Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  I took a seat on the least-stained of the red chairs after Mom departed. As I thumbed through the first few pages of the magazine I chose from the selection, I realized it contained an entire full-page feature on Taylor Beauforte’s downtown style. Downtown style! I smirked. To the best of my knowledge, Taylor had never been downtown in any city, anywhere. There was Taylor, carrying a blue Coach bag and wearing skinny jeans with a white floral pattern on them. There she was again, briskly walking through an airport, wearing tight olive-colored cargo pants with a white eyelet sleeveless top and beige Grecian-style sandals. She was definitely dressing much more fashionably than she ever had when she lived in West Hollywood now that she lived with her dad. However, Chase Atwood’s wife was a stylist. It was a safe assumption that Taylor was getting some help.

  “Allison!” a deep, booming voice called my name and I looked up from the magazine. A nerdy guy carrying a walkie-talkie motioned for me to follow him. “I’m Rob. You’re supposed to come with me.”

  Rob was my height, had a five o’clock shadow, and wore a wrinkled polo shirt. He punched a four-digit code into the access panel on the wall, and I followed him through the door and down a long hallway, its white walls scuffed with hand prints and dirt. We passed several doors, some of which had signs with light bulbs over them blinking in red: ON AIR. Rob never slowed his pace near any of those doors, and when the hallway came to an end, we turned left and continued toward a glass door that appeared to lead outside.

  “Are you taking me to my dance lesson?” I asked sheepishly, primarily to make conversation since I already knew my schedule for the day.

  “All I know is they said Studio Four,” Rob told me brusquely. “Don’t know if they’re going to have you dancing in there, or tossing Frisbees, or what.”

  Rob pushed the glass door at the end of the hallway open and stepped through it, barely holding it open for a split second for me to follow him. I was a little offended by his rudeness; didn’t he know I was about to become a big star?

  White gravel crunched beneath my feet as we walked toward two big warehouses I had seen from the parking lot. Rob led me to the far corner of the warehouse on my left, and up a small block of stairs. He knocked on a white plastic storm door that looked better suited for a residence than a warehouse, and a woman dressed in a mulberry-colored terry cloth jumpsuit answered.

  “This is Allison Burch, the first of the Fulsom group,” Rob told the woman, reading my name off of a clipboard.

  The woman inside the warehouse appeared to be confused. After looking at me for a second, she opened the storm door and told Rob something in Spanish.

  “No hablo Español,” Rob told the woman impatiently. He then turned to me and said, “I think this is the cleaning lady. You can wait here until the rest of the group arrives.”

  The cleaning lady seemed a lot happier to have my company than Rob did, and she chatted away as she mopped the cement floor of the warehouse. I sat down cautiously on an unsteady wooden chair and took in my surroundings as I waited (for what or whom, I wasn’t sure). There were large bolts of white paper hung horizontally on the wall at the far end of the open warehouse space, which I guessed was probably used as a sound studio. Wires and ropes for arranging lights and microphones dangled from the very high ceiling. Double doors suggestively beckoned to me on the other side of the room, but I resisted the urge to explore. It was an awfully large space for a dance practice, and as the minutes dragged on, I grew increasingly suspicious as to why Rob had left me in this large, damp warehouse.

  Fifteen minutes passed.

  Then twenty.

  The cleaning lady tired of my silence and slipped headphones over her ears. As she hummed along with music, a sense that I should have been somewhere else crept up on me. Where was everyone? Had Rob brought me to the wrong place? Was I going to be penalized for being late? Was this some kind of Center Stage! trick to determine if I was gutsy enough to find my dance lesson?

  Just as I worked up the nerve to rise from my chair and walk back toward the storm door to peek my head outside, the double doors at the other end of the warehouse opened. A slim black man wearing a white t-shirt and gray knit pants appeared. “Are you Allison?” he asked in a voice that sounded a little cross.

  “Yes,” I admitted, although, at that very second, I wished I was not Allison.

