by James Ponti
Caitlyn and the others returned from the kitchen with coolers filled with Jell-O Balloons. And now the Jell-O was inside the balloons—where it was supposed to be.
Caitlyn was pretty stressed by the whole situation, but she did flash a big smile when she looked up at the scoreboard and saw that the Vibe team had won the last event.
“How did that happen?” she asked Mitchie when she caught up to her friend.
Mitchie shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Lorraine said firmly. “You should have seen the three of them. They were amazing!”
Unfortunately, while the team spirit carried over from one event to the next, the results weren’t the same. The object of the Rhythm and Balloons Toss was for teammates to spread apart and toss balloons to each other—to the beat of a popular song. If two teammates succeeded in catching the balloon without its bursting open, they moved farther apart and tried again.
Mitchie paired up with Lorraine, but this time they were one of the first teams to be eliminated. When Mitchie tried to catch the balloon above her head, it burst open, covering her with giant globs of raspberry Jell-O.
Tess and Ella lasted a couple of rounds longer but were knocked out when Tess misjudged a balloon and it landed right on top of her. Jell-O filled her hair and began to drip down into her shirt. The others took a deep breath as they waited for her to explode in anger, but they were in for a pleasant surprise. She just laughed as she tried to shake off the Jell-O.
After four events, the Vibe team was having a great time. And much to their surprise, they were still doing pretty well in the competition. Placing third in the rock climb and first in the three-legged race had left them tied for fifth with just one more event left before lunch.
CHAPTER SEVEN
All the campers got together in front of the stage for the next competition. Although none of the girls from Mitchie’s team were saying it out loud, the fact that they were in fifth place was foremost in their thoughts. Suddenly, their being one of the three teams on the plaque was a real possibility.
“We have one more event before we break for lunch,” Brown said, “and it’s my favorite one. Other camps play capture the flag, which is cool. But here at Camp Rock, we play a game called Capture the Keys to the Tour Bus.”
Everybody laughed.
“It is a game that was inspired by a time when yours truly misplaced the keys to our bus while my band was on tour. Our manager gave me thirty minutes to find them before he was going to rent another bus and make me pay for it out of my own pocket. Luckily, my mates pitched in and we found those keys with three minutes to spare.
“Now you’ve got the same deal,” he went on. “I’ve hidden the keys to the Connect Three bus somewhere here at Camp Rock. If you find the keys, go to the bus and blast the horn. If you do it in less than thirty minutes, not only do you win the race, you also get to have a rock-star lunch in the bus with the band.”
This bit of information led to cheers and applause.
“We’re even going to give you a clue,” Brown added with a twinkle in his eyes.
Shane walked out with an electric guitar, and the campers went wild again.
Lorraine stifled a squeal. Even though she had been at Camp Rock for a while now, she still couldn’t get over the fact that they were privy to little concerts from the Shane Gray.
“Shane here is going to play a little something for you,” Brown said with a smile. “You’ve got to pay close attention, because it’s the only clue you’re going to get.”
Shane smiled and played four notes on the guitar.
Now Mitchie was really confused. “That’s it?”
“What’s the clue?” Lorraine asked, somewhat disappointed there had been no lyrics or signature dance moves.
Tess just shrugged.
Brown was delighting in the difficulty every one was having. “I told you to pay close attention,” he said. “All right, Shane, play it for them one more time.”
Shane nodded, got back into a serious rock-star pose—and played the same four notes.
Brown held up a stopwatch. “That’s it. No more help. You have thirty minutes.”
The teams didn’t need any more encouragement. Immediately, they ran off in every direction. They would turn the camp upside down if it meant finding those keys.
The Vibe team, however, stayed where they were. They weren’t just going to run around like chickens with their heads cut off. They wanted to come up with a plan.
“So the music is the clue. Any ideas?” Mitchie asked.
The girls pondered silently. “Did it sound like the beginning of a song?” Ella finally asked.
“That could be it,” Lorraine said. “Maybe the title of the song is the clue.”
Tess hummed it out loud. “It sounds a little familiar,” she said, “but I can’t quite place it.”
She hummed the notes again, and this time something about them caught her attention. “You know, they sound a little bit like the opening to that David Cook song.”
She sang the first notes of the song, and the others joined in. “I think you’re right,” Ella said.
“What if the clue isn’t the name of the song?” Lorraine asked. “What if it’s the name of the singer: Cook.”
They all shared a look and smiled. “The kitchen.”
They tried to keep their excitement down. The other teams were running around in every direction, and the girls didn’t want to attract too much attention as they headed toward the kitchen.
Slyly keeping an eye out for the others, they began walking toward the mess hall. Unfortunately, they noticed two of the guys from Rhythm Cabin, Colby and Mac, were headed in the same direction.
“Check it out,” Lorraine said, nodding toward them.
“Think they figured it out?” Ella asked.
As if in response, having just noticed the girls, the boys started sprinting toward the kitchen. The girls chased after them, resulting in a simultaneous dash to the mess hall.
“Look in the cupboard!” Mitchie told Ella as they burst through the door. “I’ll check the pantry.”
