Lemonade Mouth Puckers Up (23 page)

Friends and coconspirators, it would be difficult to convey the full depth of disappointment that soon enveloped the hearts of your pink-haired protagonist and her beleaguered band of rock-and-roll outcasts. It wasn’t merely the loss of their once-idolized promoter. One theory holds that people who choose to perform on a stage are really just looking for a way to be loved, and maybe that was a little bit true for Lemonade Mouth. Maybe acceptance was part of what they were looking for. So can you imagine, then, the despair it brought them to hear from one of their former rock-and-roll heroes, a respected music insider, that he would do everything in his power to make sure nobody in the industry would ever want anything to do with them?

It was no joy-fest. Let me assure you.

The drive home after that last meeting with Mr. Decker was a miserable experience. Each of us was still shaken by the immensity of what we’d done. There we’d been, in possession of our very own ticket to fame and glory, and what had we done with it? Tossed it out the window. Now we had
no choice but to face the dreary reality that our big chance was behind us and would never, ever return. Is it any wonder that we started to second-guess ourselves?

What had come over us?

Had we just made the biggest, dumbest mistake of our lives?

Had we lost our minds?

But there was no turning back. Without Decker and Smythe behind the scenes pushing the high-level buttons of the big media outlets, our phones soon stopped ringing and our lives plummeted back to their former ordinariness. Within days we felt like zombies, shuffling through our everyday jobs and obligations. I remember stopping by Mo’s store and discovering her hunched in a chair, dismal and alone, staring at a wall. Olivia all but disappeared from view, retreating into her house like a turtle into its shell. Charlie’s reaction was perhaps the most telling. For two days he wouldn’t talk—I mean at
all
—and when I asked him why, he reached dejectedly into his pocket and pulled out a preprinted card that explained how Buddhist monks often use silence as a way to center the mind in times of turmoil. I knew Charlie had been on his self-imposed mission to find life’s answers or whatever, but—wow.

This just seemed too sad for words.

As for me, my situation was no less depressing. At the height of our Decker excitement I’d cut back my hours at my mother’s lab, but now, with no other commitment stopping me, I had no excuse not to return to the old schedule. So once again, bright and early every morning, I found myself stationed at the Reception Desk of Purgatory. I spent a lot of that time with my cheek planted on the desktop.

“Cheer up, Stella,” my mother said one morning, setting
a cinnamon bun in front of my nose. “Better to be an almost-was than a never-could-have-been. At least you have your health.”

I swiveled a bleary eye toward her. My
health
? Seriously?

Yes, I snarfed down the cinnamon bun (why waste it?), but clearing the fog of my despair was going to require a power beyond that of a mere pastry.

As if matters needed worsening, the Decker and Smythe situation wasn’t the sole dark cloud hovering in my sky. First, with our Earl connection cut, my free tickets to Sista Slash’s Take Charge Festival were gone. I’d also missed my opportunity to
buy
tickets, because the entire superhyped festival was sold out. In my frustration I resorted to calling in to WRIZ radio contests when they’d given away pairs of tickets, but I’d found no luck there either—the gods of speed-dialing hadn’t smiled on me.

After all my efforts, it made me want to scream.

Second (and this, in all honesty, was the bigger drag on my soul), Rajeev’s six-week stay in Rhode Island was nearing its end. The boy who had dropped from the sky to shake up my world and steal my heart would soon have to fly far away to his family’s new home in Lubbock, Texas. The thing was, Rajeev and I had grown incredibly close during his stay. We’d shared secrets that neither of us had ever shared with anyone else. It hurt to even
think
of being apart. And I knew he felt the same. We had just a few days left, and then what? Sure, we could call and text and video chat, but it wouldn’t be the same as having him here in person.

Would he and I ever be together again?

Would life ever be the same after he was gone?

My mother must have read my thoughts, because before
leaving me to head deeper into the lab, she gave my shoulder a sympathetic squeeze and said, “Don’t worry, hon. I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”

She was right, of course. Whenever I worked at the lab, Rajeev almost always stopped by to hang out with me. It was the one bright spot that made the job tolerable. But today I knew it would be hard to feel cheerful, even for him. When he arrived at my desk a few minutes later he was holding his hand behind his back. His expression was serious.

“I brought something for you,” he said.

“You did?” I tried not to sound quite as downhearted as I felt. “What is it?”

