“I don’t believe in luck,” Olivia said. And then after a pause she said, “A dandelion. In a flat gray vase.”
Olivia’s house was tiny. It stood in a small clearing in the woods so it was hard to see from the road. Earlier that afternoon, when I’d finally found the long dirt path that she called her driveway, I realized that I must have passed it hundreds of times without ever noticing it. I set my bike against a garage that leaned a little to one side, and then I took in the walkway, which was overgrown with weeds. The paint flaked from every wall I could see. I wasn’t convinced that I’d come to the right place. Or that anybody lived there at all. But then Olivia had appeared at the door, looking paler than usual with dark shadows under her eyes. Inside, the air smelled sweet, a little chocolaty maybe, like somebody was baking. The place was cluttered with stuff. Tattered armchairs, mismatched end tables, cat furniture, music boxes—there was barely enough room to move around. Jumbled onto shelves and piled onto coffee tables were stacks of old books, magazines, newspapers, photograph albums and box after box of what looked like dusty trophies, porcelain figurines, letters and other stuff I couldn’t even guess at. But the clutter somehow felt comfortable, like you just wanted to pull up one of the chairs, grab a box and spend the afternoon going through it.
Olivia introduced me to her grandmother, a square-jawed turtle of a lady with a walking stick. I told them both how sorry I was about Nancy. Eventually Stella, Mo and Charlie joined us. We went outside and held a little ceremony for the cat, and after that we came back in and sat around on ancient sofas. It wasn’t long before Charlie and I got Brenda (Olivia’s grandmother insisted we use her first name) laughing with our stories about the Halloween Bash, which already seemed longer ago than just the previous night. Olivia even smiled, which made me glad I’d come—that all of us had.
More than three hours later, none of us felt ready to break up our little gathering. Now on the roof, I think we were all feeling relaxed, peaceful even. Charlie’s voice broke the long silence. “You guys are way off,” he said. “It’s a one-eyed zombie pushing a baby carriage.”
Mo chuckled. “How do you figure?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Look, see the head? The monster’s shoving hard like the wheel is stuck or something.”
I squinted but I didn’t see that at all.
“Maybe it’s just me,” Stella said. “But once again all I see is a blob. A giant white, fluffy blob.”
Nobody spoke for a couple seconds, but then we all laughed, including Stella.
I think that was the moment when it first struck me that something had happened. With the five of us up on Olivia’s roof gazing at the sky, I suddenly realized that everything felt different now. And I was sure I wasn’t the only one who sensed it. I didn’t know exactly when it’d happened, but hanging out after Nancy’s funeral that Halloween afternoon, Lemonade Mouth felt almost like a family.
And as weird as this family was, with everything that was going on with my messed up family at home, I was grateful to have this new one to fall back on.
Olivia’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts. “How bad did we mess up last night?” she asked nobody in particular as far as I could tell. “I mean, what do you think they’re going to do to us on Monday?” It was a question that had probably been on all our minds but which until now none of us had actually asked aloud.
“Detention,” I guessed. “At least. Worse, maybe. Mr. Brenigan was pretty unhappy.”
“You don’t think they’d actually suspend us, do you?” It was Mo’s voice. “My parents would disown me.”
“Who knows?” I imagined having to explain it all to my Dad. My stomach sank at the thought. With the whole Sydney thing going on, I’d already fallen off his A list. “It’s possible.”
But that’s when Charlie chimed in. “Come on, guys. You gotta stop thinking that way. Yeah, sure, we might get in a little trouble—and just so you know, my mother wouldn’t exactly be thrilled about that either—but we all talked about this last week and decided it was important to make a statement. Remember?”
Nobody argued. It was true.
“So we need to keep reminding ourselves that we did the right thing. And there’s nothing anybody can do to us now that would take that away. Plus, didn’t we pull it off with style? Weren’t we everything we wanted to be? Unconventional? Fearless? And even if some kids tried to stop us, didn’t we make it happen anyway, without compromises? I have no regrets. None.”
