Puckers Up

by Mark Peter Hughes

  Mudslide Crush was about to perform for the first time in ages.

  The crowd started moving toward the stage again. Olivia and I were as excited as anybody else. Ray was at the microphone. It felt odd to admit it to myself, but it was good to see him up there again, and I was happy for his sake and ours that he’d agreed to do it. (He’d even toyed with the idea of bringing Bacon Sandwich to the festivities, but in the end he didn’t, maybe because a barbecue wasn’t the best place to bring a pet pig.) We cheered along with the rest of the crowd as Ray strutted back and forth like an oversized rooster with an attitude and a mud-brown Stratocaster. Acting cocky had always been part of his onstage persona, and it worked. He was fun to watch. Since Mudslide Crush’s original bass player, Dean Eagler, had already moved away to Ohio for college, taking his place was Lizzie DeLucia, who gripped her new pink bass like she was holding on for dear life. Nervous as she looked, she was doing just fine. And then Ray kicked in a rocking guitar lick that made the crowd roar. There was no denying that this new Mudslide Crush lineup sounded terrific. At his drums, Scott looked like he might keel over from sheer happiness.

  All this made me think of what Mo had said about time marching on. Back before the school year ended, who would have thought I’d ever be cheering for Scott Pickett, let alone Ray Beech? But I guess my dad was right about people changing. And I’m not just talking about Scott and Ray.

  I looked again in my dad’s direction. He was watching all this from the window of the wiener van. Seeing his grinning face, I realized he looked more relaxed than I’d seen in a long, long time, and all at once it struck me that maybe, just maybe, I understood why. After all, my father had done something few people ever dare to do. He’d taken a chance. He’d made a decision to step off the path everyone expected him to follow and had taken a shot at going after his dreams. How many people can say that? And sure, his new business hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped, but that didn’t mean the experience had been worthless to him. There I’d been feeling bad, thinking his life was going back to the way it once was, but now I understood that it just wasn’t true. His life would never be the same again because he wasn’t the same. While I’d been busy complaining, my father had been working his butt off to do something meaningful in his life. Something that was important to him.

  And he had. Despite everything, I could see it on his face. He absolutely had.

  More than ever it struck me that my dad is an amazing guy, and that I’m proud to be his son.

  CHARLIE

  Listening to the Cosmos

  It was a couple of days after the picnic, and I was on the front steps of my house with Olivia’s book and a tuna sandwich. For a long, long time, I just sat there. I do a lot of my best thinking on my front steps, and that morning my thoughts kept coming back to two things: Nietzsche and the meaninglessness of the Universe.

  Look, I’m not saying we didn’t have a great experience at the picnic. We did. It was amazing. But come on, that was just a town picnic, a small-time gig if ever there was one. After all that had happened that summer, I kind of felt like Lemonade Mouth had come close to something really, really big, only to have it snatched from us at the last second. Where was the meaning in that? It would be depressing to think Nietzsche was right, but what else was there to conclude? If the great forces of the cosmos were trying to say something, I sure as heck didn’t know what it was.

  Plus, the feeling that there was something I needed to find, something important that would help me sift through all the chaos of what had happened and somehow find order in it, was still needling me. The answer seemed so close, and yet weeks of trying to figure it out had brought me nothing.

  Zippo.

  Nada.

  So if I was starting to feel a little like the center of futility in a pointless world, could you really blame me?

  I guess sometimes I get so lost in my thoughts that I tune out everything around me, and I must have done that then, because after a while of sitting out there on the porch, I suddenly realized somebody was standing right in front of me. Somehow they’d come up close and I hadn’t even noticed.

  EXTERIOR. CHARLIE’S FRONT YARD—LATE MORNING

  The camera sees what Charlie sees: a shadowy, indistinct image of a person only a few feet away on his front lawn. Slowly the slight angle of the frame straightens and the picture comes into focus. We see that it’s a girl, and then we recognize her. It’s Olivia. Her forehead is wrinkled with concern.

  OLIVIA

  Charlie? Were you sleeping?

  REVERSE ON: Charlie. His hair is disheveled. He straightens up, rubbing his eyes.

  CHARLIE

  No, I don’t think so. I was just … thinking. About stuff.

  We see them both now. For a few seconds Olivia just stands there looking at him. From his expression it’s clear that Charlie is glad to see her but is wondering why she’s there. Then he appears to remember something. He reaches around, grabs Olivia’s book and holds it out to her.

  CHARLIE

  Hey, I want to return this to you. I’m done with it. Thanks for the loan.

  OLIVIA

  No problem. Did you ever find what you were searching for?

  CHARLIE

  (shakes his head)

  I think maybe whatever I was searching for doesn’t really exist.

  OLIVIA

  Oh. Sorry.

  CHARLIE

  (shrugs)

  It’s okay.

  OLIVIA

  (fumbling with her Scooby-Doo backpack and slipping the book inside)

  Listen, I was just passing by on my way to the library and I saw you. If you’re not too busy, want to come along?

  Charlie thinks about it a moment and then gets up off the steps. In a single long shot we see him accompany Olivia across his yard and down the sidewalk. As they get smaller in the frame we hear Charlie’s Voice-over:

  CHARLIE (V.O.)

