Lemonade Mouth (18 page)

CHAPTER 5

Sorrowful and great is the artist’s destiny.

—Franz Liszt

LYLE DWARKIN:
Scrambling Under the Gaze of
a Sadistic Behemoth

Halloween is a big deal in Opequonsett. On the Friday closest to October 31st, the high school always throws a dance and just about everybody goes. The school sets up a wooden stage at one end of the gym and kids deck the place out with pumpkins, fake cobwebs, spooky lights and stuff like that. Everyone dresses up in funny costumes and gets ready to go wild to live music. The next night there’s a smaller party at the middle school, the one I’d attended the previous two Octobers, but I was much more excited this year. Everybody knew that the Halloween Bash at the high school was the big one. Most of all, this year my buddy Charlie and his band were playing and I got to work the soundboard. I was sure it was going to be a fantastic night.

But it certainly didn’t start off that way.

I arrived early with the rest of the A.V. Club so we could set up the cables and microphones for Lemonade Mouth and figure out the best volume and effects settings. It was a job that should have taken us an hour or so. But by 7:30, only thirty minutes before the party was supposed to begin, Mudslide Crush still hadn’t let us near the stage. Dean and his friends were taking their sweet time setting up, each one of them playing a long solo and spending ages testing each microphone while their sound guy adjusted the levels. And then they’d insisted on running through a bunch of songs—I don’t know, maybe seven or eight of them. They were making us wait on purpose. It was infuriating.

While Dawn Yunker and I sweated it out by the soundboard, Lemonade Mouth, most of it anyway, sat stony-faced on fold up chairs underneath the giant new scoreboard. Wen looked sullen and seemed to have a cold, Charlie had dark circles around his eyes, and Mo, who’d only just arrived, kept biting her nails and wouldn’t even look up at the stage. Stella was quieter than I’d ever seen her, hugging that ukulele to her body almost like she expected somebody to try to smash it. The worst part was that we were still waiting for Olivia to show up. No one had even heard from her since school ended.

“I don’t know what happened,” I heard Wen say. “She told me she was definitely coming.”

“She must be on her way,” whispered Charlie uncertainly. “Maybe she got held up.”

But I didn’t have time to worry about that. When Mudslide Crush finally cleared out, we only had twenty minutes or so to set up. The A.V. Club sprang into action. While Charlie and the others set up their instruments, we worked fast. I grabbed the board as Dawn and the others scrambled onto the platform. We’d learned to be wizards at repairing old cables and microphones with electrical tape, gum and whatever we had lying around. The trickiest part would be miking Charlie’s drums. There were so many of them.

One by one, each musician stood on the platform and rushed through a few notes so I could find the right levels and write them down. Ray Beech didn’t make it any easier. He appeared next to me and hovered close while I scrambled, watching my every move but not saying a word. And let me tell you, when a sadistic behemoth is glaring at you, it’s hard to concentrate. Soon somebody dimmed the lights and the first crowd of costumed kids started wandering in. But I wasn’t done figuring out where to set some of the levels.

In the end I just had to take my best guess.

DAWN YUNKER:
Guys Are Pigs

At 8:15, Olivia still hadn’t arrived. I was fighting the butterflies in my stomach, so to kill time I went back onto the stage and fiddled with the pickup on Mo’s bass. I thought I’d heard it pop a little during the sound check. It wouldn’t hurt to add an extra piece of tape to be sure it held in place. Mo was nowhere in sight. After Scott Pickett came off the stage, she’d bolted from the gym and closed herself inside the
Barking Clam
office with Naomi. It was no mystery why. By then it was common knowledge what had happened between Mo and Scott. But it was a good thing that she wasn’t around just then to see what I saw: Scott standing in the middle of the gym with Lynn Westerberg hanging all over him.

Guys are pigs.

The place was filling up. While the sound system pumped out music from one of Lyle’s dance mixes, kids in costumes greeted each other with shrieks of laughter. There were some wild outfits this year. I saw the usual witches and ghosts and things like that, but there were also a bunch of funny ones: a tube of toothpaste, two giant purple aliens, a Ping-Pong table. The entire basketball team had dressed themselves like babies in diapers. I planned to change into my costume as soon as I was done with Mo’s bass. I was going to be a toaster.

