Free Lemonade Mouth by Mark Peter Hughes Page A

teacher, wants me and Wen and three other kids to perform in the school talent show. Can you imagine? Me, with my voice, singing onstage? Just the thought gives me the shakes. I told her no, of course. And the weirdest thing is, since then Wen has been showing up at my elbow a couple times a day asking if I’m thinking about doing it. He says he actually likes the way I sound.
    Clearly, the boy must be out of his mind.
    By the way, to preempt the question I know you’ll ask: Yes, I like him. He’s very cute. And funny. Okay? Satisfied? Not that anything’s going to happen, of course, but at least now you don’t have to bug me about him.
    Anyway, gotta go. The girls are meowing at me so I guess it’s feeding time. See you next Saturday.
    Miss you.
    Your Diva Daughter (ha ha),
Olivia
    STELLA:
Lost in Translation
    There I sat, wispy-headed and silent, barely listening to my sister tell a long, dull story. Wednesday was Family Night. My mother had recently discovered the idea in a discarded domestic bliss magazine, and this week she’d dragged the entire household to some chichi French restaurant on the East Side of Providence. As my mother and Leonard sat in rapt attention, Clea went into excruciating detail about a project she was working on for business class. It had something to do with bubble wrap, but her story was sprinkled with incomprehensible phrases like “supply chains,” “activity based costing” and “price erosion,” all of which flew completely over my head.
    This wasn’t a new phenomenon.
    Perhaps I’d ended up in the wrong family. Had there been a mix-up at the hospital, maybe a botched adoption from Planet Stupid?
    While Clea droned on, I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only uninterested person at the table. For a while I amused myself watching the step-monkeys stuff straws up their noses and pretend to be walruses.
    “Pull those out, Andrew!” my mother eventually snapped, practically leaping over her plate of half-devoured roasted duck to pull a plastic tube from the boy’s nostril. “Tim, sit quietly in your chair! All right, tell me again Clea—what did your professor say about the destination-enhanced consolidation?”
    Leonard wasn’t talking much, typical for him. But he took this break in the story to cram a hunk of braised tuna into his mouth.
    “Yuck,” I said. “How can you eat that?”
    Either he didn’t hear or he was ignoring me. Still, I couldn’t help picturing the poor fish with a hook in its mouth. Some people argue that fishes can’t feel pain, but of course they can. Studies have proven it. Just because you can’t see the agony doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
    I picked at my dinner—asparagus with grilled goat cheese. Back when I first went veggie, my mother worried it would backfire, as if her foolish daughter was certain to give herself some nutritional deficiency or something. “She’s always getting these ideas that don’t work out,” I overheard her saying to Leonard at the time. “Like when she was four and decided to put her hand on the hot stove to see what it would feel like. Or the time when she was ten and she got it into her head to stand up on her bicycle seat and ride downhill. She broke her arm in two places! Did you know that she once stuck a fork into an electric socket just to see if her hair would stand on end? Sometimes I don’t know what to do with the girl. She can be so stubborn. She gets these crazy notions and doesn’t think them through.”
    Wrong, mother dear. More than four months of no meat and so far I still had all my teeth.
    I was surprised out of my reverie by a cold feeling on my arm. I looked down and realized that one of Tim’s spastic moves had knocked over his water, which now was soaking into my sleeve. I jumped back from the table.
    “Pissant! Look what you did!”
    “Don’t make a scene, Stella!” my mother hissed. She dove across the table, righted the cup, and hurled a linen napkin on the dark stripe