Lemonade Mouth (2 page)

What can I tell you about Sista Stella that you haven’t by now heard from those who already think they know everything?

Plenty.

I wear boxers. I like fruitcake. I’ve been a vegetarian since eighth grade. The summer after that, my mother got a new job heading a start-up development project at a lab in Rhode Island (something to do with saving the planet by making cheap biodegradable plastic out of plants), so a week before high school began, my family (my mom, my sister, Clea, and me, plus Leonard and the step-monkeys) had to pack our bags and load a U-Haul. If we hadn’t left Tempe, Arizona, would there still have been Lemonade Mouth? Who’s to say?

If you want the story of
my
part in everything—and you want it to make
sense
—then I can’t jump right into Lemonade Mouth. I’ll need to begin a little earlier, explain a few things about my screwed-up life. There are a lot of misconceptions out there.

Let’s start with my hair. As a lot of people know, since I was a little girl I’d always kept it all the way down to my waist. So why, two weeks into my freshman year, did I, in a fit of frustrated rage, hack it all off, leaving little more than short tufts?

Allow me to carry you back in time to that fateful Monday in late September when Stella, our incorrigible heroine, locked herself in the bathroom and went to work with a pair of scissors.

What on earth could have possessed her? What was going on in her head? At the time there were a number of theories.

My own mother, for instance, days later (after she’d gotten over her initial shock at seeing her formerly long-haired offspring in this new and strange state), would give a patronizing roll of her eyes and explain to anybody who asked that “Stella’s still working through anger issues about moving.” Which of course I
was.
It wasn’t
my
idea to transplant my already sorry excuse for a life across the country to some nothing little town I’d never heard of. And did anybody act like I even mattered in the decision? Neither my mother nor Leonard had even asked for my thoughts before announcing that the move to Rhode Island was a done deal. Nobody
ever
asked my opinion. And after that, everything seemed to happen in a flash. Before I could even say
quahog,
I found myself in New England at a cliquey new school that I hated, where I didn’t know anyone and nobody talked to me.

“Thank you, O Mother Dear,” gushes our smiling young protagonist, “for uprooting me from everything I’d ever known and loved!”

Of course I was angry. Who wouldn’t have been?

Yes, the move may have been
part
of the reason why I ended up rifling through the kitchen drawers for a pair of scissors on that clear September evening. But it may surprise some of your readers to hear that it was
not
ultimately what pushed me over the edge.

My sister, Clea, who had recently started her freshman year at nearby Brown University but still often spent evenings stretched out on the family sofa in a self-absorbed fog, had a different theory. She thought it was all about a missed appointment.

“We all know Stella,” she was overheard snorting to Leonard the next day. “She’s immature and always has to have her own way. In her mind, just because she
finally
decides to get her hair styled, that means the whole world should stop in its tracks. So when my car breaks down and Mom has to pick me up instead of driving her into Seekonk for her all-important appointment, what’s her natural reaction? Tizzy overdrive!”

As with many wrong theories, this one also wasn’t completely devoid of truth. My mother
had
promised to drive me to get my hair cut, and in fact, this was the third appointment the distracted woman had made me cancel due to last-minute “emergencies.” And I was indeed desperate to fix my appearance. It probably sounds strange, but after the move I started obsessing about things. I felt self-conscious about how much I’d grown over the summer—I’d always been on the tall side, but now I stood just over six feet in my socks. And my superlong hair was suddenly all wrong.
I
was all wrong. It didn’t help matters that on my second day at my new school, as I ambled down the aisle to take my seat in Algebra, I passed a girl in a mohair cardigan and overheard her whisper, “Hippie Bigfoot,” to the girl beside her, another mohair cardigan. I nearly died. Clearly, some drastic change was required if I was going to fit in around here. And since there was nothing I could do about my height, I suddenly felt my ’do was the obvious place to start. Something shorter, with more style, more oomph. Even though it would be a sacrifice, I was determined to make it happen as soon as possible.