  “What are you doing in here? We’re down the hall in the rehearsal room. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

  I threw my big bag over one shoulder and trotted as fast as I could without seeming like I was running toward the double doors. “Sorry! The production assistant brought me here, and I didn’t know where everyone was.”

  My perfectly legitimate excuse met with silence, and I followed the man who I presumed to be the dance instructor down the brightly lit, fluorescently flooded hallway. We arrived at an open doorway, and through it I could see a jumble of people sprawled out on the hardwood floor. A floor-to-ceiling mirror spanned the length of one entire wall of the large, airy room. Speakers were positioned in all four corners, and an elaborate sound system control deck was built into one of the walls. Ten aluminum water bottles stood in alignment on the table at the back of the room like soldiers, all of which boasted the Center Stage! logo. The dance instructor strode into the room confidently ahead of me, and the people sitting on the floor straightened up in his presence.

  “You may have a seat,” he told me in his practiced, perfect diction without turning to look at me, and made a dramatic arm gesture toward the floor. I felt the weight of nine glares fall upon me, and I immediately plopped down as instructed. These nine people would be my colleagues and competitors for the next few weeks… if I were to make it past the first Expulsion Series. It was a little odd to think that Nelly Fulsom had hand-picked all of us. We were a diverse assortment of sizes and races.

  “Thanks for wasting everyone’s time,” a beautiful brunette with silky hair to her waist hissed at me. She looked a little older than me and was the same kind of beautiful as Nicole: self-tanner, a lot of eyeliner, naturally thin. I tried to imagine what she’d look like without all of the makeup she wore and thought smugly that she probably would look like a completely different girl. She wore nothing but a hot pink sports bra and skin-tight Lycra yoga pants, showing off her six-pack and bronzed abdomen. I fought the urge to explain about my lateness, not wanting to provoke the wrath of the teacher for talking in class. It was pointless to insist that my tardiness wasn’t my fault; no one cared.

  “Alright, everyone. Now that we’re all here let’s formally begin, shall we? I am Erick St. John, your dance guide. In this class, we will be studying the art of movement. We will condition our bodies to transition in controlled, practiced manners, rather than impulsively, which is the way most of us learn to dance at an early age.”

  Erick spoke in what I was pretty sure was a phony British accent. He paced as he addressed us. “I have danced on the stages of New York City. London. Paris. I will instruct you in the principles of dance, teaching you to use your bodies as translators of energy.”

  I thought of Taylor in the street style spread I’d just browsed in the magazine earlier that morning and half-wished she was there in dance class with me. She would have covertly grimaced at me in response to Erick St. John’s introduction. I didn’t want to be a translator of energy. I just wanted the ability to sway while performing without looking like I had a twitching disorder.

  “It is imperative in this studio that you focus. You will study your reflection in the mirror so that you become accustomed to how it feels when your body is moving with correct form. This isn’t play time, people. You are here to work.”

  He demanded that we all get up on our feet, and several of us scurried to the side of the room to dump our respective gym bags and canvas totes in a corner. We lined up in front of the mirror, and Erick stood in front of us in the center. He stared at his reflection as he led us through a series of warm-up stretches. I was careful to step into the line at
the end opposite from the brunette in the hot pink sports bra. Instead, I joined the queue between a heavyset guy and a tattooed woman who looked like she was at the high end of the age range for contestants on the show.

  “Exhale as you raise your arms. Breathe in, breathe out,” Erick instructed, semi-squatting as he raised and lowered his arms over his head. “Now lean to your right side, straightening your left leg, and fall into a deep lunge.”

  The warm-up stretches were tough, but I was proud of myself for keeping up. After fifteen minutes of holding stretch positions, a few of the people in our group were already winded and sweating. I was feeling quite accomplished until Erick announced that the warm-up was only just starting.

  “Alright, everyone, now we’re going to start our jog-in-place. It’s very important to warm up all the muscles and get the blood moving before we start our work-out. If you can’t keep up, it’s okay to take a break, catch your breath, and pick back up when you can,” Erick instructed. All of us in the group looked at each other in disbelief. More warming up before dancing? How difficult was the actual work-out going to be?