  Now, normally I’m more of a TV guy than a library person, so I’m not sure why I agreed to go. I guess maybe I was feeling a little down and I was glad to have somebody to talk to. I told her about a new idea I’d thought of, an idea of writing everything down. At the end of the school year I was forced to write an English Comp paper about how the five of us met and what happened to us that first year, and it had been complete torture writing it, but it also ended up helping me make sense of it all. So now I was amazed to find myself wondering if maybe I should try writing another school paper. Only this time not for school. Yeah, I know. It sounds ridiculous, but there it was.

  The camera is following them again, this time with a medium shot as they amble up the sidewalk.

  CHARLIE

  It’s just an idea, though, and probably a stupid one too, because first of all, I have no clue how I would even tell the story of our summer. So much happened at once. And anyway, the idea of filling up all those pages with paragraph after paragraph gives me a headache. I’m not really a writer. Maybe I shouldn’t do it at all.

  He waits for a response, but Olivia stares straight ahead, silent and unreadable, as she so often is. So he continues.…

  CHARLIE (CONT’D)

  Plus, I have no idea if I’ll even find any meaning in what happened. It’s not like we got famous or anything. What kind of a story is that? What was the point?

  OLIVIA

  (finally looking at him, she slows her pace)

  The point? Of Lemonade Mouth?

  CHARLIE

  Yeah. So, we’re all good friends and we play at a town picnic and have a good time. What the heck kind of lame ending is that? Where are our groupies and cool clothes? Where are our private jets? Where’s the big concert at Madison Square Garden?

  Olivia gives him a hard stare, and then …

  OLIVIA

  Charlie, this isn’t a Disney movie.

  CHARLIE

  (a shrug)

  Yeah, I know. But still, it would’ve been pretty cool, don’t you think?

  She rolls her eye
s. With a shake of her head she turns and keeps walking. Charlie follows, and for a while the camera hangs back as they continue down the sidewalk in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Okay, so they say descriptions of screen action shouldn’t include too much about a character’s thoughts or backstory or stuff like that, but that’s exactly what I want to put here, so that’s why I’m breaking the rules and mixing different formats and stuff, which I’ve kind of been doing all along. (I guess I’m a rebel that way. Ha ha.) Plus, it just feels right switching to regular sentences for this next part.

  So we finally got to the library, and that’s when something weird happened to me. I don’t normally get panic attacks or anything, but for some reason, being surrounded by so many shelves stuffed high with books and magazines, a sea of words in all directions, left me feeling like the walls were pressing in on me. The air smelled of homework, and all at once my mouth felt like sandpaper and my pulse was going like a burglar alarm.

  I forced myself to keep cool.

  Whatever was happening was weird, but I knew it was all in my head.

  “I don’t get what you see in this place,” I whispered as we passed through the maze of bound paper volumes. “Hasn’t anybody here heard of the digital revolution?”

  “If you don’t get it, then I’m not going to try to convince you,” Olivia said.

  I trailed along until she found an empty table. She set her stuff down and took one of the seats.

  “You come here a lot?” I asked. “Even during the summer?”

  She nodded.

  “What for? What do you do?”

  “I read, mostly. I also like to write here sometimes. It’s big and quiet and it’s good for working on my journal. You know, figuring stuff out.” By then she’d reached into her backpack and pulled out two pencils and a spiral notebook. “Here,” she said, ripping a few blank sheets from the notebook and holding them out to me, “you should give it a try. Just jot down your thoughts, whatever they are.”

  “I told you. I’m no good at that. I’m not really a writer.”

  “You just gotta keep at it. It gets easier, you know, the more you do it.”

  She was still holding the paper out to me, so after a while I took it. And then, for what felt like days, I sat at that table staring at those blank pages and wondering how on earth I was supposed to start. Beginnings are so hard. In the end I decided to scribble some words—any words—just to get me going. I wrote the first thing that came to my head:

  Once upon a time …

  And that’s as far as I got. Only four words into my story and already I was disappointed. In my mind I could see Lemonade Mouth doing all the things we did that summer, and I could hear our voices saying all the things we said. If I was going to write the story, then I wanted it to somehow be like that—like how I was viewing it at that moment. Weird as it sounds, I realized that this was really important to me, that if I could do it, it could bring me the clarity I wanted. But how? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out what exactly I was looking for.

  So eventually I gave up. I left the table and wandered around.

  INTERIOR. PUBLIC LIBRARY—LATE MORNING

  The library is almost silent except for Charlie’s echoing footsteps. He drifts between endless stacks of bookshelves, warily scanning the bindings. We see him meander through the home repair section. Now he’s exploring the art history section. He gazes at shelf after shelf but nothing grabs him, so he moves on.

  Finally he comes to a little corridor of bookcases with an overhead sign that says MOVIES, TELEVISION AND THE CREATIVE ARTS. He stops. We see him read the sign.

  CLOSE-UP ON: Charlie’s finger. One by one it slides across titles like Hollywood Ghouls and Monsters and The Golden Age of the Television Sitcom and A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Finally his finger comes to a book called Screenwriting: A Beginner’s Guide. It stops. After a pause, Charlie’s hand pulls that one from the shelf.

