Chapter One
THE LATTE REBELLION MANIFESTO
If you are reading this, you are clearly sympathetic to the cause!
What cause, you ask?
The cause of brown people everywhere—
whether you have espresso-colored hair,
a perfect latte tan, or you're as light as a mocha bianca!
Our philosophy is simple:
Promote a latte-colored world!
Forget bananas and coconuts! Go for the seamless blend! You can't un-latte the latte!
It doesn't matter if you are only coffee on the inside.
If you're a latte at heart, you are welcome!
Iced or hot, raise your cup to the cause!
Lattes of the World, Unite!
"Ugh, this sucks." I yanked the sweaty towel off my head and threw it to the ground next to the lounge chair on Carey's back patio. Carey, I noticed, was having no trouble with sunburn and seemed oblivious to the blazing summer heat. Carey, who put on SPF 50.
"I know," she said. "I keep telling my parents they need to put in a pool. It's excruciating out here."
"No kidding." I leaned back against the plastic slats. To be honest, it was hard to complain too much, since it was clearly better than going back to school next month.
I took a lazy sip of my iced coffee. "Remember back in Ms. Regan's class, when we got to name our own country and draw a flag and stuff? Now it's all AP tests and reading huge tomes. Where's the fun, I ask you?"
I retrieved the towel and draped it over my arms and head, using a corner to wipe off the sweat that was forming way too quickly. It was a necessary ordeal—as usual, my legs were a few shades lighter brown than the rest of me because I wore jeans so much of the time. Good thing I tanned pretty easily. It was probably the only really good thing about being half-Indian (from India) and a quarter Mexican. Unfortunately, the remaining quarter, which was Irish, demanded that I wear sunscreen on my face or else I'd end up with a red, peeling forehead.
"That was before high school," Carey said, sighing wearily. "Way before. And college will be even harder."
"But more fun," I pointed out. "Only a year left." I picked up my latte and took another long, cooling gulp.
"A year! We're not even done with the rest of this stupid summer," she said.
"Stuck in a ripple in the space-time continuum," I intoned, wiping sweat out of my ear. "Unable to escape its gravitational pull."
"I know—we can't even go anywhere because of those stupid jobs. We make a weekly pittance, and we don't even get to use it." Carey stirred another sugar packet into her iced coffee. "Shouldn't we at least get to spend a percentage of it on ourselves?"
"Seriously," I said. I'd been working at the Music Box Company in the mornings, and Carey had been working mornings and weekends at Hot Dog on a Stick—idiotic mall stores that were killing our brain cells. This was supposed to augment my college fund and enrich my work experience, or so my parents said. In reality, Carey and I spent most of our lunchtimes at the local coffeehouse, bitching about customers and their general idiocy. "We could pay for our latte habit, at least."
"Or we could buy some instructive t-shirts and wear them to work," Carey said, leaning back and adjusting her sunglasses. "Like, 'No dirty hot dog jokes.' Or 'No, I am not Mexican.'"
I snorted a laugh. Even though there were lots of different ethnicities here—the University of Northern California brings a ton of people to our boring suburban town—for some reason people tended to look at our brown hair and tan skin and insist we were both Mexican. In my case they were a quarter right, but it still bugged me. And of course Carey isn't even remotely Latin American. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the fact that people were so insistent really ticked us off. I mean, her last name is Wong. Mine is Jamison, from my Irish-American grandfather. Hello.
People make such stupid assumptions. Take this little incident that happened at the end of last year: Carey and I were both part of the graduation procession, as members of the 20 top-ranked juniors who got to be in the Honor Guard. In the bathroom beforehand, touching up our hair and makeup, the junior class secretary—this completely overrated bimbo named Alicia—said, "Oh, Carey, you look so cute in that white dress. Like a little Japanese animation character." Which was kind of dumb, but it was what she said next that made us glad we were not part of the "popular" crowd or any other crowd with her in it.
Alicia turned to me, blotting her shell-pink lipstick with a tissue. "And your dress—wow. It takes some guts to wear something like that. I guess you have to have Mexican J-Lo curves to pull it off."
"Uh…" I'd said, and smiled weakly, turning to Carey. I remember feeling the heat rise behind my cheeks, my head filling with any number of things I might have said to educate Alicia on how totally wrong she was, starting with a geography lesson about Puerto Rico versus Mexico, but it seemed futile. She just didn't get it, with her two lily-white parents and stick-thin, probably anorexic figure. And now I was going to be worrying about my stupid round butt, round shoulders and round face the whole time I was standing out there in front of the school, and Carey was going to obsess about being short. It was just a bad situation.
"Remember what that dumb Alicia said during graduation?" I turned on my side toward Carey. "Can we pay for someone to kidnap her and drop her off by the side of the road in, like, rural Guatemala? That sounds like a good monetary investment."
"We could…use our savings to pay for a bus ticket to some little beach town," Carey said, her eyes half-closed, "where there are a ton of cute guys who are all rich internet millionaires…" She reached over with the pitcher of half-melted ice cubes and dropped a few more into my cup. As I watched the smooth, tan liquid rise up the sides of the glass, something clicked in my brain.