I didn’t know what to think. Even if we did the right thing, I still felt like we’d made big trouble for ourselves. And that Mr. Brenigan wasn’t going to let us off without any punishment at all.
“I guess you’re right,” Mo said, even though she didn’t exactly sound convinced. “Maybe we did okay.”
“Okay? Are you kidding? We were great! We blew them away!”
An airplane came into sight from behind one of the branches that framed our view of the sky. We watched quietly as it crept along, trailing a white line across an otherwise clear patch of blue. Eventually it sank behind another tree and disappeared.
That’s when Stella finally spoke up again, but there was a lot less confidence in her voice than in Charlie’s. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just too stupid for anything I do to ever work out.”
“How come?” asked Olivia. Like me, she was probably remembering what Stella had said through the bathroom stall at the Bash. “Why do you say that?”
“Look what happened last night. If only I’d thought it through ahead of time, I would have realized they were going to shut us down.”
I hoped she was joking. “Stella,” I said, “you could say the same thing about any of us. And in any case, who was it that got us all over to Bruno’s and convinced us to form a band even though not everybody wanted to? Who persuaded Mr. Brenigan to let us play the Bash? As far as I’m concerned, you’re an absolute genius.”
The others chimed in, but Stella was too stubborn to listen.
“Well, as long as we’re confessing,” Mo said after a while. “I guess I’ll go next. Sometimes I feel like the biggest fraud in the world.”
Her words seemed to drift up into the sky. At first I didn’t understand, but then she started telling us about her Indian family, and how no matter what she did she never felt like either a genuine American or a genuine Indian. I never really thought about that before, but it made sense. How could you ever feel comfortable if no matter where you went you felt like you belonged someplace else? It made me see Mo in a new way.
“Okay, I have one,” Charlie said. “Sometimes I’m convinced that the only reason I’m alive is because of some gigantic cosmic mix-up.”
It was a strange thing to say, but then he told us all about his twin brother who died at birth, and how he thought about him a lot. This was all news to me. “It makes you think,” he said. “It’s like, why was I the one who lived? What if it was supposed to be my brother but for whatever reason there was some screw-up, some major celestial mistake? You know what I mean? I wonder about that sometimes.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea he had this cloud hanging over his head. I could only imagine how sad it would feel to know I had a twin who was gone forever. And I wondered what else I didn’t know about him, or about the secret lives of any of my friends.
Suddenly I felt like it was my turn and everyone was waiting for me. Now, normally I don’t get into conversations like this. When there’s tough stuff to talk about, I’m more likely to make a joke and laugh it off than to really discuss it. Which is why I was so surprised when I heard myself say:
“Sometimes I wish I had a time machine.”
To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what I meant by that. But it wasn’t long before I figured it out. I told my friends about my dad, about how Sydney was taking over our lives, and how sucky it was that they were getting married. I didn’t say anything about how I lusted after her, of course, but I did tell them how I wished everything could go back to the
way it used to be, before it all got so complicated. And everybody listened and nobody said I was crazy. It’s weird, but that afternoon as I lay staring up at the branches, it was almost as if there was something in the air that made me want to open up. Maybe it was because we were looking at the sky and not at each other, I don’t know, but I was surprised how easy it was. And talking out loud about this stuff actually made me feel a little better.
“How about you, Olivia?” asked Mo. “Anything to confess?”
There was a long silence. Finally I heard Olivia say, “No. Only that I’m glad you guys came. Thank you.”
It was a nice thing to say, but I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. After all, I suspected there was so much she could have shared with us but didn’t. About her life, about how she ended up living in this spooky little house in the woods with her grandmother and, most of all, about her dad. I was sure I wasn’t the only one who wanted to know. But none of us pushed her. Not today of all days. But all the same, I wondered why she wouldn’t trust us enough to let us further into her world.
After that, nobody spoke. As we stared quietly into the sky, a bird swooped into view, diving from out of nowhere, rising above the trees and finally gliding in a wide, slow circle. A cool breeze passed over us, shaking the branches and making me shiver. A moment later, a shower of orange and brown leaves fell all around us like confetti.