  I reluctantly ran in place along with everyone else in line and fretted when Erick fell out of the formation and walked behind our row, inspecting everyone’s form. “Shoulders back!” he barked at a guy with a beard in his early twenties. “Exercising with poor posture is worse than not exercising at all!”

  “Don’t hold your breath!” he ordered a black girl with long braids. “It’s very important to keep breathing!”

  I tried to take to heart all of the instructions that Erick gave to everyone else so that by the time he reached my end of the row, he’d be unable to find fault with my jogging. My heart swelled with jealousy when he passed the girl in the pink sports bra and complimented her on her posture.

  “I run marathons,” she replied.

  Ugh, I thought, a glimmer of hatred for her igniting in my chest. I seriously hoped her voice wasn’t all that great, whoever she was, because I already knew I would not enjoy her company for twelve long weeks.

  I pushed my shoulders way back. I kept my spine as straight as possible. I lifted my knees up high as Erick had while he was still running, and I was breathing with more focus than ever before in my sixteen years of life. Watching my reflection, I cursed the beads of sweat rolling from my forehead down to my cheeks, and the blotch of dark sweat that had bloomed around the neckband of my t-shirt. I saw Erick approaching in the mirror, and I averted my eyes away from him as he inspected the jogging of the guy to my right.

  “Take a rest, big guy! I can’t have anyone passing out in this studio! Go get some water! People! It’s very important to take rests when you need them!”

  The big guy on my right, who was at least a foot taller than me and probably almost fifty pounds overweight, fell out of line to cross the room and grab a water bottle.

  “Run naturally!” Erick barked at me after observing me for a moment. “Everything about your form is unnatural. Relax your shoulders! Relax your spine! You’re not going to win any awards for throwing your back out.”

  I saw shame register on my face in the mirror as I let my shoulders droop back to their usual slump. This didn’t please Erick either. “I didn’t tell you to relax that much! We are in a studio of dance, not leisure!”

  I straightened up again, and tried to push my shoulders back only half as much as I had before, but it was useless. Obviously my shoulders were all wrong, my posture was all wrong. Erick shook his head at me in disappointment and moved on to the woman running on my left.

  After twenty minutes of heavy cardio, we were all sweating through our clothes, red in the face, and greasy-haired. Erick told us to all take a water bottle, and he began screwing around with the audio system until pulsating dance music with heavy bass boomed from the speakers in each corner of the room. Finally, I assumed, it was dance time. During our water break, I checked my cell phone and almost screamed when I saw that we still had an hour more to go. Our warm-up had been more intense exercise than I had ever done in gym class at Pacific Valley. We were nowhere near finished, and I was already wondering about where and when I’d be able to shower.

  Back in our line formation, our first challenge was to learn how to step side to side and clap. It sure had sounded simple when Erick had told us what we were going to do, but it was anything but simple. Erick wanted us to tap our feet together a certain way on step, move our hips without moving our torsos the wrong way, and bend our knees without bending too low. I watched my own body twist and contort in the mirror as I tried to step and clap. I sucked at the one dance move that I would have thought I’d mastered at school dances prior to entering Erick’s studio. There was no denying it: my dancing was disastrous. How was I ever going to win this stupid contest if I couldn’t even survive the very first two-hour dance rehearsal?

  And then… I noticed the cameras. At some point, while we’d all been struggling to step and clap, a small camera crew had entered the studio to record us. The director noticed that I’d stopped “dancing” and motioned for me to turn back around and continue. Oh, the humiliation. I should have guessed that at some point, we’d be videotaped during our lesson. The show always demonstrated the evolution of contestants, from clumsy novices with bad hair to polished, camera-ready singers on the brink of stardom. How had I forgotten that my journey to fame on Center Stage! would include a ton of ugly duckling moments?

  “Alright, people. We’re going to take a short break so that the camera crew can interview all of you about your training so far. Keep moving, keep your heart rates up. I don’t want to see anyone just standing around, idle,” Erick told us.

