The Latte Rebellion (3 page)

Controversial, maybe, but definitely eye-catching. No doubt about it. We even came up with mysterious alter egos to mastermind the endeavor. I thought this made us appealingly enigmatic; Carey was just happy we were staying relatively anonymous in case the whole plan crashed and burned.

“You really think people will come to the website? Maybe we’re the only ones who think this is so brilliant and funny. As usual.” Carey hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder as she looked back at one of the photocopied posters we’d put up on the student activities bulletin boards early this morning:
Think Latte
, with our logo and web address.

“Don’t worry,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “This isn’t like the time we petitioned to change the school mascot to a bagpipe player.” Our current mascot was a decidedly non-politically-correct brawling Scotsman. “
That
was doomed to fail. This is a great idea. Plus … you know, it’s supposed to be fun. Don’t stress.”

“Don’t stress? Have you put
any
forethought into this?” She glared at me.

“It’s going to work out fine,” I told her. “Even if we only make half of what we’re aiming for, we’ll still be able to afford some kind of vacation.” I grinned, draping one arm over her shoulders. “Don’t think of it as a business, if that’s what’s stressing you out. Think of it as … a sociological experiment. Or a personal rebellion. A rebellion against mind-numbing boredom.”

We pushed past oafish Lou Pratt, star running back for the University Park Fightin’ Highlanders. As usual, he was taking up half the hallway, waving his beefy, sweaty arms all over the place, and he didn’t even care. He even muttered something about “shrimpy Asians” as we walked off into the noisy crowd.

“And a rebellion against people like
that
,” Carey muttered under her breath.

“No kidding.” I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, all we have to do is the publicity. NetPress will print and send the shirts, and we’ll reap the benefits.” The light-brown T-shirt would have our logo on the front, printed in dark brown, with the words “Latte Rebellion” in fake stencil lettering. Our website URL would be on the back.

Carey said I was getting ahead of myself. “We still have the whole year to get through first,” she grumbled.

“Fine, Buzzkill McGee,” I said. “All I’m saying is, using NetPress is going to be great. It’s like free labor. We don’t have to do anything except make our cut of the profits.”

“Speaking of free labor,” Carey said ominously, “it took me forever to put that website together. And Miranda worked really hard, too. This had better work.”

We stopped outside Mr. Martinez’s room, where I had AP Calculus. “I promise it’ll be worth it,” I said. “Shake on it?”

We both stuck out our tongues at each other. Then we put out our hands and wiggled our fingers together like we were playing “Chopsticks” on an imaginary piano, followed by putting our hands together over our heads and doing an Indian-style back-and-forth head motion. Then I went for a high five and accidentally hit her in the head because she thought it was the part where we shake hands. We broke out in shameless hysterics, which earned us some weird looks that I valiantly tried to ignore.

We’d developed our secret handshake in sixth grade after being the only two new kids in our class, and now it was a tradition. I’d asked Carey over to my house that first week of school, and it turned out we both had protective parents, a secret and embarrassing love of old teen movies like
The Breakfast Club
and
Dazed and Confused
, and weekly cravings for pineapple pizza. We also both had a silly streak, and we spent at least a month refining our handshake. It was our first “master plan” in a way … but obviously not our last.

Still blushing, Carey rushed off to Physics. I walked into the math room, sat down at my desk, and pulled my homework out of my folder. While I waited for Mr. Martinez to come around and check it off in his grade book, I surreptitiously flipped to the back of my spiral notebook and took another look at the Latte Rebellion Master Plan. It was really quite simple.

Latte Rebellion Master Plan

1. Sign up for website (Carey) and put up Latte Rebellion Manifesto (Asha).

2. Design logo and T-shirt (Asha and Miranda).

3. Set up T-shirt ordering on NetPress (Carey).

4. Put up signs around school.

5. Kick the marketing up a notch.

6. Sell a ton of shirts.

7. Cancun (or Seattle, or New York City, or … ), here we come!

We’d already done numbers 1 through 4. We needed to sit down and figure out how many shirts we’d need to sell in order to make it to Mexico or wherever, but the budget wouldn’t be a problem. After all, I was in Calculus … as Mr. Martinez so painfully reminded me by putting a red check mark on #4 of my homework.

