Sound Off! by James Ponti

C HAPTER O NE

    M itchie 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.
    â€œWake 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.
    â€œWhat time is it?” she asked in something that came out as half-sentence, half-yawn.
    â€œSix!” 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?”
    â€œYeah,” Mitchie said. “It means I should be asleep.”
    â€œNo,” 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.”
    â€œNo,” 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI’m curious—is one of the Sound Off games called Keep Mitchie Awake?” she asked.
    â€œNo,” Caitlyn answered.
    â€œGood.” 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.”
    â€œJust because I want to go back to sleep, doesn’t