  While walking in place, sipping water, I paid close attention to learn the identities of the contestants in my group as the camera crew made its rounds. The big guy next to whom I’d been warming up was named Chet, and he was a college student from Baltimore. The young woman with tattoos was named Suzanne, and she was from Arizona. Back at home, she taught fifth grade at a public elementary school. The heavy-sweating guy with the red beard was named Ian and he was a bartender from Brooklyn. He sang in a local rock band when he wasn’t in Los Angeles, taking more drastic measures to get famous. There was a young Latina woman studying to be a dental hygienist from Slidell, Louisiana who used her first moment in front of the camera to offer a shout-out to her daughter, who was staying with their grandmother while her mom competed on Center Stage!.

  A bubbly blond college student named Christa told the camera crew that the dance class was more difficult than she’d been expecting, but she was determined to work hard and triumph! Christa concerned me even before I heard her sing; she was from Memphis and kind of looked a little like Nelly. It was no big surprise that Nelly had chosen her to be on the team.

  The black girl with braids from New Jersey warned the camera crew that she was going to punch somebody if she looked sweaty and gross in the first footage of her seen by America. Her name was Eunice, and the director assured her that they'd shoot more interviews throughout the day when we weren’t all sweaty. Brian, a skinny, pale guy from Dallas, repeatedly told the camera crew how happy he was to be there. Jarrett, a good-looking young black guy from Miami, bragged that the dance class was nothing compared to the rigorous training he’d recently undergone as part of a touring production of the stage version of the animated film The Living Carousel. It was about magical animals on a carousel in a park who sprang to life each night. Jarrett had played a sea horse.

  The girl in the hot pink sports bra was named Robin. She was an aspiring model from Chicago and was so confident about her chances on the show, she seemed arrogant. Relax, I commanded myself as I watched her wink and flirt her way through her interview. No one likes arrogance.

  “Tell us your name and where you’re from,” the camera man of the small crew greeted me. A lavalier microphone had been clipped to the soaked neckband of my t-shirt.

  “My name is Allison, and I’m from West Hollywood,” I said, trying
to offer up a genuine smile. At least by going last, I’d had a chance to cool down a bit.

  “How is your dance training going?” the camera man asked me.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say I am the world’s greatest dancer. Maybe it’ll be okay if I just sing and… stand in one place? But it’s awesome to have the opportunity to try new things with some of the best teachers there are.” Be humble, I reminded myself. Don’t showboat.

  After our grueling dance rehearsal, we were all relieved to learn that we would be assigned trailers so that we could shower, change clothes, and freshen up. More relief followed when I found out that we would be sharing trailers with at least one other person, and I was paired with Eunice instead of Robin. Robin would be sharing with Suzanne, who looked like she was in her forties and seemed tough enough to deal with the likes of the prima donna. A strange city of trailers had been arranged at the back of the parking lot. Twenty trailers, to be exact, parked in a four rows of five.

  “This ain’t bad at all,” Eunice announced when we stepped into our trailer. There was a worn-looking couch, a stack of clean blankets, and a mini-fridge. Inside the fridge, she found bottled water and soda. “You can shower first,” she offered. “I’m gonna drink as much water as I can find after that crazy work-out.” Eunice was a cheerleader for her college’s basketball team, and even she was exhausted.

  The shower was anything but luxurious in the trailer’s tiny bathroom. There was, however, very fancy organic body wash and shampoo in the shower that smelled like gardenias, presumably from one of the show’s sponsors. Fluffy white towels were stacked up in the bathroom cabinet. Even before cooling down completely from the dance rehearsal, I was sure that I was going to be in some legitimate pain the next day.

  I stepped outside the trailer while Eunice used the shower, not bothering to blow my hair dry since we would next be taken back into the warehouse for hair and makeup consultations before lunch. What a strange little world it was on that studio lot, I marveled, with so many of us enduring such a bizarre process just for a chance to have a few minutes of singing on stage. I stared up at the puffy clouds floating past in the powder blue sky, wondering what my friends at school were doing at that very moment. They were only in their second class of the day, and I already felt like I had lived an entire day’s worth of events before ten A.M.