“Look at that one again,” he said. “I think you missed a step.”

Okay. So I’d have Carey double-check our budget with me.

When we first wrote the manifesto back in August, we’d been sitting at a sticky food-court table at the mall during our lunch break from Bathworks (me) and Book Planet (Carey), screaming with hilarity at the line “Lattes of the World, Unite.” David Castro and his skater friends, who were sitting at the next table, kept staring at us like we’d ingested tainted Orange Julius.

Poor unsuspecting David.

A few days after putting up the Rebellion posters, we dropped four flyers in his locker, one for him and each of his pot-smoking burnout friends, slipping them in through the vents in the locker door half an hour before school started. Then we canvassed the locker areas for people we might have missed, watching who went to which lockers in which buildings, so that we could do an after-school guerrilla flyer-drop targeting the lockers of potential Sympathizers. Mostly we looked for anybody who seemed ethnically ambiguous, whether their skin was the lightest tan or the darkest brown. This made Carey nervous.

“Don’t you think we’re guilty of racial profiling?” She frowned at me, arms crossed, as I grabbed my French-English dictionary and closed my locker. “I mean, somebody else might want to buy the shirts. Or support the appreciation of brown people. Maybe we should just leave flyers for everyone.”

“Anybody can buy the shirts,” I pointed out. “The posters are up all over campus. This is just targeted marketing. You have to admit, somebody with an interest in the promotion of brown people would be a lot more likely to buy the shirt.”

“
Or
people who like lattes,” she added, ever practical. “I’ve been thinking we should really work the coffee angle.”

I stopped. Carey walked a few steps before realizing I wasn’t next to her.

“What?” she said.

“That is a
great
idea, Care,” I said, my voice a little loud with excitement. “We should go to all the cool cafés and ask to put a flyer on their bulletin boards. This shirt would
totally
appeal to a coffeehouse crowd. Don’t you think?” I linked arms with her and we continued walking down the hall to fifth-period French. “I’ll be on the U-NorCal campus next Friday with my cousin Bridget for that crazy activist club she told me about,” I continued. “She says it’s just like Key Club, but I seriously doubt it. Anyway, I’ll ask if she can put up posters there.”

“Okay. I’ll make it item 4-A on the Master Plan.” Carey sounded happier.

“Perfect.” Things were looking up. All we had to do was drive around town and put the posters up. Easy as … well, you know.

That weekend, I sat with Carey at the kitchen table, sun streaming in through my mom’s stained-glass window hanging and throwing purples and greens on our budget worksheet. When I say “budget worksheet,” I should point out that we were pretty low-tech—it was basically just a printed-out chart and some calculations scribbled on a piece of paper.

“So,” Carey said, pointing at the spreadsheet, “once we subtract the NetPress service charge, we’re making a profit of six dollars per shirt, if we keep the price at twenty.” She looked up at me. “That’s not a lot. How many shirts did you plan on selling?”

I frowned. We were originally hoping to make at least ten dollars a shirt, but we didn’t want to charge a ton of money, either, or nobody would buy them. I thought for a minute, then scribbled down some more calculations of my own.

“Okay,” I said, “according to the travel website, we can do a seven-day Mexico cruise for $400 each. A week in Seattle would be $465 each if we stay in a hostel. So … let’s split the difference and say we need to make $1300. That’ll be enough for the three of us, Miranda included.”

“So at six bucks profit per shirt,” Carey said, “we’d need to sell more than two hundred.”