But it wasn’t my family’s constant crises that led me to the radical mutilation of my coiffure.

Some people say it was because of Mr. Brenigan, the Vice Principal at Opequonsett High School. They point out that the very day I got busy with the scissors happened to be the same one in which the high school Powers That Be sent me home for wearing an allegedly obscene article of clothing. All it had been was a plain army-green T-shirt, albeit snug-fitting, onto which I’d added two handprints in yellow acrylic paint. But the small-minded autocrats in the front office felt that since the two handprints happened to fall on my breasts, the shirt was somehow inappropriate for a learning environment. The shirt was, of course, art. It was also the trademark look of Sista Slash, the famous activist and musical anarchist. I used to wear mine at my old school all the time, so when I picked it out that morning I honestly hadn’t thought anything of it. But Mr. Brenigan insisted that I could return to school only after I’d changed into more appropriate attire.

Even now I can remember his exact words:

“Opequonsett High doesn’t have a dress code, exactly. It’s just that we have an unwritten line and that shirt crosses it.” Mr. Brenigan, who looks like a tired Michelin Man with a receding hairline, leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers together while he talked, as if what he was saying was deep.

“But . . . what about freedom of expression?” I asked, trying to hide the fact that I was nearly crapping in my jeans. It wasn’t as if I’d ever been sent home from school when I lived in Tempe. Juvenile delinquency was new to me.

Mr. Brenigan gave me a steady gaze that went on and on. I began to wonder with growing alarm whether I’d missed something. That’s another thing you ought to understand about me—I often found myself struggling to keep up, and it freaked me out a little. Maybe because every other member of my family was certifiably brilliant. My father, a biochemistry PhD like my mother, was working on a cure for pancreatic cancer in St. Louis. My sister was at Brown. My mother ran a lab that sounded like something straight out of science fiction, for godsakes! Even my step-family was impressive. Leonard had started his own software company and was a millionaire by age twenty-five, and the step-monkeys, at eight, were already demonstrating a surprising aptitude for taking apart their electronic toys and putting them back together again. My own apparent dumbness was a source of constant embarrassment. In biology class on my very first day, for example, instead of paying attention to Mrs. Birch’s long, boring speech about some moth in England, I’d found myself staring at Mrs. Birch’s belly, which stuck out from her otherwise-slender body like a beach ball. At the end of the lecture, when the teacher asked if anybody had questions, I raised my hand and asked, “Are you pregnant?” At this, the boy next to me quipped, “No, Einstein, she just stuck a pillow under her shirt. It’s the latest fashion.” The class broke out in fits of laughter. I tried to shrink in my chair.

Anyway, during Mr. Brenigan’s long silence I felt myself blush.

Eventually he half smiled. “You can’t change the world. We run a tight ship here, Stella, and everybody’s part of the same crew. I don’t know what you were used to back in
Arizona
”—at this point he eyed me significantly as if he were studying an obvious bad egg from a scandalous part of the country—“but you’ll soon learn that
here,
we respect the rules. Written and unwritten.”

As you might imagine, that almost sent me into a frustrated conniption. So it does seem plausible that the T-shirt incident, together with Mr. Brenigan’s speech, the memory of my stolen Arizona life, and the reality of finding myself an outcast in a new unfriendly school in a hostile new state, as well as my mother’s obvious disregard for my feelings might, in combination, have been enough to set off the whirlwind of snapping scissors and flying hair that soon followed.

But it wasn’t. Not quite.

Not to say that each of those points didn’t weigh on my troubled mind. They absolutely did. But what ultimately sent me storming into the bathroom that night was something else.

So what was it? All right. I’ll tell you.

The truth was, I didn’t really know. All I understood was that I’d had a feeling welling up inside me for a while, a feeling I’d barely noticed at first but that now was growing so fast it was practically taking over everything else. Like I was going to explode. Like all the atoms in my body were getting ready to burst and it was only a question of when.

I was a walking time bomb.

