Lemonade Mouth

by Mark Peter Hughes

  Minutes later, I sat quietly in Mr. Brenigan’s office while he read me the riot act. Away from the shouting crowds, I began to question the wisdom of my protest. What was I trying to prove, anyway? It wasn’t as if the school rules were going to change. And when he sentenced me to a full week of detention, I felt all the fear and unhappiness I’d been wallowing in ever since school began well back up inside me. Plus, I hated to imagine how mad my mother would be when she learned how much trouble I’d gotten myself into. As Mr. Brenigan’s stern voice droned on about disappointment and harsher punishments to come, I felt Sista Stella deflate inside me.

  Soon after that, I was back in class just as friendless and alone as ever. Perhaps there was a little more whispering when I walked into the room, but other than that, nothing much had changed except that now I was a certified, publicly acknowledged freak. As I took my seat I could feel in my pocket the envelope that contained the documented proof of my own foolishness.

  Eighty-four.

  As if any more proof were needed.

  WEN:

  So Much for Sympathy

  Mr. Prichard gave me detention for swearing in class. That meant I wouldn’t be able to go to the band tryouts that afternoon unless I cut detention. And this wasn’t even the worst of it. My problems were so much bigger now.

  It wasn’t long after the stiffy incident that I found out just how badly I’d screwed up my life.

  During second period I tried to calm myself down. I could play it cool, act like Social Studies had never happened. I even managed to convince myself that maybe I’d been wrong, that nobody had actually noticed Happy Roger at full mast. This was just a normal day like any other, nothing to worry about.

  It was a delusion that made me feel better.

  But not for long.

  By third-period Algebra my worst fears were confirmed. When I walked into the room there was a strange lull in the usual chatter, and as I strolled to my seat I could feel everyone watching me. I tried to ignore the strange vibe, and even pulled off a casual hi to Ted Papadopoulos, whose chair was next to mine, but he wouldn’t look at me. He kept his eyes fixed on Ms. Stone, who was writing on the board. I opened my backpack and pulled out my notebook. That’s when I heard giggling from the back corner of the room. I turned. Trisha Myers, Ashley Ducker and Georgia Cole were whispering and laughing—and, I thought, looking everywhere but at me.

  “What?” I asked them, still holding onto the slim hope that this might have nothing to do with that morning.

  Trisha shrugged and made a face as if she wasn’t sure what was so hilarious. I scowled at them and turned back around. But that’s when Georgia said, “Hey, Wen? How was Social Studies? I hear your presentation was . . . stimulating. ”

  The three of them broke into fits. A few other kids started giggling too. Ted covered his face with his hand, but I could see he was shaking with laughter.

  It took all my willpower to prevent myself from jumping out of the window.

  After Algebra, it seemed like the whole school knew. Everywhere I went, people were snickering. In the hallway before American History, this junior, Ray Beech, bumped into me and shouted, “Hey! Watch where you’re going, Woody, you horndog!” And that was all it took for his buddies to fall over each other, laughing so hard they were practically in tears.

  The humiliation was unbearable.

  Thing was, last year I’d kind of screwed things up with my two closest buddies and now I was a little short on friends. That’s why I’d been so determined to fit in this year. Until today I’d been imagining popularity, envisioning tables of kids turning to wave to me as I entered a room. But instead, kids were veering away from me like I was the plague. And I couldn’t blame them. To be seen with me was committing social suicide. And it was all Sydney’s fault. I knew I should just get over it, but I couldn’t. I’d stuffed the envelope with the drawings under a pile in my locker, but even now when I closed my eyes I could still picture the delicious charcoal curves of her nakedness.

  I know it sounds funny, but I was furious. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t my fault that my penis had betrayed me. Sure, it was attached and everything, but it wasn’t like I had any control of the little bastard. Could I help it if for some infuriating reason it had a thing for my dad’s girlfriend?

  I’d been damned to social purgatory by a dim-witted organ beyond my command.

