Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Elliott’s voice was as raw as sandpaper, but he hit every note as clear as a bell. He seemed to have practiced, professional-level control over his volume, murmuring softly during his first verse and then revving up like an engine for the refrain. By the time he reached his chorus, his voice was so loud that I could hear him through the wall of the office as well as over the theater’s inter-office loudspeaker system. Since there was only one camera feed on that monitor, I couldn’t see the coaches’ reactions, but I could hear the crowd going absolutely bonkers. The boy who was passionately roaring into his microphone with a wild blaze in his eyes didn’t seem like he could have possibly been the same guy who had just been shyly shoe-gazing moments earlier. Not only did Elliott seem like he was already a real rock star, but he also seemed to have the potential to become a legend.

  Elliott’s jaw-dropping performance had captured the attention of Tommy and Susan, too. Susan had trailed off mid-sentence, her mouth agape with the word “season” dangling from her upper teeth. Tommy strummed his fingers on Claire’s desktop. I noticed Susan turn to Tommy and shake her head like she simply couldn’t believe there would be two impressive contestants in a row. Elliott ripped through his chorus a second time, and I distinguished a few lines of the song to be about some painful lies a girl had told him. He finished at the end of the chorus, and Susan turned to me and said, “That, kid, is who you’re going to have to beat.”

  When the applause finally quieted down, Chase Atwood told Elliott, “My, oh my, son. You just knocked that audition out of the park.”

  “Home run,” Jay Walk agreed.

  Elliott was blushing, looking at his feet again.

  “What was that song you just sang? I didn’t recognize it,” Chase said.

  Elliott bit his lower lip, and his eyes flickered upward and out into the crowd for just a quick second. “I wrote it,” he said.

  I wanted to groan. He had that incredible voice, and he was a songwriter, too. I wondered if anyone in the Dolby Theater other than me remembered my performance. Just ten minutes after I’d stepped off the stage, I’d been outdone.

  Chapter 2

  The Complications

  Since my brother left for college earlier that fall, the whole structure of my family had changed. My parents were home less frequently, and even though I’d thought my entire life that I’d love being an only child, I hated it. I never hurried home from school because I knew I’d be alone for hours unless Nicole came by to do homework with me. My mom, who teaches yoga, had committed to teaching a third day of classes every week now that Todd was off studying on the East Coast. She had also taken on the extra responsibility of co-managing Levity, the yoga studio where she had undergone teaching certification. Even on days when Dad got home from work first, he waited for her to start dinner instead of attempting to cook on his own. My dad is a pretty smart guy, but completely helpless in the kitchen.

  The night I won a spot on Center Stage!, both of my parents were home already by the time I arrived. It was after dark, uncharacteristically late for me to be returning from school. Through our front windows, I could see my mom in the kitchen standing over a boiling pot as I stuck my key in the lock on the front door. Before even entering the house, I knew my dad would be watching one of his favorite true crime television shows, the kind with a lot of cheesy re-enactments and dramatic music.

  Sure enough, there he was, barely looking up from the television as I stepped into the front hallway and set my backpack down on the credenza. I unzipped its external pocket and withdrew the folded forms that Claire had given me to review and sign.

  “You’re home rather late,” Dad commented.

  “I had to work on something at school,” I lied. I had no idea why I instantly decided to lie. I could have told him about taking the bus to Hollywood and auditioning right there and then. But for some reason, was too ashamed of my desire to become famous to come right out with it.

  In the kitchen, Mom was straining pasta into a colander at the sink. “Hi, honey,” she greeted me without turning to face me. She wore a cashmere wrap over her yoga pants. It was pretty rare that my mom wore anything other than knitwear. “Long day at school?”

  “Actually, no,” I admitted, sinking down into a seat at our kitchen table. A few months earlier, our table had been covered in mountains of college catalogs addressed to my brother. “I have to tell you something.”

  This immediately got my mom’s attention, because I never told her anything. The last time I announced having a serious matter to discuss was when Taylor’s mom died, and I had been hoping my parents would attend the wake. I had really been hoping they would consider letting her live with us for the summer so that she wouldn’t have to leave Los Angeles with her father, but then I realized how dumb that plan was. It was ridiculous to think that a famous rock star would let his daughter shack up with a middle-class family in West Hollywood so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her. What would the gossip magazines have said about that? But anyway, my mom was always asking me how school was, how my friends were, and trying to gain insights into my life. She never believed me when I informed her that nothing of interest was going on at school or with my friends.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, this time putting the pot of spaghetti down on a ceramic tile to prevent it from burning the counter. She turned to face me, trying a little too hard to appear casual when it was plainly obvious that she was dying to hear my news.

  “So, there’s this TV show,” I began, wondering how far into the story I should backtrack. “It’s called Center Stage!. People from all over the country audition for it, and then there are these battles every week, and contestants are eliminated.”

  “I’m familiar with the show, Allison. You watched it all last spring. Do you think I live under a rock?”

  “Yeah, so...” I continued, weaving my fingers together and cracking my knuckles.

  “You want to audition for the show,” Mom guessed.