Within moments, the kitchen was a whirlwind. While Tess and Lorraine were crawling around on their hands and knees looking under everything, Colby sifted through a bag of flour and Mac searched in the refrigerator.
When Connie Torres walked into her kitchen, she was stunned. “Everybody, stop!” she shouted, raising her voice not so much in anger as to be heard over all the noise. “What is going on here?”
“We’re looking for the tour-bus keys!” Mitchie blurted out.
“There are no keys in what was my very clean kitchen,” Connie said.
“Are you sure?” Colby asked. “Because we’re pretty sure it was that one David Cook song. And Cook led us here.”
“That’s what we thought,” Tess said.
Having heard Connie’s yell, Brown came rushing into the room.
“Okay,” he said, as he scanned the flour-covered kitchen.“Next time I should announce that the kitchen is off limits. Sorry about that, Connie.”
“That would be a good idea,” Connie said, nodding.
Tess slumped. “You mean the keys are not in here?”
“No!” Brown exclaimed. “They’re not.”
Without missing a beat, the boys from Rhythm Cabin bolted outside and started searching again. Mitchie, though, felt bad and started to clean up. The rest of the girls from her team joined in to help.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mitchie’s mom said when her shock wore off. “You’re in the middle of a competition. We can fix this later.”
They didn’t need to be told twice. “Thanks, Mom,” Mitchie said. Turning to her team, she gestured for them to follow her.
The four girls walked into the dining room to think about the clue some more. Once again they tried to hum it out to see if the notes could mean something else. But they couldn’t quite get it.
“I need the piano,
” Mitchie said as she moved over to the instrument on the other side of the room. “I think it went like this.”
She played four notes. First she tried them slow. Then she tried them fast. But they didn’t register with anybody.
“Are you sure those are the notes?” Ella asked.
“Pretty sure,” Mitchie said. “The first note was C. Then B. Then G and E.” She played the notes as she said them.
Tess shook her head. “I don’t think the second note was a B. I think it was an A.”
Mitchie tried it and nodded. “You’re right. It was an A.”
“Play that a couple times,” Lorraine said.
Mitchie played it through a few more times at different speeds.
“Stop!” Tess said as she smiled. “I know where the keys are.”
“You do?” Mitchie said.
Tess nodded. “Let me sit down.”
Mitchie got up from the piano bench, and Tess sat down. She played the four notes. “It’s not a song,” Tess said. “It’s a word.”
She played them again. Only, this time, she said the name of each note as she played it. “C.A.G.E. Cage.”
“That is so cool!” Mitchie said. “It’s hidden in a cage!”Then she paused. “Wait.What cage?”
Lorraine and Ella both spoke at the same time. “Rockin’ Robin!”
Mitchie’s eyes grew wide. That had to be it! One of the decorations that Brown had put up in B-Note—the camp’s hangout and snack bar—was a stuffed bird that played the song “Rockin’ Robin” if you pressed a button. The bird was in a big plastic cage.
In order to keep from attracting attention, most of the girls went in the wrong direction, acting as if they were looking for the keys in one of the rehearsal rooms. Tess, meanwhile, slipped unseen into B-Note and found the keys hidden in the bottom of Rockin’ Robin’s cage.
Just as the thirty minutes were about to expire, Tess hurried up to the tour bus, unlocked the door, and sounded the horn.
In a matter of seconds, the other campers surrounded the bus, amazed to see Tess standing inside it alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Because they had won the Capture the Tour Bus Keys event, the girls from the Vibe team were treated to a rock-star lunch on the bus along with the guys from Connect Three. The food was the same as the food that the other campers were having in the mess hall, but the surroundings made all the difference.
“I cannot believe how cool this bus is,” Mitchie said as she took a bite of her grilled-cheese sandwich. “It’s like a real house with wheels.”
“Yeah,” Ella added, looking at all of the fancy gadgets and electronics. “A totally nice and blinged-out house.”
Ella wasn’t joking. The bus was fully loaded with comfy couches, flat-screen televisions, video-game consoles, and a rockin’ sound system that was currently playing a Justin Timberlake dance tune.
“And to think,” Mitchie said, soaking it all in, “we wouldn’t be here if Tess hadn’t been a total genius and solved that clue.”
“Let’s hear it for Tess,” Lorraine said raising her cup of lemonade for a toast.
“Tess!” the others responded.
Normally, Tess would have been basking in the glow of this sort of attention. But, she hadn’t even heard a word of it. She was busy studying the list of remaining events and doing some quick math on a scrap of paper.
“What’s that about?” Mitchie asked, pointing to the paper.
Tess looked up and smiled. “We may get on the plaque.”
“What are you talking about?” Lorraine asked. She was sitting in a massage chair, so her voice vibrated as she talked.
“The plaque,” Tess explained. “The top three teams get their names engraved on the plaque that hangs in the Music Mess Hall of Fame.”
“So does the winner of the Big Enchilada,” Shane added with a smile. “And I got my name on it as proof.”
Nate shook his head. “I can’t believe you brought that up,” he said. “You did not deserve to win that. If I hadn’t slipped on that pile of wet leaves, I would have beaten you.”
“Yeah,” Jason added. “And if I had been . . . faster and finished before you, I would have beaten you, too.”