"Or…we could do something really fun," I said, sitting up straight as I thought of the most brilliant plan I'd ever had in my life. Our summer, and our afternoons out on the Wongs' back patio, were about to get a whole lot less boring.
And so the Latte Rebellion was born.
Firstly, we loved lattes. Secondly, we thought that a latte was a brilliant metaphor for being mixed-up ethnically, like we both were. And thirdly, we were both sick and tired of high school, and of living at home being treated like children, not getting to spend even a dime of our hard-earned cash. We needed to come up with some fun money.
That's where it all started, really—how to earn some money of our own, no strings attached, and what we wanted to do with it. There wasn't any talk of Rebellion at first, and the only lattes in the picture were the iced lattes we kept guzzling to stay cool. What we kept talking about was getting the hell out of Dodge. It definitely wasn't going to happen this summer. But next summer? A post-grad trip sounded like heaven to me.
It wasn't hard to decide where to go. England was a given—our favorite movie to watch together when one of us was cranky or moody was Pride and Prejudice. (I liked it for the tasty English men, and Carey liked it because she liked actual literature.) Plus, my mom had a cousin who lived just outside London, so our parents would be less likely to object. So we'd try for one of those week-in-London package deals.
At first it was just this nebulous daydream. We had a half-formed idea floating around in our heads about "latte as a concept"—big surprise, considering how much of it we were drinking—and how we could use that concept to raise extra money.
Clearly we didn't want to simply open our own coffee cart—it wouldn't be any better than our current jobs. We'd just be annoyed by a different idiotic cross-section of the population. Plus, there was nothing new or exciting about yet another coffee stand in a town full of cafés.
But then we started to take the latte idea further. One afternoon we were lying on the patio giggling after Carey asked with mock seriousness, "What does latte mean to you?"
I grinned and said, "It means the ultimate coffee beverage! More than the sum of its parts." I sat up, thumping my fist on the armrest of the lounge chair. "Not just coffee, not just milk, but a new beverage for the future!"
"Through blending, it becomes better! Stronger!" Carey added, laughing.
"Hey," I said, suddenly. "Just like us. We're living, breathing lattes."
"Okay, now you've lost me," Carey said, looking at me skeptically over the top of her sunglasses.
"I'm serious," I said. "You're half Chinese. I'm half-Indian and a quarter Mexican. We're mixed up. We're not really one or the other thing. We're like human lattes."
"Um…okay." Carey was still looking at me like I'd grown an ear out of my forehead. "So what does that have to do with anything?"
"That's our marketing angle," I explained, impatiently.
"And we're marketing…what, exactly?"
"It doesn't matter. We could be selling dog collars or lip gloss or…whateve. But we could appeal to mixed-race buyers and call it—the Latte Girls, or something."
"The Latte Girls sounds so Baby-Sitters Club," Carey said, rolling her eyes. "But I see what you're saying."
Clearly, though, we had to do a bit more thinking if we wanted to raise some funds. It couldn't just be this little idea that we laughed about over coffee every afternoon. We'd have to come up with a specific way to raise the money.
That was where the really brilliant part of the plan came in. Thinking of our usual complaint-filled afternoons coming up with t-shirt slogans for our synaptically challenged customers, it had come to me like a flash: we could sell t-shirts. Everybody liked t-shirts, especially people at our school, who seemed to buy every school- and sports-related t-shirt known to man. All we'd have to do was come up with a catchy design. We already had the killer marketing idea.
So we came up with the Latte Rebellion Master Plan. By September, we'd written the Latte Rebellion Manifesto and started designing a logo and website. October first—two weeks ago—we got the site up and running, thanks to Carey, our tech whiz. The logo I'd designed was plastered across the top: a coffee cup with steam forming the shape of a hammer and sickle. Our artsy friend Miranda Levin helped with the drawing part. The t-shirt would have the same logo, screen-printed in dark brown on a light brown shirt, with the words "Latte Rebellion" in fake stencil lettering. The website URL would be on the back of the shirt.
My cousin Bridget, who worked part-time in a print shop, thought it was a cute logo when I showed it to her. I was hoping to convince her to help us produce the shirts. I hadn't exactly gotten her to say yes to printing them yet, but I was sure I could work on her. Plus, she went to U-NorCal and could probably sell a bunch of our shirts there.
But Carey said I was getting ahead of myself. We still had to earn enough money to get some printed in the first place.
***
"Do you think people will really come to the website? Maybe they'll think it sounds stupid. Maybe we're the only ones who think this is funny." Carey hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder as she looked back at the poster. She's kind of a worrywart when it comes to planning stuff—everything is a major endeavor for her, involving meticulous forethought. Our current scheme was no exception.
