Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Elliott’s song perfectly captured my own feeling of being trapped in a cycle of new towns and new schools. I didn’t think it was possible that any other kid could feel as isolated as I did, but it was evident to me as Elliott sang that he and I had far more in common than I would have dared to imagine before he entered my house that day. It seemed unreal that I had stumbled blindly into a friendship with a guy who was so perfectly suited for me, and as I watched Elliott sing, I realized that he could maybe be my boyfriend. He could totally be my boyfriend. I wanted him to be my boyfriend. I wanted to sustain this special connection we had; I wanted him all for myself. Maybe I was the only girl who’d ever seen the real him, how amazing he actually was.

  As soon as he strummed his last chord and looked up to me to signal that I should stop recording, The Boss charged at Elliott and made his way into the frame. His dark wet nose and eager slobbering tongue bobbed onto the screen of my phone before I hit the button to end the video.

  “Geez, Cassie, are you crying?”

  I hadn’t even realized that a tear was making its way down my cheek. Embarrassed, I wiped it away with the back of my hand. “Shut up,” I complained. “It was a sad song.”

  Elliott put his guitar back in its case and after a moment of contemplation he said, “Sorry if I made you sad.” A wicked twinkle appeared in his eye and he added, “But if you want to get famous, you have to write songs that make young girls cry. Barry Manilow taught me that.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I teased. It had been a long time, longer than I could even remember, since I’d admitted to myself that I badly wanted something. I’d gotten so accustomed to not getting what I wanted, whether it was a toy my friends had, or a normal mom and dad instead of an estranged mother and grandparents raising me, or a real bedroom of my very own where I could spend more than one school year, that I’d simply stopped allowing myself to hope for things. And the hue of Elliott’s turquoise eyes when he looked at me nearly stopped my heart. “It wasn’t your song that made me sad, it just made me realize that I am sad about a lot of things,” I admitted.

  Then it all came tumbling out of me. The strangeness of those first few weeks with Mom, both of us sometimes beginning sentences in awkward unison, missing my grandparents so much that I tried to keep my phone conversations with them short at first to prevent myself from crying. Staring straight ahead in strange school cafeterias while eating my lunch and listening to kids around me discuss birthday parties and trips to bowling alleys to which I had not been invited. Instances when Mom and I were driving or both sitting in front of the television and I could tell we were both wondering why we were bothering to make our arrangement work out when it was somewhat obvious that we were simply co-existing, neither of us actually enjoying the process of trying to forge a parent-child relationship. I told him all about how much I’d loved working at Camp Toltec all summer, even in spite of the thousands of mosquito bites I got, because it was so nice to be in a quiet place where I could be myself.

  Elliott listened patiently, and then told me that his father had taken off when he was four years old. Both of his parents were heavy drinkers, and for a while after his father split, his mother’s drinking had gotten worse. He’d been placed with a foster family in nearby Mission Viejo for a while, and he’d actually liked living with them until his mother petitioned to have him returned to her when he was in first grade. Since then, she’d been slipping in and out of sobriety, hiding her drinking from him for months sometimes before losing her job and spending the next few months angrily banging around the house. It was an unpredictable, endless cycle. Sometimes money would be tight, but they’d scrape by. Other times his mother would just be despondent, unable to pull herself together even when the cupboards ran bare and the fridge was empty. He’d stopped caring about school when he realized that his teachers had noticed that his clothes were dirty and he never had enough to eat at lunch time, but either were too afraid to ask questions, or just didn’t want to get involved.

  “Maybe that’s all going to change now. You’re really talented, Elliott. Like, Bob Dylan-level talented. You could be, like, Conor Oberst or Kurt Cobain,” I encouraged him. I wondered if his mom even knew what kind of gift her son had. There was a good chance that no one other than Mr. Tinker had ever encouraged Elliott to further his talent.

  He bashfully rolled his eyes. “Ha. Maybe Kurt Cobain, but with not as many intravenous drugs since they’re kind of hard to come by in Temecula.”