“Those are pretty big ifs, fellas,” Shane said gleefully.
The boys continued giving each other a hard time, but Mitchie was focused on what Tess had just said.
“You really think so?” Mitchie asked her. “You think we could make it into the top three?”
“We’ve got a great chance,” Tess said, “if I did all the calculations correctly.”
The two of them exchanged smiles. After years of nothing but frustration when it came to sports, the chance to actually do well in a competition was almost more than they could have hoped for.
Mitchie went and sat down next to Tess. “What events are left?”
The two of them looked over the list and started plotting out their strategy.
Unlike Mitchie and her team, Caitlyn was having a lunch that was anything but fun and exciting. She barely paid attention to her sandwich as she stared at the papers spread across the table in front of her and continued to flip through her giant binder.
Brown approached and sat down next to her.
“What’s the matter, Commish?”
“Everything,” Caitlyn said, frustrated. “The balloons were just the tip of the iceberg. We’re behind schedule. We’ve had to rearrange the event order. I’m not sure we have everything ready for the Big Enchilada.”
“Slow down,” Brown said gently. “I think you’re losing sight of something.”
“There’s something else?” she asked, panicked as she looked at her papers to see what she might have missed. “What is it?”
“It’s not in those papers,” he told her. “Come here a second.”
Brown stood and signaled for her to follow him. Reluctantly, she got up.
“I want you to look at this.” He walked her over to where the Sound Off plaques hung on the wall. “Who has won the Golden Drumstick more times than anyone else?”
“I have,” Caitlyn said.
“That’s not luck,” Brown told her. “The Golden Drumstick is given to the camper with the most spirit. And for quite a few years, that has been you. You’ve won it because you’ve gotten into Sound Off more than any camper ever. Why?”
“Because it’s so much fun.”
“That’s right,” he said with a smile. “But you haven’t looked like you’ve had much fun today.”
“This year, I’ve got responsibility,” she replied. “I’m supposed to make sure everyone else has fun.”
Brown laughed. “And they are. But there’s no reason you shouldn’t have fun, too.”
He looked at Caitlyn hopefully, but it was clear his words hadn’t hit a chord—yet.
It was time to try a different tactic. “Some day you want to be a music producer, right?”
Caitlyn smiled. “Absolutely.”
“And when that day comes, you’re still going to enjoy the music, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” she replied.
“Believe me,” Brown said, pointing at the papers on the desk, “this is nothing compared to how far you’ll fall behind schedule when you’re trying to organize a rock-and-roll band during a recording session.”
“I guess that’s true,” she said, her tension easing slightly.
“And it’s good that it’s true,” he told her. “Because it’s during the unplanned moments that the real musical greatness occurs. Have you ever heard of Sam Phillips?”
“Sounds familiar,” she said. “He was a producer, right?”
“He wasn’t a producer,” Brown said. “He was the producer. He ran Sun Records, and he practically invented rock and roll. Like any good producer, he was always on the lookout for something new. Well, one day, he was auditioning a singer in his studio, and it was not going well. And it was certainly not going according to his plan. They were falling behind schedule. The studio
musicians didn’t think the singer was any good. The audio engineer didn’t think he was any good. And Sam wasn’t sure, either.”
“What happened?” Caitlyn asked.
“During a break, the singer started goofing around with the microphone,” said Brown. “The song he sang wasn’t on the playlist they had arranged. And he sang it in a way that was very different than the way everyone else had wanted him to sing. He just sang it in his own style.
“And Sam, being a great producer, knew that he had lucked into something great,” Brown continued. “He cancelled lunch, quickly got everyone back into position, and told them to start recording. Then he told the singer to do it the way he had when he was joking around. And that’s how they recorded the song.”
“What was the song?”
“‘That’s All Right, Mama,’” Brown answered.
Caitlyn didn’t recognize the name. “Was it a hit?”
“You might say that,” Brown said. “And so was the singer.”
“Who was he?”
“Elvis Presley.”
“That’s cool,” Caitlyn said, smiling. Then she frowned. “But what does it have to do with Sound Off?”
“It’s important to plan things out, Caitlyn,” Brown said with a smile. “But sometimes things don’t follow the plan. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone is having a great time—even Tess, and we know how much she hates Sound Off. You’re doing a great job. So you should stop worrying about everything and enjoy it.”
Caitlyn looked up at him and smiled.
“Thanks, Brown. Thanks a lot.”
He just smiled, did his best Elvis pose, and began to sing as he walked away.
CHAPTER NINE
After lunch, Sound Off quickly got under way again. This time, there were some notable attitude adjustments. Brown’s talk had done a world of good for Caitlyn. She was trying to remember to have a little more fun and a little less stress. She still carried her giant binder around with her, but she was determined to make an effort to enjoy herself.
Meanwhile, the girls from the Vibe team had set their sights on a top-three finish. They figured if they did well in the two remaining events, they would have an excellent chance at earning a spot on the plaque and immortality in the mess hall. After checking their math, they even realized that they had an outside shot at finishing in first place. They would have to do well in both events, but they had a chance to catch the Rhythm team, which was currently in first place.
