Sound Off!

by James Ponti

  Copyright © 2009 Disney Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney Press, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney Press, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

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  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number on file

  ISBN 978-1-4231-5274-3

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  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped” book.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  STAGE FRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mitchie Torres was not a morning person. It didn’t matter if she was at home during the school year or at Camp Rock in the summer, her goal was to get up at the last possible moment. The fact that musicians usually performed at night and slept late was part of the appeal of a life in rock and roll. But this morning, the piercing sound of an alarm clock was making sleep all but impossible.

  At least it was for Mitchie.

  On the other side of the cabin, her best friend, Caitlyn Gellar, was sleeping like a baby, completely unaffected by the alarm’s buzz.

  Mitchie attempted to block out the sound by wrapping a pillow around her head. When that didn’t work, she tried a blanket. Out of frustration, she chucked the pillow across the room and hit Caitlyn right in the head. If she was going to suffer, she at least wanted to suffer with company.

  But Caitlyn just took a swat at the pillow as if it were a mosquito and rolled over, all without giving the slightest sign of waking up.

  Finally, brushing her brown bangs out of her eyes, Mitchie got up and walked over to Caitlyn’s nightstand. Making as much noise as she could, she turned off the alarm.

  “Wake up!” Mitchie cried, shaking her friend by the shoulder. “It’s the least you can do, considering it’s your alarm clock going off.”

  Caitlyn was even less of a morning person than Mitchie was. She normally had trouble waking up after a good night’s sleep, and recently she’d hardly been getting any sleep at all. Caitlyn had been working late every night this week, so it took her even longer than usual to gain semiconsciousness.

  “What time is it?” she asked in something that came out as half-sentence, half-yawn.

  “Six!” Mitchie exclaimed. “In the morning!”

  It took a moment for this to sink in, but when it did, Caitlyn panicked. “It’s not six,” she stammered, as her eyes finally focused on her clock. “It’s 6:03. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yeah,” Mitchie said. “It means I should be asleep.”

  “No,” Caitlyn informed her as she sat bolt upright, suddenly wide awake. “It means I’m already running three minutes late. We’ve got to stay on schedule today.”

  “No,” Mitchie said sleepily as she picked up the pillow she had thrown at Caitlyn and headed back for her own bed. “You have to stay on schedule. I have to go back to sleep.”

  Mitchie crawled under the covers and pulled them up over her head. It took Caitlyn all of two seconds to pull them back off.

  “You can’t go back to sleep!” Caitlyn said excitedly. “Today is Sound Off!”

  Sound Off was the name of Camp Rock’s “game” day. It was a really big deal for a lot of the campers, especially Caitlyn. Mitchie, though, was much too tired to get excited about anything—except sleeping.

  “I’m curious—is one of the Sound Off games called Keep Mitchie Awake?” she asked.

  “No,” Caitlyn answered.

  “Good.” Mitchie smiled. “That means I can go back to sleep.”

  There was no way Caitlyn was going to let that happen. “Trust me, you don’t want to miss any of it. Sound Off is a total blast. Besides, I’ve spent a lot of time working on it, and I could use your support. I really want the day to go well,” Caitlyn said, referring to the cause of her recent streak of late nights. Brown Cesario, the director of Camp Rock, had selected her to be one of the Sound Off commissioners.

  As the commish, as Brown liked to call her, Caitlyn was in charge of conceiving, planning, and designing most of the games along with her two partners—Peggy Dupree and Shane Gray. The only rule that Brown had given them was that Sound Off had to be FM/AM, which stood for “fun, musical, and messy.”

  “Just because I want to go back to sleep, doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to it,” Mitchie said as she tried to pry the covers back out of Caitlyn’s white-knuckled grip. “It’s just that if I’m well rested, I can get into it more. Besides, the first event isn’t until nine. I don’t need three hours to get ready for a potato-sack race.”

  “First of all,” Caitlyn replied. “It’s not a potato-sack race. Any camp can have a potato-sack race. This is Camp Rock. It has to be FM/AM. We’re having the Hip-Hop, Hippity-Hop Hip-Hop in a Sack Race. And, that’s not even the first event. The first event is the Disco Duck Walk. No wait, we changed that last night. Now it’s the Hard-Rock Rock Climb.”

  Mitchie stared at her friend. This was a lot to absorb so early in the morning, but she could tell there was no stopping Caitlyn. It looked like going back to sleep was definitely out of the question.

  “And, you can’t just roll out of bed and compete,” Caitlyn continued. “You’ve got to meet with your team and figure out who’s doing which events. You need to come up with a game plan. You need to eat a healthy breakfast and give it time to digest. And you should stretch properly. It’s a whole day’s worth of events. You don’t want to start cramping up around the Reggae Row Off.”

  “And I don’t want to fall asleep in the middle of the hippity-hop thing, either,” Mitchie added.

  Caitlyn took a calming breath and relaxed. “I know,” she said. “I guess I’m a little excited about this.”

  “You don’t say,” Mitchie remarked with a laugh.