  For a second I wasn’t sure if he was being serious with me or not, since I’d never known anyone at any of my previous schools who was into drugs. Of course it was possible that Elliott did drugs; kids everywhere did drugs, I presumed. Even just the mention of hard drugs sent a ripple of alarm through me. Noticing my reaction, he added, “Just kidding. It’s easy to buy heroin in Temecula. Even Mi-Hyun is a total addict.”

  “Thank God. I was just wondering this morning where I could buy some heroin.”

  “You should audition,” Elliott said suddenly, thrusting his guitar over the coffee table toward me. “Really. It would be so awesome if we both got to be on the show.”

  “I don’t know,” I said bashfully. The truth was that Elliott was way more talented than I was, and I knew it. I mean, I liked music, but I’d never given any consideration to a career actually performing on television. At Camp Toltec, kids looked up to me because I could play guitar, and it gave me great satisfaction to make sure that the campers, most of whom had cerebral palsy, had great memories to take home with them. Many of those kids freely admitted that they hated school, and hated being considered different from everyone else in their hometowns. Songs around the bonfire at night were more than just songs; they were like therapy, sort of. They celebrated how happy we all were to be together. I felt like my experience at camp that summer had been the tipping point of figuring out what I wanted as a career, and while music was part of it, becoming some kind of star was not.

  “Oh, come on, Cassie! I dare you!” Elliott egged me on.

  I was never very competitive, so daring me was pointless. But it was hard to say no because I didn’t want to disappoint him. With a heavy sigh, I handed him my phone, and got up from the floor to switch places with him on the couch.

  “What should I sing?” I asked, strumming his guitar strings while he sat down on the floor. The guitar pick he’d handed me to me was electric blue and I could feel where his fingers had worn it down a little bit. Even though it was just a cheap plastic pick and he’d probably gotten it for a dollar at the guitar store, he’d obviously been using it for a while, and I felt even more special that he’d handed it to me so eagerly.

  “Something soulful,” he said. “You don’t have such a broad range with your voice but if you stick to low notes, you sound good.”

  By that point I’d come to understand that Elliott’s frankness wasn’t intended to be rude. “What about ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman?” I suggested. The song was one of my favorites, one of the slim few I knew all the words to other than silly camp songs like ‘Bingo’ and ‘The Forever Song,’ none of which would be suitable for an audition.

  “Too sad,” Elliott decided. “Do you know any songs by the Beatles?”

  Grandpa was a huge Beatles fan. Some of my earliest memories were of him playing Revolver on his old-fashioned record player on Sunday mornings when I still lived in Glenview. It had not escaped my attention that my mother couldn’t stand music by the Beatles, quite possibly because her own father loved it so much. “I know just about every song by the Beatles,” I bragged.

  We agreed that I’d sing “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” since the chords on that one were repetitive and I wouldn’t have to learn an insane guitar solo. It took me three tries to get past the first chorus without messing up and asking Elliott to start over, which impressed me even more retroactively that he’d been able to perform his own song in one try without screwing up the lyrics or the guitar tabs even once. Unlike Elliott, I als
o had to watch my fingers reach for the strings to make sure I was about to strike the right chord each time, only gaining enough confidence to look up at the camera toward the end.

  “See? That was good. Really good,” Elliott assured me, and since I already knew he was somewhat incapable of lying just to flatter someone else’s ego, I believed him.

  It was almost seven o’clock, and the unexpected sound of the garage door opening startled us both. The Boss darted toward the front door as he always did when Mom got home, barking his head off in greeting. Elliott silenced himself mid-sentence and stood up from the couch. “Wow, it’s late. I should probably get going.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I assured him, not wanting him to go just yet. I wanted some kind of reassurance from him that we’d spend another afternoon together like this one. “It’s just my mom.”

  “Nah,” Elliott said, swinging his guitar case over his shoulder. “I get freaked out by parents. Will you email my audition video to me?”

