I unfolded it, I felt a wave of dread. I didn’t want any more problems. When I’d started at this school, all I’d wanted was to fit in. But it sure wasn’t easy. I quickly read the note and then showed it to the others.

“Freaks Back Off the Bash.”

CHARLIE:
Stella Shoots Her Mouth Off