I was the last to leave. Olivia and I were both quiet as she walked me to my bike.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked finally, her hand on my elbow.
I shrugged. “I’m thinking about how fitting it is that on Halloween I’m headed back home where I’m pretty much guaranteed to run into the Demonic Deadbeat of Decoupage.”
Olivia frowned. “Maybe you should give Sydney more of a chance. She’s really not so bad.”
“That’s easy for you to say. She’s not marrying your dad.” The words popped out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying. And then it was too late to take them back. I felt about two inches tall. But if I’d upset her, her face didn’t give it away. She looked as calm and unreadable as ever.
The leaves crackled under my feet as I wheeled my bike around. Darkness was already seeping into the woods. I hadn’t meant to stay here this late. I wondered vaguely if Olivia’s house ever saw any trick-or-treaters. Were there any kids brave enough to venture through these trees?
And then I realized how close Olivia’s face was to mine. She was watching me.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked her.
“Clouds,” she said almost at a whisper. “How, if you’re in one, it can make you blind to what’s right in front of you.”
“Okay . . . ,” I said, not sure what she meant. That often happened with Olivia. Then, looking into her solemn, brown eyes, I suddenly felt something else I didn’t understand. It was a weird, dizzy feeling. I didn’t know what it was, but it scared me a little.
But then she looked away. In the late afternoon shadows, her face seemed especially long and tired. She took a couple steps into the clearing and then, her back to me, she gazed up again at the sky. “And another thing about clouds is that they never disappoint you. They can be anything you imagine them to be. . . .”
I still didn’t understand, but she obviously had more to say so I waited. She seemed deep in thought again. I couldn’t help thinking that even though Olivia knew so much about me and my life, she had a whole set of experiences that I couldn’t even begin to guess about. What would it be like to have a dad in prison for killing someone? I figured it must eat you up inside. I asked her once, but she just shrugged it off. Olivia seemed to keep a lot of things locked behind a door she never opened.
And now the sudden empty feeling in my gut made me realize how much I wished she would let me in.
Watching her on her front walkway in the dimming light, I also realized two more things: First, that she wasn’t going to say anything else after all. And second, that with Olivia, silence could say a lot.
CHARLIE:
Mozart’s Banjo
Somebody left yet another note on my locker. It was 1st thing Monday morning and I’d already missed the homeroom bell which is why the school corridors were empty. As usual I was running late and out of breath. But when I spotted the big white piece of paper taped above my combination lock I slowed down. Even from twenty feet away I could just about make out the letters written in thick black marker. I considered. Could it just be a message from 1 of my friends? Lyle asking me to meet him after class maybe? Stella announcing she’d come up with another crazy idea?
Somehow I didn’t think so.
Finally I was close enough to read it:
COME TO MY OFFICE IMMEDIATELY.
—MR. BRENIGAN
My breakfast sank. I pulled the note off the metal door and studied it again. Oh no. Here it comes. It didn’t take a genius to guess what this was about.
The heavy feeling didn’t go away when I got to the Front Office and saw Mo, Wen, Stella and Olivia already waiting on the long bench in front of Mr. Brenigan’s doorway like death row convicts. Mo gnawing at her pinky nail. Mrs. Flynn the secretary offered me a sympathetic smile but then before I could even sit down Mr. Brenigan’s scowling head appeared.
“All here? Good. Everybody into my office.”
The 5 of us filed in. There were only 3 chairs for us so Stella and I stood. Mr. Brenigan stepped around his desk and settled into his humungous cushioned seat. For a few seconds he glared at us and tapped his finger on his lip. He looked angry enough to burst. “I suppose you know why you’re here?”
Nobody answered.
“That was quite a performance on Friday I imagine you kids think you’re very clever?”
Olivia shuffled in her seat.