  Just as I promised him that I would, Mom stepped in through the front door still wearing her dress uniform. Confusion and then anger crossed her face as soon as she saw us, and I assumed it was because she’d known since she drove down the block that I had a guest over by the presence of Elliott’s lousy car in our driveway. “Why, hello,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound welcoming at all.

  “Mom, this is my friend Elliott from school,” I quickly explained. Elliott and I were both blushing, which was embarrassing, because we hadn’t been doing anything at all to justify my mom’s curious concern.

  “Nice to meet you,” Elliott mumbled shyly. “I was just leaving.”

  The second the screen door slapped shut behind Elliott, my mom put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “Cassandra, how long has this been going on?”

  She obviously thought that I’d been having Elliott over after school on a regular basis. “You mean having friends over after school? Elliott is the first person who’s ever come over, and this was the only time,” I said defensively, not liking at all what she was insinuating.

  Her mood softened a little, and she took another step inside the house before kicking off her unfeminine black pumps. “I don’t want you inviting boys into the house when I’m not home.”

  “We’re just friends, that’s all.”

  “Doesn’t matter. No boys.”

  After we ate dinner in silence, I retreated to my room and watched Elliott’s audition video twice with my headphones on before emailing it to him. Both times, his performance held me in complete rapture. If I hadn’t had a total crush on him before he sang one of his own original songs in my living room, I was totally, completely, head-over-heels in love with him after I did.

  Then, I watched my own audition video. After the first twenty seconds, I paused it and tapped my phone off. It was too embarrassing, the way my face changed shapes as I sang, the way my eyes kept darting downward to check my finger positioning. The color of my hair was hideously unflattering; I vowed to walk to the pharmacy after school the next day to buy a cheap box of hair dye and rectify the situation.

  The deadline for submitting auditions to Center Stage! was the following evening, but I already knew I’d never dare to send mine in.

  Chapter 5

  Dance Class

  When I was four years old, I tripped over my shoelaces at the La Brea Tar Pits and fell on my face so hard that I broke one of my front teeth in half. Fortunately, it was a baby tooth, but that mighty tumble was the first in a childhood plagued by a remarkable clumsiness. In first grade, I begged to be enrolled in jazz dance class with Taylor. Once Mom enrolled me, I realized that my fascination with it had a lot more to do with the rainbow-striped leotard and tutu that Taylor wore to recitals than with learning how to dance. My parents, the terrorists, kept video footage of the few recitals in which I had performed (before throwing in the towel on dancing). In the videos, it was apparent that I had no ability or desire to follow along with the rest of the group, whatsoever. While all of the other little girls smiled and moved in unison through the rehearsed motions, spinning and raising their arms in sync, I was always off on the side, freestyling.

  “She’s an improvisationalist,” Dad would reason whenever Mom reminded me that there was a dance routine that everyone was expected to follow.

  In junior high gym class, on rainy days, boys and girls would be paired up for dance lessons taught by Mr. Medavoy, a former Marine and very unlikely dance instructor. I was hopeless at the polka, never able to follow my partner’s lead when it was time to turn, and the only part of square dancing that I was able to master was the do-si-do. I sucked at all of it, from the Grapevine to the Hustle, and developed a technique of lagging behind everyone else during line dances so that I could follow their movements.

  That was a long time ago! I assured myself the morning of my first day of production on Center Stage! as I pulled on the brand new yoga pants that Mom had bought me for dance rehearsals with the show. Surely I couldn’t still be so apocalyptically uncoordinated. However, I couldn’t remember the last time I had danced in public. Even at school dances, my friends and I lurked in the corner of Pacific Valley School’s gymnasium beneath the streamers, trading gossip and singing along to songs, instead of dancing. Senior boys would always venture into our dark corner in search of Nicole and pull her onto the dance floor for slow dances, but Kaela, Michelle, and I typically just drank a lot of punch.