  “Not exactly.” I fanned the forms from Claire out across the table. “I kind of already auditioned for the show. And made it. I mean, they picked me. They chose me as a contestant.”

  My mom’s face contorted rapidly from happy to surprised, to angry. She was still in angry mode when she pulled the potholders off her hands and opened her mouth. “Allison, how could you have auditioned for a television show without our knowledge? You’re a minor! No production company would invite someone your age to audition without having parental permission!”

  “Well,” I began, deciding just to lay it all out, “they think I’m eighteen. So, they didn’t ask me for parental permission. But now that I made it onto the show, I obviously have to be honest with them about my age. They gave me all these forms to sign.”

  I slid the forms suggestively around on the table. Mom didn’t take a step closer to the table to review them. “And why do they think you’re eighteen?” she asked in an incriminating tone.

  I shrugged innocently and fibbed, “Maybe they just jumped to conclusions.”

  Mom eyeballed the forms on the table, leaned back against the kitchen counter with her arms crossed over her chest, and bellowed, “Rich! Rich, can you please join us for a conversation in the kitchen?”

  My parents are very formal with each other. I used to think it was funny how they’re always so polite, but my mom says that respect is the cornerstone of a lasting relationship. She reads a lot of non-fiction books about marriage and raising children to be responsible adults, so she’s full of little sayings like that. My friend Nicole’s parents always refer to each other as honey and sugar and baby, but with my parents it’s always Rich and Lisa.

  My father joined us in the kitchen, glancing once over his shoulder back toward the living room, obviously still a bit engrossed in the television show he had abandoned. He carried a can of diet soda in one hand and rubbed the bridge of his nose, where his glasses rested.

  “Allison has auditioned for a talent competition television show witho
ut our knowledge and has been chosen as a contestant,” my mother said. She informed him with her tone that she was upset and expected him to be, too. I scowled. Any other parent in Los Angeles would have said those words with pride, but not my mom. My parents were born and raised in Los Angeles, both in the west-side neighborhood of Palms. My father’s father had worked at Boeing, just as my father went on to do, and my mother’s father had owned a chain of car washes around Culver City. We might seriously have been the only family in Los Angeles without a single Hollywood showbiz connection.

  “Is this true, what your mother’s saying?” Dad asked me. “Did you really audition for something without thinking it might be a good idea to tell us first?”

  “Yeah, well...” I stammered, “I just sent in a taped audition. I didn’t think anything would come of it. Honestly, I didn’t. But then they invited me to go to the Dolby Theater and audition in person, and I wasn’t sure if I should go or not, you know, because it seemed like a long shot and I’ve never performed in front of a real audience before except for that one time at school and I thought I might get freaked out and blow it—”

  Both of my parents were staring at me as if I were speaking in tongues. This was pretty much how they looked at me whenever I talked about anything related to celebrities or movies.

  “What kind of talent show is this?” Dad asked.

  “It’s singing,” I told him, not surprised that he was oblivious. “A professional singer coaches you, and then you sing a song every week, and either you get eliminated or you keep going, and at the end of the season, the winner gets a record deal.”

  I intentionally left out the part about going on tour with All or Nothing. Neither of my parents would be in support of my boarding a private jet with Irish boy band stars and gallivanting around the world. Especially if either of them had any clue about my fantasy about marrying one of the members of the band, Nigel O’Hallihan. There was even a slim chance that my culturally ignorant father knew who All or Nothing was because posters of them covered the walls of my room. He had commented numerous times in the past that he didn’t understand how they managed to get their legs into pants so tight, and about how when he was their age, boys wanted to look tough and wouldn’t have used so many hair styling products intended for girls. Ugh.

  “I just can’t comprehend this fascination of yours with becoming famous,” my father sighed. “Isn’t it enough for you to just be a high school student and get good grades? You have your whole life ahead of you. You can try to become a singer, or an actress—or whatever you want—after college.”

  “Dad,” I said sternly. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You have to let me do this.”

  Dad exchanged an annoyed glance with my mother. “That’s where you’re incorrect, Allison. We’re your parents. We don’t have to let you do anything.”

  “Dad, seriously,” I grumbled. This was why I had made my audition video in secrecy. My dad had a way of making me hate myself for even wanting to succeed. This conversation was turning into the same one we’d had a week ago when I flunked my first pop quiz of the year in French class. Then, my parents had made me resign from my part-time job at Robek’s, making juice, to concentrate more on my grades. It hardly concerned them that now I didn’t have any pocket money for concert tickets, or for lunch at Del Taco whenever my friends wanted to go off-campus. Their mutual belief was that there would be plenty of time for me to see live bands and buy myself tacos after high school.

  “Really, Allison,” my mother agreed with him. “Does this have anything to do with Taylor?”

  Heat flashed across my face, and I fought off humiliation. There is no reason at all to be ashamed, I reminded myself. I had just earned myself an incredible opportunity. “No! It has nothing to do with her. It has to do with me and my talent,” I insisted. “Why can’t you guys acknowledge that I’m good at something?”