I finished with the tape. I hoped Charlie and his friends were as good as Lyle said. Especially since that ass Dean Eagler and his buddies had made such a big fuss, as if Lemonade Mouth was going to ruin the whole evening.

Then a couple seniors dressed as plants called up to me. “What’s the deal with the band? When are they starting?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, trying to sound calmer than I felt. “Soon, I hope.” I couldn’t help glancing toward Charlie, who was talking frantically with Lyle near the soundboard. What would they do if Olivia never showed?

But just as I left the stage, Stella came rushing over to me. “Where did she go?” she said, her face red and frantic.

“Who?”

“Olivia. Wen just said someone told him they’d seen her run through here. Did you notice where she went?”

I shook my head. “No. I didn’t see a thing.”

LESLIE DERN:
I Am Not Going to Throw Up

So I was standing at the sink in the girls’ bathroom with Kate Bates, adding the final touches to our makeup. I’d convinced Kate to come as a French waitress like me even though she complained that the miniskirt made her butt look big. It did, but I didn’t say so.

Just as I was leaning in to darken my eyeliner, the door behind us burst open so loud I jumped, which totally made me smear my eyelid. And then in the mirror I caught a glimpse of that Olivia Whitehead girl rushing toward the first stall. She looked as pale as aspirin and she was holding her hand over her mouth. She was talking to herself too. It wasn’t loud, but Kate and I both agree on what we heard. She repeated it a few times:

“I’m
not
going to throw up! I’m
not
going to throw up!”

And she didn’t.

At least not until just before she reached the toilet, anyway. But then, from the sound of it, up came everything she’d eaten all week.

MR. BRENIGAN:
A Terrible Mistake

I wasn’t sure what the problem was. Stella Penn and I had agreed that her band would begin playing at 8:00 on the dot and now it was 8:15 and we were still waiting. I had Dean Eagler and a few other seniors and juniors on my back about getting started with the live music. I told them to relax, that Stella’s band would come out soon. But I kept checking backstage to try to find out what was going wrong. Every time, Stella would assure me that everything was fine and they were almost ready. From the beginning, from that very first afternoon when she’d walked into my office and asked me to allow her band to perform at this year’s Halloween Bash, she’d promised me there wouldn’t be any problems. I’d admired her confidence. She told me in no uncertain terms that after playing at the Bash, she and her band planned to win the Holiday Talent Show. Despite reservations, I’d decided to give her the go-ahead.

But what a headache it turned out to be.

It’s amazing how a little thing like a high school band can cause an uproar in a town like Opequonsett.

Still, the thing was, and I want this completely understood and in the record: I started off rooting for her. It’s not easy being the new kid in a place like this, and even though Stella had a bumpy start to the year, after our initial talk she had me honestly convinced that she wanted to turn herself around. Anyone could see she was a girl with a great deal of potential. I hoped allowing her this opportunity would give her a constructive place to focus her energy.

But now as I checked my watch again, I began to realize I’d made a terrible mistake.

RAY BEECH:
One Final Tonguer

It was hilarious! Twenty minutes after they were supposed to start, the gym is swarming with people, and the freshman freaks still aren’t ready! So Dean slides back up to Butt Wipe-Brenigan and in his best suck-up voice he reminds him that we’re planning on doing two sets and maybe since everyone is waiting we should just start our first one. A couple of minutes later Butt-Wipe says okay. Yes! So then just as we’re about to get up on stage, I see Mo Banerjee wander in from her hiding place like the Last of the Bummed-Out Princesses. At that exact same moment, Lynn pulls Scott’s face to hers so she can give him one final tonguer before the show. Mo sees the whole thing! Her eyes completely bug out and then I watch her scurry away again, her face in her hands. It was great!

So we start our set, and I can’t hold back a huge grin. We really got those freaks good!

CYNTHIA STENMAN:
Eavesdropping with Marilyn Monroe

I was sitting on the toilet in the girls’ bathroom while Olivia was barfing her guts out in the next stall. So gross! A minute later the main door slammed open again.

“Olivia? You in there?” I knew the voice. It was Stella Penn.

“I’m here,” Olivia groaned. Then there was this completely revolting dry-heave sound like she was some kind of sea otter or something.

Then I heard Stella say, “Please leave!” Obviously, she was talking to Leslie Dern and Kate Bates, who I’d been eavesdropping on until Olivia showed up.

It didn’t take them long to scurry away.