We both sat there. How could we sell two hundred shirts? Before we were faced with the actual numbers, it had sounded like such a great idea. Now it seemed impossible. Two hundred shirts—it would be like selling one to every member of the senior class. Ludicrous, to say the least. I imagined Lou Pratt in a Latte Rebellion T-shirt, his huge stomach stretching out the front, and snorted.

“It isn’t
funny
,” Carey complained. “This is a serious problem.” She looked down at our scratch paper, doodling an angry face with a thought balloon full of calculations.

“I know; I’m sorry. I was just …” What if she decided
not
to do this? I didn’t want to do it alone. And taking our vacation alone would not only be pointless, it would be downright sad. “Well … okay. Let’s make a list. An addendum to the Master Plan. Remember anything from our Econ class last year?”

“No,” Carey said. “Are you kidding? Hands down, my least favorite class ever.”

There was a long pause. Then the irony hit and we both started laughing hysterically, me almost giving myself a coffee noser and Carey getting hiccups.

I heard my dad in the next room mumble something cranky-sounding, and a few seconds later, my mom poked her head around the door jamb from the living room. “Everyone okay here?”

I was still coughing and laughing and she broke into a smile herself, the corners of her dark eyes crinkling as she watched us try to get ahold of ourselves.

“Your father said, ‘It doesn’t sound like they’re studying in there,’ ” she said, artificially lowering her voice to imitate his Stern Dad tone.

“We’re taking a study break,” Carey said, grinning at me.

“We’re fine,” I managed to rasp, which started us laughing all over again.

“I’ll take your word for it, but keep it down, okay? Dad’s working on that new account with the office chair supplier. You know how he gets.” My mom rolled her eyes and left us to our temporary insanity.

I was relieved she hadn’t done more than peek in. It would have been way too hard to explain everything. And if my dad had decided to butt in and give us the third degree—well, then you can guarantee we wouldn’t have been cruising anywhere. Our hard-earned T-shirt money would disappear without a trace into the Bank of Ashmont, never to be seen again. At least, not until we had to buy college textbooks.

By the time we recovered from our momentary lapse of reason, we were both feeling more optimistic. This was so much better than any of our schemes of the past. It blew the Toilet Paper Revenge Caper out of the water. It even beat our Take the Fight Out of the Highlander campaign. This was going to be the highlight of our senior year, and we’d have even
more
fun enjoying the “fruits of our labor,” as my father would put it. Only for him, the fruit of my labor ought to have the words “Harvard,” “Yale,” or “Stanford” in it. Needless to say, there would be no parents on the trip.

I pulled a blank sheet of paper in front of me and started making another list.

Latte Rebellion Marketing Plan

1. Flyers in lockers of Rebellion Sympathizers: known, suspected, or potential.

2. Posters at school, in cafes, and everywhere we go.

3. Ask Bridget to put up posters at U-NorCal.

4. Send emails to everyone we know.

5. Talk up the Rebellion. Whisper about it at school. Spread gossip about the Rebellion’s fabulous line of must-have clothing.

I made a quick handwritten copy of the list for Carey.

“I’ll make a bunch more flyers and bring them to school on Monday,” I said. “We should come up with an exhaustive list of everyone who might want a shirt. We can use last year’s yearbook.”

“And we should bring some flyers for Miranda so she can hand them out to the Art Club.” Carey sounded a lot less stressed now, and I silently breathed a sigh of relief. I wouldn’t be able to do this without her.

One thing was for sure: even
with
her, this project was going to be a lot more involved than we’d thought. But, as I reminded myself again and again, it was all about the results. Sure, the idea was pure unadulterated genius, but the best part would be when we were in an airplane together, or on a cruise ship, with one entire week of hard-earned freedom just waiting for us.

The following April:
Ashmont Unified School District Board Room

I was sweating, even though I had prepared for this moment. Every dull second studying
Robert’s Rules of Order
for Mock Trial, all the time I spent poring over the list of charges against me and the list of rules I supposedly violated (information I had a right to, according to the ACLU and school district policy) was going to pay off, I told myself firmly.