  However, it did have to do with Taylor, at least a little bit. Taylor never desired to be super-famous, at least not the same way that I did. Ever since we were little girls, she had wanted to study music, become a violinist with a symphony orchestra, and travel the world. The endless craving for fame that was all too common in Los Angeles sickened her, primarily because her mom had a bad case of it. Before her death, Taylor’s mom infrequently landed guest roles on TV shows and sometimes sang commercial jingles. She’d wear racy dresses to school events intending to flirt with our classmates’ fathers who worked at movie studios. Her tireless, hopeful auditioning and habit of scheduling life around parts she never won infuriated Taylor. One of Taylor’s most frequent complaints was that her mother’s preoccupation with cosmetic face fillers and minor plastic surgeries prevented them from ever having enough money to go on vacation or buy a new car. My mom used to say, “She’s got a good head on her shoulders, that Taylor,” and then she’d kind of trail off before saying what I knew she was thinking: despite her mother’s influence.

  “What happens if we let you compete on this show, and you don’t win?” Dad asked me. “You’ll be devastated, and you’ll probably have to miss several weeks of school. Has that thought occurred to you? That if you don’t win, the entire country will watch you lose?”

  Leave it to my dad to casually crush my dreams. That exact thought had occurred to me, but now that he was mentioning it, suffering a major failure on prime-time would be the worst. And I hadn’t given much thought to school because I never did. Todd was the scholar of the family, not me. I was lucky to earn straight B’s with each report card, and I fantasized about the outfits I’d wear to college classes more often than I thought about which subjects I’d study.

  “You can call the producers and ask them about school,” I assured my parents. I was confident that Tommy Harper and Susan DeMott would have much more expertise than me in convincing parents that television shows were more important than junior years of high school. “And I won’t freak out if I lose. I promise. I want this more than I have ever wanted anything in my whole life, Dad. Please, please at least let me try. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if this were about Todd and not me. You’d never try and stop him from achieving his dreams. Ever.”

  I hated myself as I fumed in my chair throughout dinner for playing the Todd card, but it was true. My parents never denied Todd anything. Maybe they pitied him a little because he’d needed cleft palate surgery when he was a baby, but he had turned out just fine. His scar did little to deter girls from throwing themselves at him. When Todd turned sixteen, he got a car so that he could drive himself to his job in Century City. When I turned sixteen, my dad resisted taking me to the DMV for my license for an entire month while he made me drive around Glendale for extra practice.

  Then, when Todd moved away to Connecticut for school in August, my parents let him sell his car and put the money toward his meal plan instead of turning the car over to me. So unfair. My parents told me they’d help me buy a car the first time I received Straight A’s on a report card; as if that was ever going to happen.

  That night I laid in my bed fully clothed. I was too excited to change into pajamas because the act of preparing for bed seemed like too great of a commitment to falling asleep. It seemed like if I permitted myself to sleep, by morning when I woke up, the entire day’s events would have been erased and the opportunity to sing on Center Stage! would be no more real than the last hurried moments of a lucid dream playing out as my alarm clock buzzed. Through the wall separating my room from the hallway leading to the living room, I could hear my parents speaking in hushed voices but couldn’t make out any words.

  I had company that night. Our rogue cat, Buster, made a rare appearance in my bedroom and was stretched out across the foot of my bed as if it were his own. For a few minutes, lying there in the dark, my thoughts drifted to Taylor’s deceased mom. Even though I thought Taylor’s mom was beautiful, I could see that she wasn’t exactly the greatest parent. Taylor never had a curfew, and my parents never let me sleep over at her house
. Taylor had to lug her laundry two blocks over to the laundromat every Saturday; the washing machine at her house had been broken since we were in junior high and it wasn’t much of a priority for her mom to get it fixed. Even still, there were times when I wished my own mom was more like Taylor’s. I solemnly mourned Taylor’s mom that night, knowing with certainty that she would have been thrilled for me.

  I was all too aware of the click made by the lamp in the living room when my parents turned it off and walked past my room on the way to their own bedroom. Somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles (was it Temecula? Chatsworth? I couldn’t remember), Elliott Mercer was probably also lying awake, staring up at his ceiling and wondering if he’d just started the next chapter of his life. I wasn’t sure why I had started thinking about Elliott Mercer so late at night, but he was the only other contestant whose audition I’d bothered to observe that afternoon. It irritated me that I hadn’t even taken a good look at him in the waiting room before I’d gone on stage.

  If he’d taken a good look at me, he probably wouldn’t have felt any more threatened by my appearance than I’d been by his before he heard me sing. Although no one liked pouting in front of the mirror more than me, on days when I was honest with myself, I knew I was cute but average-looking, at best. I took after my dad’s side of the family in that I had chubby cheeks and eyebrows that needed frequent plucking. My only stroke of luck in the looks department was inheriting cobalt blue eyes from my mom to match my brother’s eyes. Only, my brother’s big blue eyes made him look dreamy and poetic. Mine made me look sleepy and at times, stoned (or so a jerky senior guy at Pacific Valley School had told me).