  On our drive over the hill toward Studio City on the 101 Freeway, I desperately prayed that some of my mom’s natural grace had blossomed within me since Mr. Medavoy’s gym class hoedowns. I was hopeful that an unlikely miracle would reveal itself in my dance class, like Superman finding out as a young Clark Kent that he had the unexpected power to lift a car.

  When we reached the studio lot, the attendant at the gate checked a list for our names and waved his approval for Mom to enter. The studio where we would be shooting didn't look anything like I’d imagined. In my dreams leading up to this day, the studio was a majestic Hollywood campus encircled by a tall stucco wall and breezy palm trees. I had expected that there would be an ornate iron gate like the one at Paramount Pictures near my house, keeping mundane Los Angeles out and glamour in. I had imagined that a handsome production assistant driving a golf cart would greet me and that he’d whisk me away across the manicured lot to my mother’s astonishment. The fanciest thing about this actual, real studio was the bright network sign along the road marking the entrance to the parking lot. Beyond the guard’s station, I saw several office buildings and two buildings that looked like warehouses. There were no emerald green, plush lawns. No cute little bungalows from which producers rushed with scripts tucked under their arms. This drab place, the network studio lot, would be where I would spend the majority of the next few weeks of my life.

  Despite the humdrum appearance of the studio, I was almost psychotically excited. It was, at last, show time! The sensation that had seemed like a kind of a fun, Christmas morning excitement earlier that morning at home had boiled into anxiety so strong that I was queasy as Mom parked the car. Typical Los Angeles blanketed the sky, which had previously been pink with the promise of a sunny day at dawn. As we crossed the blacktop to the building’s entrance, I hoisted my huge canvas bag over my shoulder. In it, I had packed two changes of clothes, my makeup bag, a snack, a bottle of water, and magazine to read in case I got bored. Later that day I would marvel at how I could have ever thought I’d have time to get bored during production. It was painfully early in the day, and there were still a lot of empty parking spaces in the lot. I felt completely unprepared and wished I had at least allowed my mom to give me a few yoga lessons in the time I’d wasted since my audition.

  “We’re here to check in for Center Stage!” my mom informed the smiling receptionist in the front lobby. The receptionist wore multiple earrings in each ear, and had rhinestones glued onto her impressive fake fingernails.

  “You must be Allison,” the receptionist
greeted me. She stood from behind the front desk where she sat to meet us on the other side. The lobby was so small that it was hard to ascertain anything else about the inside of the building from its appearance. Behind the big front desk was a wall of thick glass tiles and a big potted plant. Signs that boasted the logos for a few of the production company’s shows, including Center Stage!, hung on the cream-colored wall next to the glass tiles. To the left of the reception desk was a large wooden door with a security panel of buttons. There were three red chairs and a dirty-looking coffee table covered in greasy, folded magazines, but nothing at all in the lobby suggested that this was a place where dreams were fulfilled. Where magic happened.

  The receptionist lightly touched my shoulder and said, “You’re in Ms. Fulsom’s group, and you’re the first to arrive. One of the PA’s will take you down to Dance Studio Four in a moment.” We were embarrassingly early; I’d bounced out of bed at the crack of dawn and had rushed Mom through her coffee even though she’d repeatedly advised me to cool my jets. The receptionist flashed her amazing smile at me again and returned to her desk to call someone (presumably, someone behind the wooden door). “Allison Burch has arrived,” she said into the phone before hanging up. She nodded toward the red chairs. “Go ahead and have a seat.”

  “Okay, hon,” Mom said, pulling my hair from my shoulders around to the back of my head. “Knock them dead today. Call me on my cell if you need anything, and Dad will be here at six to pick you up.”

  I didn’t want her to leave, but didn’t want her to stay, either. I wondered if other contestants’ parents were going to walk all the way into the building with them. Then I remembered that most of the other contestants were probably driving themselves to the studio because they were adults.