“I have to tell you, I’m disappointed. A school dance is no place for a”—he seemed to search for the right word—“political tirade. What you did was uncalled for and completely disruptive. And you—” he pointed at Stella “—you let me down. Didn’t you promise you weren’t planning anything funny? Didn’t you assure me there wouldn’t be any problems?”
“But it wasn’t funny Mr. Brenigan. And there weren’t any problems” Stella said. “We just spoke our minds. Nothing dangerous or disruptive happened! So you didn’t have to shut us—”
But he held up his hand. “I don’t need to hear it I heard enough on Friday night. What you kids pulled, inciting people like that—it was inappropriate. Even subversive. Especially that speech about the soda machines. Frankly the financial decisions of the school board are none of your business.” Stella opened her mouth to speak again but Mr. Brenigan didn’t let her. “Mohini aren’t you planning on applying to medical school? Didn’t it even occur to you to consider the effect of having an incident like this on your record?”
Mo’s face turned an odd color.
“Olivia. Charlie. Wen” he said, taking in each of us 1 at a time. “I hope this isn’t going to be the start of an unfortunate trend. This is only the beginning of your 1st year here and I wouldn’t say any of you are getting off to a particularly auspicious start.”
After a long pause I heard Olivia’s husky whisper. “So what are you going to do to us?”
“Excellent question. What to do?” He sat back and tapped his lip again. “I consulted with Mrs. Ledlow and we considered our options. On the 1 hand there’s detention. But somehow that doesn’t feel sufficient. After all, we’ve tried that a number of times with Stella but it obviously didn’t have much effect.”
Stella was leaning tight-lipped against a bookshelf.
“We talked about suspension but that seems a little overboard. Especially considering that 4 out of 5 of you don’t have much of a history of troublemaking.” Mo kept chewing absently on her fingernail but even as she did I could see a hint of relief on her face. “In the end she left the decision up to me.”
I caught a worried glance from Wen. Here it comes.
“My decisio
n” Mr. Brenigan said finally “is to take a combined approach. 1st you will all have 1 week of detention starting today. And since I’m in charge of freshman detention this week I expect to see each of you promptly at 2:05 this afternoon.”
Nobody spoke. To be honest I was too scared. Mr. Brenigan could be pretty intense when he wanted. I braced myself for 2nd of all.
“In addition” he looked directly at Stella now “to prevent any further grandstanding I’m disqualifying all 5 of you from participating in the Holiday Talent Show.”
Stella’s eyes went wide. “You can’t do that! We have a right to—”
But he held up his hand again. “No Stella this is not up for discussion I’ve already spoken with Mrs. Reznik and we’ve already removed your names from the list.”
Mrs. Reznik agreed to remove our names from the Talent Show list? Really? I had a hard time believing it.
“As you know, we run a tight ship around here. And I won’t have you kids turning another school event into a circus. You should be thankful I’m letting you off so easy.” Again Stella started to speak but he cut her off. “But if you try to pull anything like that again—any disruption of school activities, any provocation of the students to cause any kind of trouble at all—I promise you I won’t be so lenient next time do you understand?” His eyes scanned our faces 1 more time. “As of this moment, Lemonade Mouth is finished.”
I just gaped at him. He was serious.
Mr. Brenigan stood up and pointed to the door. “Alright we’re done. Back to class.”
He herded us out of his Office. We were all too stunned to argue. Besides, it was obvious he wasn’t going to listen to anything we had to say.
After he shut the door we stood there blinking at each other. Then we wandered into the Lobby outside the Front Office just as the bell sounded for the end of homeroom. Kids started pouring into the hallways. None of us could talk. I felt like I’d been punched hard. It wasn’t the detention—I didn’t care about that so much—but to be kicked out of the Holiday Talent Show was big. I couldn’t help glancing at Stella her jaw looked really tight now and for the 1st time ever she didn’t seem able to speak. I knew how much she wanted us to win the Talent Show so I felt especially awful for her. And for Mrs. Reznik too. I still didn’t believe she wanted us to stop playing. Lemonade Mouth was sort of her baby after all.
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