  REVERSE ON: Charlie. He’s studying the cover. He opens it to a random page. He’s taking it in, concentrating. Suddenly the silence is broken by an energetic tombak drum beat. Soft at first, it builds in volume. It’s the opening riff of Lemonade Mouth’s “Blastoff Castaways.” After a while Charlie looks up, lost in thought.

  We see him drift to an armchair and for a few measures we watch him sitting there, reading, with the book open on his lap.

  A screaming electric ukulele joins the music—hot chords of triumphant energy. The bass and trumpet kick in too, and now the camera begins to slowly pull back. As the view widens away from Charlie, we see more and more of the library around him: An elderly couple peruses the shelves of a nearby bookcase. A teenage boy types at a laptop. A middle-aged woman reads a newspaper while, at her side, a little kid sits cross-legged on the floor with a picture book.

  Smaller and smaller on the screen, Charlie remains motionless in the armchair. He’s on the verge of a transformation. The world may be continuing around him unaware, but Charlie’s universe has just spoken, sending him on an unexpected new journey of exploration and discovery.

  The music takes over.

  FADE OUT.

  STELLA

  The Great and Mysterious Conductor

  The summer wasn’t over yet, but already it had been a time of meteoric highs and desperate lows. Our music was still getting downloaded (Lyle told us “Zombietown” was starting to do especially well), but giving away music isn’t exactly a long-term business strategy, and it wasn’t like we were household names or anything.

  Let’s just say we didn’t feel so overexposed that we needed disguises to leave the house.

  Olivia once told me that everything that ever happens was always meant to be, that life’s events, no matter how large or small, are like train stops on a journey where nobody but some great and mysterious conductor knows the route, let alone the final destination. Things might seem random and maybe even a little unfair at times, she said, but if we wait long enough, the grand purpose will eventually reveal itself. I never used to believe that, but when I look back at that chaotic time and its aftermath in the months that followed, I can’t help but be amazed at how things played out in ways none of us could have predicted but that seem to have been inevitable.

  Take Franco, for example.

  After our appearance on American Pop Sensation, the backlash against him grew until finally, sometime in October, somebody somewhere uncovered an old video clip of Franco singing a Broadway tune called “Send in the Clowns” at a karaoke competition. It turned out that Franco had a singing voice like a drowning duck with a nasal problem. Both jaw-dropping and hilarious to watch, the video shot to the top of the most-watched rankings. Whoever uploaded it even took the trouble to add choice APS clips of Franco giving some of his most cutting insults, so he seemed to be tearing his own performance apart. After the revelation that Franco was no better than the acts he’d cruelly ridiculed, he became a national punch line and eventually resigned from the show in humiliation.

  I actually felt sorry for the guy.

  On the other hand, I hear he’s doing all right now. He started a one-man lima bean farm in eastern Wyoming far from other people, where he practices meditation as a way of overcoming the inner anger he’s carried since childhood. I’m told he’s never been happier or more relaxed.

  And then there was SNaP. That autumn I began to notice less-traditional models showing up in advertisements. Beautiful full-figured women in glamorous poses. Skinny academic-looking guys relaxing on the beach or posing as construction workers while attractive women eyed them appreciatively from afar. Kids with actual acne that hadn’t been airbrushed away, and it wasn’t being treated as something horrifying or even remarkable. At first it was hard to get used to but, boy, did it feel good.

  It felt like Lemonade Mouth had been heard.

  Perhaps the most gratifying moment for me, though, was seeing the smiling faces of Ruby, Glenda and Glenda on the magazine cover of New Music Week
ly. The article inside told the story of how, after their APS appearances, Earl Decker had taken the three of them on as clients, combining them into a single act. The writer implied that signing the scrawny, birdlike girl and those stocky teen twins was just Earl’s way of riding the new “Get Real” wave, but I didn’t think so. Earl Decker may have been many things, but there’s no denying he was a genius at recognizing musical potential, so when I read that article it hit me that he’d done it again. By blending little Ruby’s incredible voice with the creative musicianship and backup vocals of those banjo-playing twins, Earl might just have created yet another pop sensation for the ages. And time proved him right. As everyone knows, that first album by Ruby and the Glendas went platinum and is already considered a classic. My friends and I couldn’t be happier for them.

  But all that came later, of course.

  Compatriots, when I recall myself in the waning weeks of that momentous summer, I see a different girl from the one whose fingers trembled the first time she dialed the offices of Decker and Smythe. While it’s true that I secretly still yearned for the elusive glory that comes from general acceptance, it’s also true that playing gigantic stadiums or otherwise rising to the top of the music charts was no longer my central concern. No, my attention had moved on to more important matters, and even small-seeming moments now sometimes glittered with real, lasting significance.

  Case in point:

  A couple of days after the Lemonade Mouth picnic, I returned home from band practice to find my older sister and my two little brothers huddled around a large package that sat on the kitchen table. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, all three eager gazes moved from the package to me. Right away I knew something was up. It was as if they were expecting me to turn into a platypus or something.