  After the seventh-period bell I stood in the hall halfway between the gym, where the Marching Band tryouts were about to start, and the stairway to the basement, where freshman detention was about to begin. I felt paralyzed with indecision.

  Azra Quimby appeared from the crowd, her stuffed backpack over her shoulder. She came right up to me and just stood there, which kind of freaked me out. Finally she said, “Excuse me, Wen. You’re standing in front of my locker.”

  “Oh.” I stepped aside. “Sorry.”

  Azra and I had kind of a weird relationship. We used to be best friends. Along with another girl, Floey Packer, we’d been kind of a threesome, almost inseparable. But that all ended last year when I’d made the mistake of asking Azra out. Now that we’d broken up, everything was uncomfortable between us.

  A few seconds later she was crouched down, pulling things out of her backpack. Without looking up at me she said, “What are you doing here? Don’t you have detention?”

  “Oh, you heard about what happened?”

  She nodded. “Everybody heard.”

  Another wave of shame washed over me. But I refused to let it show. “I’m trying to decide what to do. Today is Marching Band tryouts. Should I really forget about band and go to detention like I’m supposed to, or should I skip detention, accept whatever the consequences may be, and go to tryouts like I’d planned? What do you think?”

  She stood up, her backpack restuffed and rearranged, and slammed her locker door shut.

  “I don’t know,” she said, barely looking at me. “But I gotta get going or I’m going to miss my bus.”

  So much for sympathy.

  Alone again, I realized I didn’t have much time left. In less than four minutes the after-school activities bell would ring. So I took a deep breath, gripped hard on my trumpet case handle, and made my decision.

  I ran toward the gym.

  When I got to the open double doors, I could see a crowd of kids, each with instrument cases at their sides, standing around a table set up at one end of the gym floor. Jonathan Meuse stood in the thick of it like a scarlet-haired king holding court. He was already explaining how the Marching Band budget was smaller this year, so anyone who got in this year would be expected to sell a lot more chocolates than ever to pay expenses. But then he noticed me at the door.

  “Oh, look who it is, folks!” he called. “Woody! Woody Gifford! You here for the tryouts, Wood-man?”

  Everybody turned. A bunch of kids laughed.

  Suddenly my legs turned to jelly. I felt every molecule in my body shrivel up. It occurred to me as I scanned the grinning faces that I might be better off spending my after-school time alone at home in front of the TV.

  “No,” I said, lamely, backing into the hallway. “I . . . uh . . . have detention.”

  As soon as I was out of sight I started running, my head as warm as a brick oven. I couldn’t get away from there fast enough. When I came to my locker I stopped, yanked open the little metal door, shoved my trumpet and case violently inside, and then slammed the locker door shut again. For a few seconds I just stood there with my forehead pressed against the cold metal.

  There’s something incredibly humiliating about not being cool enough to try out for Marching Band.

  A moment later I dragged myself toward the basement stairway. I figured I still had a half a minute or so before the bell.

  OLIVIA:

  An Introverted Virgo of the Worst Kind

  Dear Naomi,

  Let me start off by saying that I don’t believe in accidents. I’d hate to think that whatever happens is simply the inadvert
ent outcome of a series of random events with no preordained purpose.

  Anyway, there’s too much evidence against it. I’m not saying that the future is already decided, only that each decision we make, however small, helps clear the path toward events that inevitably follow. For example, if I hadn’t skipped American Lit, I wouldn’t have had to show up to detention that afternoon. And if I hadn’t gone to detention, everything would have been different.

  But the fact was, Mr. Carr assigned The Great Gatsby, a sad, beautiful story I’d already read at my old school. Plus, he liked to quiz us after each chapter and there’s no better way than that to strip away all the fun of a good book. Which was why I chose to skip third period and spend the time curled up on a bench behind the janitor’s equipment room finishing it for the third time. Which in turn was why, when the principal, Mrs. Ledlow, happened to make a rare visit to that corridor, she found me there. And that was why, at 2:05 that afternoon, I had to show up to the basement for ninth-grade incarceration. Where Lemonade Mouth was born.

  How could all that have been dumb luck?