After the door swung shut again I heard Stella step closer. She waited a few seconds and then asked Olivia if she was okay. “Yeah,” Olivia’s voice said. “I mean I’m not going to die or anything.”

“Can I open the door?”

Long pause. “Okay.”

There was more shuffling from the hallway and then a guy’s voice called in. “She here?”

“Yep,” said Stella. “She threw up. But she looks fine and says she’s okay.”

I heard some whispering and then the guy said, “We’re coming in.”

I nearly freaked but I kept quiet. From the footsteps I realized that two people, not just one, had joined Stella and Olivia.

“How you doing, Olivia?” I recognized this voice, too. Charlie Hirsh.

Olivia took a while to answer. “I can’t go out there.”

After a moment Stella said, “Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

That’s when the door opened again and somebody else tried to come in. Whoever it was, Stella took care of it.
“We’re in here!”

“But I have to use the bathroom!”

“Use the one by the cafeteria! Can’t you see we’re having a
conversation
?”

Whoever it was, they went away.

I quietly pulled up my legs. Thank God I’d come as Marilyn Monroe. If I’d worn a scarecrow costume, my original idea, the leaves probably would have crackled and given me away. I didn’t want to miss this.

“But you
can
do it,” said somebody else, another guy. “I know you can. We rehearsed everything. We’re good. Your voice is great. Besides, you and I put everything we have into writing this music. And the words you wrote, they’re wonderful.”

Olivia took a deep breath. I thought she was going to spew again but she didn’t. “I’m so sorry, Wen. I didn’t want to let you down, any of you. But I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

“Won’t you tell us why?”

“I’m just . . . I don’t know. I’m scared.”

There was a long silence before anybody spoke. It was so quiet I could hear the sound of water dripping from one of the faucets. Finally Wen said, “I know what you mean. I’m scared too.”

“Me too,” Charlie said.

Stella didn’t say anything right away. Something was happening out in the gym. I heard the crowd suddenly cheer and then Mr. Brenigan said something through the microphone but I couldn’t make it out. A moment later the audience screamed even louder and the music started up. I recognized the opening guitar chords. It was Mudslide Crush.

That’s when Stella finally spoke.

“Please, you can’t quit,” she said in a voice quieter than I’d ever heard coming from her mouth. “This is really important to me. I haven’t told any of you this but the truth is, everything I do I screw up. My mother thinks I’m out of control and I need to make this work to prove to myself that I’m not a complete idiot.” In the space underneath the door, two spike-buckled combat boots (who else’s could they be but Stella’s?) moved even closer to Olivia’s stall. “I’m scared too, but please, Olivia, don’t back out now.”

SETH LEVINE:
Waiting for a Mudslide

This year would be my last Bash, and I intended to make it a great one.

Through almost the entire Mudslide Crush set I danced with Wendy Davis, who came as a witch, and Jane Seiseki, who’d sewn up a sheet, a string and a big piece of cardboard to look like a giant teabag. Me, I was Abraham Lincoln. We were laughing and working up a sweat, but after a while my beard itched and my ears were pounding so I decided to get some fresh air. On my way out I ran into Kyle Reeves and a bunch of the Student Council crowd getting rowdy at the back of the gym. Somebody offered me a Jell-O shot. After that I needed to hit the john so I slipped out the double doors. A few kids milling around in the main foyer gave me high fives and shouted things like “Abe! Dude!” or “Way to go, Mr. Prez!” It was a laugh.

Anyway, while I was on my way to the john I stumbled across a handful of kids speaking in hushed tones at the entrance to that little hallway near the janitor’s equipment room. There’s a bench in that hallway, and over their shoulders I could see it. There sat five glum-faced kids, none of them talking—just staring into space. The whole scene struck me as weird.

“What’s going on?” I asked one of the guys at the front of the hallway.

“Lemonade Mouth,” he said quietly, like it was a funeral.

Curious, I looked over his shoulder again. I didn’t know any of them by name at the time, but I’d heard about this band, of course. Some of my friends were disappointed because a bunch of freshmen were going to cut into the Mudslide Crush show. They made a big deal out of it. In my opinion, it was all kind of ridiculous. Mudslide Crush had played the Halloween Bash the previous two years. Their songs were okay and all, but I thought they all sounded the same after a while. I was glad to have some variety this year.