  “It’s just that I want it to go well,” she admitted. “Sound Off is one of my favorite things about Camp Rock, and if it doesn’t go well this year, it will be all my fault.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mitchie assured her. “It’s going to be off-the-charts great. I know it!”

  “You think so?” Caitlyn asked. “Because it hasn’t seemed like you’ve been looking forward to this.”

  Mitchie felt a little guilty. In all honesty, she wasn’t excited about Sound Off at all, but she had hoped her roommate hadn’t picked up on it. “If that’s the case,” Mitchie said, “it’s only because I won’t be on a team with you. That would be way more fun.”

  “That is a bummer,” Caitlyn agreed.

  Normally they would have been on the same team because campers competed by cabin. But since Caitlyn, Peggy, and Shane were organizing the day, they weren’t partaking in the actual events. Instead, Mitchie had taken Peggy’s spot on the girls from Vibe Cabin’s team. That meant that she was going to be on the same team as Tess Tyler.

  Tess and Mitchie had been through a lot of ups and downs at Camp Rock. Originally, they had been friends, but they had had a big falling out and become sort-of enemies for a while. No
w they were finding a middle ground, but a day of crazy competition might be more than their budding friendship—and Mitchie’s patience—could handle.

  “Besides,” Caitlyn added, “Vibe Cabin needs all the help it can get.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Mitchie asked.

  “By what?” Caitlyn answered, suddenly coy.

  “Why does Vibe Cabin need all the help it can get?”

  “You know, it is early,” Caitlyn said, completely ignoring the question. “Maybe you should go back to sleep for a little bit.”

  “You still haven’t answered me,” Mitchie pointed out. “Why does Vibe need help?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Caitlyn asked. “I totally thought I mentioned it. It’s not a big deal.”

  “You told me that Sound Off was fun and exciting and the best day all summer,” Mitchie said, mimicking Caitlyn’s enthusiasm. “But you didn’t say anything about Vibe Cabin needing help.”

  “Well,” Caitlyn said, “you know how Tess is really good at singing and dancing and pretty much everything?”

  Mitchie laughed. “Yeah, I kind of noticed that.”

  “Well,” Caitlyn said with a shrug, “‘pretty much everything’ doesn’t include Sound Off.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mitchie asked.

  Caitlyn shrugged. “She’s no good at sports. No good at all.”

  This surprised Mitchie. Tess seemed pretty athletic in dance class, and she certainly was competitive. Mitchie had just assumed she’d be a natural at sports.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Caitlyn confirmed. “And you know Tess doesn’t like to look bad. So the whole day kind of puts her in a grumpy mood.”

  “Oh.” Mitchie gulped.

  “You might want to get over there and start warming her up,” Caitlyn said. Then she looked at the clock and realized that she was falling further behind. “Now I’m eleven minutes behind schedule!”

  Reaching down, she grabbed the giant Sound Off binder she had been carrying around all week and hurried for the door.

  “Relax,” Mitchie told Caitlyn as she left. “It’s a daylong event. I don’t want your brain cramping up by the time we reach the Reggae Row Off.”

  “Thanks,” Caitlyn said over her shoulder. “I’ll see you out there.”

  As she watched her friend leave, Mitchie felt a pang of guilt. Caitlyn had worked nonstop getting things ready for Sound Off, and Mitchie was kind of dreading the day’s events. Like Tess, Mitchie was not good at sports. And that had always frustrated her.

  If there was a beat, Mitchie could move with perfect precision. But if there was a ball, she seemed to have two left feet. She had been embarrassed on more than one occasion at Camp Rock, and she was pretty sure this day would provide even more opportunities to look silly. On top of it all, she would be dealing with a grumpy and equally uncoordinated Tess.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In all the times that she had eaten at the Mess Hall of Fame, Mitchie had never really paid any attention to the plaques that hung on the wall near the kitchen. They were clustered under a pair of old wooden paddles which had been painted to read CAMP ROCK and SOUND OFF. There was a different plaque for every year since the beginning of camp. Each plaque featured the names of the top three cabins as well as the winners of two individual awards—the Big Enchilada and the Golden Drumstick.

  Mitchie had no idea what either the Big Enchilada or the Golden Drumstick was or how it had anything to do with Sound Off, but she smiled when she saw some familiar names on the plaques. Caitlyn had won the Drumstick, and Shane had won the Big Enchilada during his last year as a camper.

  “My proudest moment.”

  Mitchie turned to find that the pop star— and current camp counselor—Shane Gray had walked up behind her. He was wearing a striped referee’s shirt and had a whistle on a string around his neck. Despite the odd apparel, he looked every inch the pop star—from his dark hair to his brooding eyes.

  “What was?” she asked.

  “Winning the Big Enchilada,” he said as though it had to be incredibly obvious. “As far as I’m concerned, it was right up there with the day Connect Three got our first gold record.”

  “What’s the Big Enchilada?”

  “It’s the last event of Sound Off,” he said with a big smile. “It’s an obstacle course that runs through the whole camp. It’s beyond crazy.”

