Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  “You’re not making an assumption. I am,” Lee replied. “Trust me. You’re going to need that. I’m Lee Yoon, independent filmmaker, by the way.”

  Ralph looked humored but impressed by Lee’s confidence, and shook his hand with an amused smile. “I’m Ralph Reed, location unit director. Nice to meet you.” He dropped the memory stick into the pocket of his jeans.

  When the crew finished interviewing my parents, the unit production manager suggested, “Let’s get the friends, too.”

  “We might as well. They’re already here,” Ralph shrugged. One by one, my friends were taken out to the patio for quick interviews. I leaned against our sliding door, watching Martha fluff Kaela’s hair. Kaela dreamily watched Colton, who was smiling at a handsome production assistant wearing a plaid button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up, stretched tightly over his well-defined biceps. Lee studied the production unit’s interactions as if trying to commit the entire process of conducting interviews on a patio to memory.

  Ralph took a shine to Michelle during her interview. He clearly got a kick out of her gruff voice and reluctant smile as she showed him the wrist brace she wore due to a soccer injury. Mom chatted with Nicole as if they were old friends. She hadn’t ever gotten a reason from my brother as to why he and Nicole hadn’t gone out on more dates. I got the feeling that she wished Todd had taken Nicole more seriously.

  The golden early autumn sun bounced off the calm waves of our pool in rapid arcs and slivers. Just for a second I saw my life with perfect clarity. I wondered if I were to become famous whether or not I’d ever have another moment like this: my closest friends, my parents, the familiarity of my house. Did I want to be famous badly enough to risk what I already had and loved? As soon as the thought occurred to me, I tried to banish it; I had no reason to believe that I’d have to compromise anything for success. But deep down at the bottom of my heart, as I watched Lee give his interview, I thought of Taylor and knew better. There was always a compromise for fame. It was a law of physics, practically: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If I was lucky enough to have a shot at becoming a celebrity, I was sure I’d find out what that compromise would be.

  The next day at school was bittersweet. I had sworn my friends to secrecy not to tell the other kids at school until closer to the season premiere, but I was a little annoyed that they’d followed my orders. When I folded up my white lab coat and hung it on a hook in the Chemistry lab cloak room next to Kaela’s, I felt a small victorious thrill. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll never wear you never again, Chem lab coat! I thought to myself. Ms. Shakur reminded us to all read Chapter 2 and urged us to prepare for a quiz on Monday about isotopes. My days of caring about isotopes were over, at least temporarily, even though I’d promised my parents I’d keep up with homework. My teachers had informed me that they’d e-mail me weekly assignments during my absence and wished me the best of luck.

  Over the weekend, I hung out at the Farmer’s Market at the Grove with my friends as if it were any other weekend. My friends grilled me about what the show was going to be like as we wolfed down enchiladas, and I was at a loss for what to tell them. Other than the schedule that Claire had supplied to my mom and the general rules for the show, which everyone in America knew, I had no idea what to expect. The truth of the matter was, I was getting nervous. Almost three weeks had passed since my audition. Even though I’d been singing in my room just like I always had, I was growing paranoid that maybe I wouldn’t be able to deliver the goods once the show started.

  We finally all gave in and bought tickets for the Sanborn Meyers movie that Lee wanted to see. In the darkness of a movie theater, I wondered what Elliott Mercer was doing that weekend and how he was preparing for the show. Maybe he was boarded up in his bedroom, writing deep, soulful songs. It bothered me that I couldn’t exactly remember what he looked like, or the hue of his eyes.

  It was comforting to think that even if he were busy doing broody, artistic things, he would presumably be forced into a dance lesson on Monday morning, just like me.

  “Hey. Do you have a good cell phone?”

  At first I thought Elliott was trying to be ironic by asking me such an odd thing, but the expression on his face suggested that he was being completely serious. On Monday, we were the first to arrive in Miss Chlodowski’s classroom, and his question was posed so immediately that it seemed like he’d been thinking about it all day.