  I like to think that whatever happens was always meant to happen, like an unstoppable train that departed long ago and forever rolls toward an inevitable destination. Life seems so much more romantic that way, don’t you think? Still, you asked me to tell my story so I guess I need to begin it somewhere. That afternoon in detention is as good a place as any.

  It started like this:

  Detention that day was downstairs with Mrs. Reznik, the music teacher. When I walked into the music room, a cluttered, windowless basement space near the A.V. closet and the school’s boiler room, the little radio on Mrs. Reznik’s desk was playing a commercial with a catchy jingle, that “Smile, Smile, Smile” one about teeth. It kind of stuck in my mind. That’s not unusual for me. There’s always some tune or other drifting around in my head.

  Anyway, just as the bell rang I took a seat near the back. I was trying to concentrate on my breathing. I sometimes get panic attacks in stressful situations and right then I needed to keep calm. Nobody spoke. Mrs. Reznik sat at her desk, coughing and scowling as she leafed through a giant pile of paperwork. A tiny, narrow-faced lady with a body shaped like a piccolo, skin like worn shoe leather, and a startlingly large nest of lustrous brown hair, she was a sight to behold. I’d seen her reduce kids to tears with one look. There were rumors that the school administration had been trying to force her into retirement, but they couldn’t get rid of her. I could understand why. The woman scared the pee out of me.

  I studied the blackboard where she’d set down the law in sharp, spidery chalk letters.

  Detention Rules:

  1. No gum chewing, food or drink in the classroom.

  2. You will remain seated.

  3. You will not talk.

  4. The first time you break a rule, your name will go on the board. The second time, you will receive another detention.

  At my old school, St. Michael’s in Pawtucket, they didn’t even have detention. St. Michael’s is an alternative school, a place where they send kids who don’t fit in somewhere else so they can get an education “without walls.” But Brenda, my grandmother, told me back in July that we couldn’t afford the tuition anymore so now I found myself back among the walls.

  My chair squeaked and I almost jumped. Mrs. Reznik looked up. “Name please?”

  The other detainees, two boys and two girls, turned to look. I tried to smile. I may have been an introverted Virgo of the worst kind, but at least I was working on it.

  “Olivia,” I reminded her. “Olivia Whitehead.”

  Mrs. Reznik frowned and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “You can all read the rules. I suggest you use this hour to work on something productive.” Some pop song came on—Desirée Crane or Hot Flash Smash, somebody like that. Still, it was the “Smile, Smile, Smile” commercial that looped through my mind.

  The other kids went back to staring into space. I only recognized two of them. Wendel Gifford, a kid who always seemed to dress in crisp, preppy clothes, was in my Social Studies class. We’d never actually spoken, but he’d embarrassed himself during a presentation that morning and I felt sorry for him. The Amazon girl with the leather skirt, savagely ripped tights, and short spiky hair was Stella Penn. After she’d pulled that crazy stunt at an assembly earlier that week, everybody knew who she was. The other two I didn’t know. Tapping nervously on his desk at the far end of the front row sat a sullen, thick-necked boy with an overgrown mop of frizz. To my left fidgeted a skinny Indian-looking girl with long dark hair, big brown eyes and, at her feet, a huge, gray double bass case. She was biting her nails like a stress-fiend.

  After a while, Mrs. Reznik went into a coughing fit. They were dark, rumbly coughs that seemed to come from deep in her chest. Everybody looked up. After a moment she stood and stepped toward the door. “I’ll be back in one minute,” she said, still coughing, and then left the room. When she came back she seemed better. In her hand was a green and yellow paper cup that said Mel’s Organic Frozen Lemonade. It must have come from the machine I’d noticed at the top of the stairs. She set it on her desk and sat down.

  I guessed the no-drinks rule didn’t apply to Mrs. Reznik. Not that I was going to say anything.