A piece of paper I received that day may also have contributed to The Hair Incident. In some other week, perhaps, the bad news delivered on this document might have rolled right off me instead of hitting me head-on like a renegade garbage truck. But given my volatile state in that monumentally crappy twenty-four-hour period, it’s possible that this little spark might have been all that was needed to set me off.

So what was it?

It arrived in the mail. At home that afternoon, waiting for my mother to drive me to my appointment (still unaware that said appointment wasn’t to be), I checked the mailbox. I noticed the envelope addressed to me right away—it was long and white and in the top left corner was the address of J. Edgar Hoover Middle School in Tempe, Arizona. There were several stickers eventually directing the letter to Rhode Island. I had a sudden idea what it was. Back in June, my old school had held a “Future Careers Fair” where a nurse, an insurance salesman, two artists and a veterinarian spoke to a crowd of eighth graders about their jobs. We could choose to take short written multiple-choice tests that were supposed to tell us about our personalities, aptitudes and the kinds of careers we might consider someday. Foolishly, I’d signed up and taken the tests. The results were apparently mailed late and, since my family had moved, had taken even more time to find their way to me. To be honest, by then I’d forgotten all about that fair.

But now here was the envelope. So I opened it.

Within seconds I felt like day-old crap.

Now, please forgive me if I don’t detail everything the letter said, except to say that it included an IQ score that confirmed my worst suspicions about myself. I knew something about IQ scores. My mother, a member of Mensa, the club for people with intelligence quotients in the top two percent of the general population, has an IQ of 164. I knew that 100 was average. So when I saw the number written by my name, that about-to-explode sensation I’d felt growing inside me for days quickly swelled until it was almost unbearable, until it literally throbbed through my body. Here was indisputable proof of why I so often found myself lost in class, why I was bad at math, bad at English, bad at everything.

Eighty-four.

In a family of geniuses, I was now a documented dummy.

I believe there are moments that can make you burst out of yourself, smash through the boundaries of your everyday life, the unhappy existence you have until then accepted without protest, and make a change that is dramatic, unexpected and right. And that, my friends, is the only explanation I can offer for what I did to my hair that night, why I apparently lost my mind.

Within minutes after my mother came home, I was at the bathroom sink with my hands gripping the porcelain so hard my knuckles were white. In the mirror my bangs covered my eyes, and shapeless turd-brown hair framed my grimacing face like limp drapes.
Eighty-four!
I wanted to scream but didn’t. Instead, I held the scissors just above my left cheek and made the first cut. A long ribbon of hair fell to the floor. After hacking off the length from first one side, then the other, I reached behind my neck and bunched the remaining length in my fist.

It was gone in one vicious chop.

I was burning so hot that I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d finally figured out why everybody else always seemed to make the decisions without asking me, why the universe was out of my control, run by the crappy ideas of other people. It was because I was stupid. I hated my life. And each slice of the scissors felt like a stab at my whole messed-up world.

Here’s what I thought of Mr. Brenigan. Yank-snip!

Here’s what I thought of natural selection and genetic variation. Yank-snip! Yank-snip!

It was only when I noticed the impressive piles of hair in the sink and on the floor that I came out of my trance. I balled my fists, each breath short and sharp. I blinked at the stranger who looked back at me from the mirror. My bangs were gone, and all that remained elsewhere on my head were short wisps that jutted out at harsh angles.

I’ll admit it: I felt a brief moment of panic. What had I done? How was I going to face my mother? How would I get through the next day at school?

But then something unexpected happened. I stared hard at my reflection, truly studied myself. I could actually make out the shape of my head for the first time in forever. I leaned in closer. I couldn’t remember having such a clear view of my ears. My neck either. It was thick and white and strong. I liked what I saw. Even my wide cheekbones, which I’d always thought made me look like a gorilla, now seemed almost regal.

And then, standing in the bathroom with most of my hair at my feet, I felt an unexpected adrenaline rush. The girl in the mirror was a different Stella that I barely recognized. Yet at the same time, she was like a long-lost friend, somebody I’d known all my life but didn’t see a lot of.