  “Uh, it’s an okay phone,” I said uneasily. It wasn’t the latest model or anything, but my phone was the one perk my mom provided to me as some kind of half-hearted consolation for our frequent moves. I think she erroneously thought that I used the phone to keep in touch with friends in towns we’d left behind, when in fact I primarily used it to entertain myself during moments when I was self-conscious about being alone (like during lunch time in the cafeteria).

  Elliott was intrigued. “Does it make videos?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t all phones make videos these days?”

  He pulled an ancient flip phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and exhibited it to me without any shame whatsoever. “Not all phones.”

  I took his phone from him and examined it with amusement. Its screen was cloudy and cracked, and the buttons on the key pad were sticky with grime. It had been manufactured at a time when the fanciest of phones had low quality cameras in them. Handling it made me antsy to wash my hands with bacterial soap. “How long have you had this thing?”

  “Forever,” he admitted. “Hey, whatever. It still works. It was my mom’s and she gave it to me when she got a free upgrade. It’s not like I call a lot of people.”

  I handed his relic back to him and assured him, “Mine shoots video. But, why? What kind of video do you need to make?”

  He slid his phone back into the pocket of his jeans and unzipped his guitar case. “I want to send in an audition for Center Stage!”

  At this, I nearly burst out laughing because I thought for sure he was joking. The contestants on Center Stage! were always the cheesiest, most ambitious, all-American nerds. The female contestants were typically former beauty pageant queens, and most of the guys could dance like Michael Jackson. Occasionally bikini models with halfway decent voices would cross the stage, sometimes girls who were the stars of the choirs in their small-town Baptist churches. Every once in a while, someone who broke that mold would step out in front of the audience—a heavily tattooed mechanic, an overweight middle-aged mother of five—and even though without fail those rarities would have astonishingly good voices, they’d be voted off simply because audiences at home always texted in more votes for the bikini models and dimpled guys with fierce moves.

  “Elliott,” I said in all seriousness, “Why in the world would you want to audition for Center Stage!? That show is so gimmicky.”

  “Because I could win it,” he said with such utter confidence that he completely convinced me. Elliott, once I thought about it, could win it. The rest of America didn’t know how socially awkward he was. If he appeared on television screens and just sang, everyone would think exactly what I thought when I first laid eyes on him: that he had serious potential. “At least,” he backtracked with a little more modesty, “I think I could get on the show. I could probably do okay.”

  I plugged my electric guitar into my own tiny portable amp. “I think you’re right. I think you could at least get on the televised auditions. You can shoot your audition on my phone if you want. When is it due?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “I wish I’d known about it sooner but I don’t really watch TV much. I have to email in my submission before six o’clock tomorrow night. You should submit one, too.”

  “Me?” I choked. “Oh, hell no. I couldn’t be on television.”

  “Sure you could,” Elliott insisted. “You’d have just as good a shot as me. Your voice is so-so but it might get better with practice.”

  I bit my lower lip. Elliott’s brutal honesty was something I’d not quite
gotten used to yet. I realized that he wasn’t intentionally being cruel, but also that for whatever strange reason, he was unable to understand how just blurting out his unfiltered opinion sometimes wasn’t kind. Or normal. I had never considered myself to be much of a singer, so I shouldn’t have been offended, but still.

  “But you’re super pretty, and that counts a lot,” he added, making me instantly forgive him for slighting my vocal abilities. Melissa burst into the room, bringing an abrupt end to what might have been Elliott’s feeble attempt to flirt with me, as well as our discussion about Center Stage!

  Elliott and I lingered in the hallway after practice as Miss Chlodowski locked up the classroom behind us. Melissa rushed off down the hall to the parking lot, where the brand new sparkling Audi she’d gotten for her seventeenth birthday was waiting for her. Even in the brief period of time I’d had Melissa in my lifetime, I’d quickly learned that her favorite topic of conversation was the very expensive gifts she often received from her father, who had recently divorced her mother.

  “Can we go to your house to shoot the audition?” Elliott asked. “I already called in sick to work.” That had been rather presumptuous of him, but that was kind of his style.