  Wen and Stella stared vacantly at the wall, the frizzy-haired boy tapped on his desk and the skinny girl absently fingered a pile of rubber bands. In a poster hanging near my chair, four old guys in short pants and feathered hats were playing accordions and tubas under this huge willow tree in the middle of what looked like some quaint, pastoral German village. I gazed at it and imagined myself into the picture. I’m pretty good at that, imagining myself somewhere I’m not. I find I can visit the nicest places that way. In my mind I was relaxing on the ground in front of the four guys, listening to their music and feeling the grass between my toes and a gentle breeze in my hair. Soon, the music transformed into the tooth song and I realized the commercial had come back on Mrs. Reznik’s radio again.

  Smile, smile, smile!

  Would you like the perfect smile?

  Don’t you want your first impression

  to be great?

  I looked up. Every head in the room was nodding with each oomp-oomp-oomp of the tuba.

  Bernbaum Associates, Bernbaum Associates,

  Bernbaum Associates

  Can fix your smile—Don’t Wait!

  Soon after that, Mrs. Reznik’s cell phone rang. She put it to her ear and a second later she stepped out of the room again to take it, only this time she switched off the radio before she left. It took me a minute or so to adjust to the silence. My eyes drifted back to the rules again, and I found myself pondering Mrs. Reznik’s skinny D’s and the steep slope of the tops of her T’s when I suddenly noticed that something felt wrong. I looked around.

  Everybody in the room was looking at me.

  That’s when I realized I’d been singing the smile song. My face went warm. After a moment, Stella laughed. Wen shrugged kindly and turned back around, and then everybody else did too. I wanted to die.

  There are different opinions about what happened next.

  Mo, who of course I now know was the skinny girl, says it was Charlie, who at that time I only knew as the frizzy-haired boy, tapping on his desk that started it. Charlie says it was Mo. She picked out a rubber band, stretched it between her thumbs and flicked it with her fingers. By changing the length she altered the pitch, making the same bouncing notes as the tuba in the commercial. I don’t remember who was first, but it doesn’t actually matter because before long they were doing it together. And it sounded good.

  Boom tappa boom tappa boom.

  Oomp-oomp-oomp.

  Stella and Wen looked up. The next thing I knew, Stella shot out of her seat. She hopped over a row of desks to where Charlie sat.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered, shrinking back from her. I wondered if he thought she was going to hit him. Big as he was, Stella looked like she could take him.r />
  “Don’t stop tapping!”

  On the wall over his head hung a beaten-up ukulele. She reached across, grabbed it off the hanger and took it back to her seat. After adjusting the tuning pegs, Stella started strumming the chords of the jingle along with Mo and Charlie. The ukulele sounded tinny and crazy. But in a good way.

  By that time I guess Wen wanted to get into the act. He went to the storage closet and rummaged around. Eventually, with a big silly grin, he held up a kazoo.

  “Yes!” Stella whispered.

  Still plucking her rubber band, Mo giggled. I kept glancing over my shoulder at the door, expecting Mrs. Reznik back any second. They played through the full song—the verse and even the Bernbaum part. Wen had the melody. It was a joke, but it still worked. The music from their makeshift instruments sounded so unusual, so exciting. My heart pounded. I suddenly didn’t care if Mrs. Reznik showed up.

  The next time the verse began, I sang the words.

  Smile, smile, smile!

  Would you like the perfect smile?

  Don’t you want your first impression

  to be great?

  Hearing myself sing in front of people felt weird. I’d never thought I had a very pretty voice. Instead of a pure, clear sound like the singers in, say, a Disney cartoon, mine is kind of low and scratchy, like a three-pack-a-day smoker. It’s always been that way, even when I was little.

  But Stella nodded, Wen winked and everybody was grinning.

  Then dial, dial, dial!

  Change your life, improve your style!

  Call our dental experts ’fore it gets too late!

  It felt like one of those perfect moments where everything comes together. But like I said, I don’t believe in accidents. Even if this strange, musical moment, the final result of a long chain of seemingly unlikely events, never came to anything else, it was meant to be.

  Something new had been born.

  We were just starting over again when Charlie suddenly lost his grin and stopped tapping. I looked behind me.