“A surprise. A high-tech mood booster to make up for all you’ve lost.”

I looked up. All right, I was intrigued.

At last he set it on the desktop. It was a bobblehead of Elvis. With a gentle flick of Rajeev’s finger the king of rock and roll bounced and nodded at me, a tiny pompadoured stud muffin in a dance frenzy. I looked back at Rajeev. He was waiting for my reaction.

Despite everything, I smiled.

What can I say? The boy knew the way to my heart.

It was Lyle’s idea not to wallow in our misery. “You gotta throw yourselves right back in it,” he urged soon after the Decker debacle. “Let’s finish the old recordings. There isn’t much left, just a few cleanup tracks and maybe some overdubs. But at least it’s something to do instead of sitting around moping.” We agreed, but it was kind of a downer to return to the makeshift studio after working on a big-time
project at a real, high-tech operation. Our dreams had been so big, and now we were back to standing around in a sweaty garage?

It was hard not to feel discouraged.

But at least there was
some
good news. Starting the day after our appearance on
After Midnight with Chet Anders
, our official website (yep, it turned out we had one. Lyle and Naomi had put it up only a day before our careers crashed and burned. How ironic was
that
?) started receiving appreciative messages from people who’d seen the show.

I read maybe a couple dozen messages like that, most from ordinary people who’d struggled for one reason or another to accept themselves and wanted to let us know they liked our music and appreciated what we’d said. Which was nice to hear.

If that was the only good thing that came out of what happened, at least it was something we could be proud of.

The other positive news was that Lyle turned out to be right—going back to our old recordings was a welcome distraction. The Decker incident had left a certain amount of unspoken tension among us, but now that we were back in Lyle’s garage and making our own musical production decisions, we started remembering how we used to feel when we were making music just for ourselves. The garage setting was far more casual than that stuffy studio with Mr. Decker’s stressed-out producer. Here we felt like we were just hanging with friends and having fun, which of course was exactly what we were doing.

This arrangement was a lot more comfortable. It felt
right
.

Maybe it was having Lyle and Naomi helping us again, or maybe it was just where we happened to be emotionally and artistically, I don’t know, but somehow being more relaxed made the whole process not only easier, but
faster
too. It was as if our version of the music had been bottled up inside us, waiting to get out. Without really thinking about it, we completed all the remaining overdubs from the earlier songs in just two intense afternoon sessions. Then, in a third session, we added two additional new songs—“Ninja Earthquake” and “Bounce in All Directions,” both recorded in single takes, with all of us playing our instruments together, like in a live show.

For us, those few afternoons in Lyle’s messy garage were like an oasis in the desert. They helped us forget, at least for a while, all the bad stuff that had happened, and they gave us something to look forward to. I think we were all relieved just to be having fun again, and I think that energy came through in the music we made. In my humble opinion, the results were better than any of Decker’s studio recordings.

The big difference, of course, was that the Decker recordings would have gotten exposure to millions while these
tracks, proud as we were of them, had little hope of being heard by anyone beyond a small number of local fans.

A few days later, I arranged for the five of us to meet at Bruno’s so we could figure things out. You know, the future of the band and how we were going to move forward, stuff like that. I was trying to stay positive. It was clear on everybody’s faces, though, that the flash of joy that had briefly returned to us in Lyle’s garage had been beaten down again as the hopeless reality of our situation set in.

So much for moving forward.

Everyone arrived at Bruno’s looking as enthusiastic as cold, wet blankets. And there seemed to be something uncool brewing between Olivia and Wen. First of all, Olivia showed up almost an hour late. A day earlier we’d texted her about meeting, but none of us had seen her since. Then, when we asked Wen if he knew where she was and where she’d gone (we figured he was the most likely of us to know, right?), he said he had no idea and his face practically morphed into a tomato.

Perfect, I thought. Relationship troubles. That’s all we needed.

How many zillions of bands have imploded over the years because of some stupid love spat?

At last Olivia turned up, and she looked exhausted. She was apologetic but vague about what had happened, saying only that she’d been away, and nobody pushed her to say more because it was obvious she didn’t want to. No surprise there. This was Olivia, after all; mystery seemed to follow the girl around like a shadow. We all knew that if there was
something important she wanted to tell us, she’d get to it when she was ready.

But I could see there was something still going on with Wen. The whole time we were there, he hardly even looked at her.