  On the drive to my house in Elliott’s unbelievably crappy Ford Fiesta, I learned that he bagged groceries six days a week at the giant Von’s supermarket on the outskirts of town. I didn’t press him for details as to why, at seventeen, he worked almost forty hours a week. Having been raised by my middle-class grandparents and then living with my penny-pinching Spartan mother, I already knew all too well that not everyone was as lucky as Melissa Feldman, being given Louis Vuitton handbags and Audis. His explanation about his job as well as the state of his car, which was literally held together by Gorilla Tape and hope, completely relieved me of shame about my own tiny house in one of the town’s few not-so-fancy neighborhoods. I didn’t feel any need to impress Elliott, or perhaps more accurately, I sensed that even if I tried to impress him, he would have been oblivious.

  “Wow, this is a nice house,” he said as we pulled into my driveway. There wasn’t anything I would have considered nice about it, but it was a decent two-bedroom house. We had a freshly mowed lawn, since our landlord’s son came over every Saturday morning with his lawn mower. Our roof was covered in Spanish tile, which was pretty much the norm for our neighborhood. A white bark alder tree in the corner of our front yard near the curb did little in the way of offering shade to keep our living room cool.

  “It’s alright,” I agreed. In fact, it was probably the nicest of all the rental houses we’d lived in since I’d been staying with Mom. I was compelled to add, “It’s a rental. We never stay anywhere long, so it makes more sense for us to rent.”

  Elliott shut off the engine of his car, and in the absence of its hum, my street seemed eerily quiet except for the chatter of birds. “Why? Are your parents, like, bank robbers or something?”

  “No. I live with my mom and she’s in the Air Force. We move around to the different bases,” I explained. In the past, when I described my unusual family situation, that was usually the end of it. But as we pulled our guitars and amplifiers out of the back seat of Elliott’s Fiesta (he’d brought his guitar in addition to his bass to school that day, revealing that he’d been thinking about asking me to video his audition since he got up that morning), I could tell I’d sparked his curiosity.

  “Wow. Does your mom fly planes?”

  I explained as I led him up the little cement path to our front door that my mom used to fly planes, but she probably hadn’t climbed into the cockpit of a military aircraft in at least five years. She was brass now, a strategist, someone who’d most likely be in the Air Force professionally until she retired.

  The Boss met us, tail wagging, at the front door, clearly very excited to get to sniff someone new. “Sorry. He’s overly friendly,” I apologized as The Boss immediately began snorting around Elliott’s legs.

  “It’s cool. I like dogs,” Elliott said, squatting to let The Boss lick him on the face.

  We set our guitars down and I said I had to take the dog for a quick walk before we shot the audition because he’d been locked up by himself all afternoon. Fortunately, Elliott seemed excited about that and didn’t insist that we just put The Boss in the back yard for a while, since the dog hated being in the yard alone. We set out to circle the block once with The Boss on his leash, and Elliott continued interrogating me for details about my life. It was that hazy, golden time of afternoon, when bees were still busying themselves around flowering bushes and a lot of our retired neighbors were sitting on their porches just drinking iced tea because it was so hot outside.

  “What about your father? Where’s he?” Elliott asked.

  “Don’t know. Don’t even know who he is,” I admitted. It had been years since anyone had asked me about the identity or whereabouts of my father. Right around the time I was in first grade, when family structures were often a topic discussed during lessons or explored in stories read during class, I hounded my grandmother for information about my father relentlessly. The answer I received never varied: “You’ll have to ask your mother about that one day.” Thankfully, by middle-school, most kids had been informed by their parents that asking too many questions about someone’s home life was considered rude, but apparently Elliott hadn’t been similarly informed.

  “That’s crazy!” he replied, impressed. “I wish I didn’t know who my dad was. It makes it easier to stay angry at someone, I think, knowing where they are and what they’re doing.”