  “And winning that is your proudest moment?” Mitchie teased. She had a hard time believing that the lead singer of one of the hottest bands in the universe could get pumped over an obstacle-course win. Still, ever since she and Shane became friends, he’d been surprising her. Today was no exception.

  “Absolutely,” he replied, a smile lighting up his handsome face. “At the end, I was going head-to-head with both Jason and Nate, and I just beat them to the finish line. It was sweeeeet.”

  Mitchie was still laughing at the image of the bandmates duking it out when Caitlyn and Peggy walked over to them. Caitlyn was in heavy-duty panic mode as she flipped through the giant binder that contained every detail about anything and everything to do with Sound Off.

  “We start in twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds,” she said as she checked her watch. “We need to make sure that we’ve got the stopwatches, the whistles, and the disco ball.”

  “Disco ball?” Mitchie repeated, perplexed.

  “It’s all ready,” Peggy reassured Caitlyn.

  “Peggy and I already went through the checklist twice,” Shane added.

  Caitlyn gave him a look. “The original checklist? The revised checklist? Or the amended revised checklist?”

  “We did all three,” Shane said, as Peggy and Mitchie tried not to laugh. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “Good,” Caitlyn said with a slightly relaxed breath. “Have you talked to Jason and Nate?”

  “Jason and Nate are coming?” Mitchie asked with a smile. Shane’s bandmates were known to drop by now and then.

  Caitlyn cringed. “That’s supposed to be a surprise.”

  “I didn’t hear anything. Promise,” Mitchie replied, holding a hand to her heart.

  “Yes,” Shane said to Caitlyn. “I talked to them a few minutes ago, and they’re right on time.”

  Caitlyn nodded and then turned to Mitchie. “Here you go,” she said, pulling out some papers from her binder and handing them to Mitchie one at a time. “This is the schedule of events. Here is a list of event descriptions, so you can figure out which member of your team should do what. Not every person has to participate in every event. And here is your team sign-up sheet. You’re the captain, so you’ll be in charge of it. Your team needs to be at the starting line no later than three minutes before an event is scheduled to begin.”

  “Whoa, team captain!” Mitchie cried, quickly trying to think of a way to get out of it. “Don’t you think it should be one of the other girls? Maybe someone who has done this before?”

  “It can’t be Tess,” Caitlyn explained. “I told you how she feels about Sound Off.”

  “What about Lorraine or Ella? Don’t you think one of them would make a good captain?”

  Caitlyn gave her a look. “If you don’t want to be the captain, I can go find one of them. But since you’re standing right here . . .”

  Mitchie could tell that Caitlyn’s feelings were a little hurt by her resistance. “No, it’s not that I don’t want to be captain,” she answered. “I just want to make sure I don’t step on any toes.”

  “Captain or no captain, Vibe Cabin is going to need all the help they can get,” Peggy added.

  “That’s what I hear,” Mitchie said, dreading the day more and more.

  Suddenly Caitlyn seemed to remember something and started flipping through her binder.

  “The sound system,” she blurted out. “Have we checked it?”

  “Last night,” Shane told her.

  “And then again about an hour ago,” Peggy added.

  “In other wor
ds, you’re saying you haven’t checked it recently,” she said. “Maybe I should go look at it one more time. Just to be sure.”

  She turned quickly and headed outside.

  “She’s a little nervous,” Mitchie said.

  Shane laughed. “Just a little. We better go help her.”

  “Yeah,” Peggy said.

  “And, I guess I better go . . . captain my team.”

  “Good luck with that,” Shane said.

  Mitchie smiled. “Apparently I’ll need it.”

  Mitchie looked through the papers as she walked over to the table where Lorraine Burgess and Ella Pador were eating breakfast. Lorraine’s head was bent over her cereal bowl while Ella applied a fresh coat of lip gloss—her accessory of choice. There was no sign of Tess.

  “Hey, guys,” Mitchie said with a half wave as she reached the table, “ready for Sound Off?” She tried to sound enthusiastic, but it wasn’t very convincing.

  “Absolutely,” Lorraine said. “Look what I’ve got.” She held up a pink short-sleeved jersey with a big V on the chest. “I made them for all of us. They have our names on the back, and when we stand next to each other they spell out Vibe.”

  Mitchie flashed a big smile. Lorraine was an excellent costume designer, and the shirt did look cool. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  “That’s awesome,” Mitchie said. “They look great.”

  Lorraine smiled appreciatively. “Thank you.”

  “Here’s the sign-up sheet,” Mitchie said as she held it up. “We’ve got to figure out who’s doing what events.”

  She handed the papers to them.

  Ella, who, like Lorraine, was pretty excited about the day, laughed as she read through the event names. “Disco Duck Walk. Hip-Hop Hippity-Hop in a Sack Race. Some of these are new. This sounds like fun.”

  “You know,” Mitchie said, warming up to the day, “I think you’re right. It does sound fun.”

  “Oh,” Ella said spotting something on the list. “I want to do the first event. The Hard-Rock Rock Climb.”

  “Me, too,” Lorraine said. “Is it okay if we both sign up for it?”