This time, however, Carey didn't need to worry. The Latte Rebellion wasn't some lame, grade-school lemonade stand. It was going to be our best plan ever. Not like last year, when we decided that if the seniors got an officially sanctioned senior ditch day, the least we juniors could do was petition for one of our own. The assistant principal really didn't go for that. Even Carey thought I'd kind of lost my marbles.
"The posters are great," I said, grinning at her. "Don't forget—this is supposed to be fun. Even if we only make a quarter of what we hope to make. Don't think of it as a business, if that'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, 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 didn't even care. In fact, we heard him mutter something about "shrimpy Asians" as we walked off into the noisy crowd.
"And against people like that," Carey muttered under her breath.
"No kidding." I rolled my eyes. "Anyway, all we need is for ten people to place pre-orders for the t-shirts. Then we can afford to print the rest, and sell them at a profit."
"That's if your cousin still agrees to do free labor. What if she doesn't want to?"
"She will," I said, sounding more confident than I felt. "I'm sure she'll have sympathy for the cause." With our full load of AP classes, Carey's new job at Book Planet, and both of us tutoring kids every Saturday for the Key Club, Carey and I didn't have time to learn how to print t-shirts on our own.
"I hope so," Carey said vehemently. "It took me forever to put that website together."
"Well, the signs were no picnic. I spent an hour after school Monday putting them up, and then another hour yesterday replacing the ones that got torn down." I stopped outside my sixth-period class, calculus. "Don't worry. It'll be great. Did you get the online payment set up?"
"Yeah…" Carey hesitated, her eyebrows coming together into a straight narrow line. "You know, they take a percentage of the payment."
"Oh." I bit my lip, envisioning more money down the drain. "Well, that's okay. We'll recalculate the numbers and find out how many t-shirts we'll have to sell."
I smiled at her apologetically. She sighed.
"I promise it'll be worth the hard work," 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 hysterical giggles, Carey blushing a little, as usual, when people stared.
We developed our secret handshake in sixth grade after being the only two new kids in our class and both half-Asian. With everyone asking us if we were Mexican, I decided it was time to band together. I asked Carey over to my house that first week of school, and it turned out we both had protective parents, a love of sappy friendship movies 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 not our last.
I sat down at my desk and pulled my calculus homework, a review worksheet on matrices, out of my folder and waited for Mr. Martinez to come around and check it off in his gradebook. While I waited, I used the time to go back over the Latte Rebellion Master Plan. It was really quite simple.
LATTE REBELLION MASTER PLAN
1. Sign up for free website (Carey) and put up Latte Rebellion Manifesto (Asha).
2. Design logo and t-shirt (Asha).
3. Calculate number of shirts and price needed to cover London trip for two.
4. Put t-shirt ordering information on website (Carey).
5. Sign up for online payment service (Carey).
6. Put up signs around school. Wait for pre-orders.
7. With pre-order money, get t-shirts printed (Asha's cousin Bridget).
8. Kick the marketing up a notch.
9. Sell the rest of the shirts.
10. London, here we come!
We'd already done numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6. We needed to re-do #3, obviously, but the budget wouldn't be a problem. After all, I'm 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.
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 list and some calculations scribbled out on a piece of paper.
"So," Carey said, pointing at the spreadsheet. "Once we subtract the sales tax and service charge, we're making a profit of eight dollars per shirt." She looked up at me. "That's really good. We're really only paying for the cost of the shirt and the ink, thanks to your cousin."
I frowned. We were 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, and scribbled down some more calculations of my own.
"Okay," I said, "according to London Trips, if we use a student discount, and stay in a hostel, we can do the 7-day trip for $800 each. So…we need to make $1600. That's 200 shirts."
We both sat there. How could we sell 200 shirts? Before we were faced with the actual numbers, it had sounded like such a great idea. Now it seemed impossible. 200 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."
"I know; I'm sorry. I was just…" If I didn't keep her on board now, I would risk losing most of the brains in this outfit. Once Carey decided not to do something, it was definitively over. "Well…okay. Let's make a list. Call it the Latte Rebellion Marketing Plan. Remember anything from our Econ class last year?"
"No," Carey said. There was a long pause. Then we both started laughing hysterically, me practically falling out of my chair and Carey getting hiccups. I kept forgetting about this part: It was going to be great doing this with Carey, and we'd have even more fun in London 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. I theorized this was mainly because he didn't have the opportunity to go beyond his junior college accounting classes, and because he worked too hard keeping his office supply store running. I theorized this because he reminded me at every opportunity. Needless to say, there will be no parents on the London 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 known Rebellion sympathizers.
2. Ask Bridget to put up posters at U-NorCal.
3. Send e-mails to everyone we know.
4. Print trial run of 5 t-shirts. Distribute to key parties. Wear them as often as possible.
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.
"So, I'll make a bunch of flyers and bring them to school on Monday," I said, trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible. "We should come up with a list of everyone who might want a shirt. We can use last year's yearbook."
"And we should put more than one flyer in each person's locker, in case they want to tell someone else about it." Carey sounded more like herself again, 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—even though it was going to be fun—this was going to be a lot harder than we thought.