  It had never crossed my mind to be angry at my father, whoever he was, because in my mind he didn’t actually exist. I had no evidence that he’d known about me and bailed, or had offered my mother some kind of assistance and had been shot down. Who he was and the reason for his complete absence from my life was a mystery I didn’t care to investigate. “So, where is your father and what’s he doing?” I asked, wanting to show mutual interest in Elliott’s life.

  “In Texas running some kind of automotive repair shop,” Elliott mumbled. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad he’s there and not here. But it would be nice to have a different kind of dad, you know? A dad who plans camping trips and bugs you about what you’re going to do with your life.”

  I thought about the stacks of college applications piling up in my room, and had to admit that I agreed.

  After giving the back yard some serious consideration as a setting for Elliott’s audition, we decided to instead shoot in the living room because the audio outside was compromised by wind, overhead planes, and birds. Inside, Elliott sat down on the living room couch and set up his amplifier. He turned its volume knob to the lowest setting so that his chords wouldn’t drown out his voice in the small room.

  “Okay,” I said, after framing him on my phone’s camera and steadying my elbows on the coffee table to keep my hands from shaking. “The acoustics in here are going to kind of suck because of the carpeting, but I’m ready when you are.”

  “This is a nice couch,” Elliott said, taking notice of the gray canvas overstuffed monstrosity upon which he was sitting. He had not seemed to notice that he’d plopped down right on The Boss’s favorite spot to snooze when we weren’t home, which meant that the seat of his jeans was surely covered in fuzzy white dog fur.

  “Also rented,” I informed him. We had very little furniture of our own because it would have been astronomically expensive to move it from state to state. “What are you going to sing?”

  Elliott strummed a few chords and adjusted the tuning keys of his guitar. “Seventy Miles to the Border,” he replied without looking up from his task of tuning.

  I wondered if that song was some kind of obscure rock classic that I was a huge ignoramus for not recognizing, and came up blank. “Never heard of it,” I admitted.

  “That’s because,” Elliott said as he balanced his guitar in his lap, “I wrote it.”

  All of the songs that I could recall seeing performed
on Center Stage! were famous. I hadn’t seen many episodes, but it definitely seemed like audiences were more likely to vote for popular songs they knew and liked, regardless of the quality of the performance. I shared my concern with Elliott and added, “Singing a song no one’s ever heard of might be suicide.”

  Elliott smiled knowingly and plucked out the melodious introductory notes of Guns ’N Roses’ “Sweet Child ’O Mine.”

  “So, what are you saying, Cassie? What kind of famous song would guarantee me an in-person audition?” he teased. His effortless demonstration confirmed what I’d assumed all along: his guitar skills far exceeded my own.

  “That song would do just fine,” I said, and added, “Now stop showing off.”

  Elliott strummed out a long, slow chord and then his hand rested, idle, against the strings of his guitar. “I know what I’m doing. I only want to be on this stupid show if I get to do it my way.”

  I thought about the commercial I’d seen a week ago when Mom was watching television. The grand prize for winning Center Stage! was a chance to travel the world with the famous boy band All or Nothing, and open for them on their global tour. I could not—even for a second—picture Elliott hanging out with those apple-cheeked, moussed-hair, posh boys from Ireland. “Elliott, seriously? What is this about? Do you really want to be on this show?”

  His smile widened. “Yes. I do. I’m graduating in May and I don’t want to bag groceries for the rest of my life. If I get on this show and give the producers something better than what they can manufacture, it won’t matter if I win or not. I can be a musician then on my own terms.”

  I was so concerned with keeping my hand from shaking that I barely breathed after I tapped the red “record” button. The song Elliot had written was about feeling like an outcast and watching everyone else surrounding him enjoy their lives, seventy miles north of the border and fifty miles inland from the ocean. The raw, sensitive lyrics gave me new insight into how alone Elliott felt at school. He sang about having to travel for an hour in any direction to break free, but how freedom was a point in time rather than a place on a map. It didn’t seem like the kind of song a boy in high school could have possibly made up on his own. Even The Boss abandoned his favorite spot near the front window and sat down next to me to listen.