Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Christa looked at all of us with a bashful smile before slowly raising her hand.

  “What’s your name, little miss?” Marlene asked Christa.

  “Christa Diane VandeKamp.”

  Christa was delighted to inform our group that she was twenty years old and had taken voice lessons with a teacher named Noah Gifford in Memphis. She’d been performing with her brothers and sisters on the Country Western circuit all over the South since she was eight years old; she’d even performed once at the Grand Ole Opry. Marlene recognized the name of Christa’s former teacher and nodded with approval, sending a ripple of jealousy through me.

  “First, we’re going to do some warm-up exercises, troops,” Marlene told us. She passed out sheet music, and the pianist plunked away at keys corresponding to the notes. Smiles appeared when those of us (myself included) who couldn’t read music realized that the little circles and lines on the grid in our hands were the notes for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Marlene then sang each note of the song using the name of the note as a lyric, “C-C-G-G-A-A-G,” and encouraged us to repeat each note after her. As we echoed her in a multi-octave chorus, she wandered among us, adjusting our shoulders and hips with a light touch to correct our posture. We sang the song at a painfully slow tempo, repeating each note after Marlene twice. Then she wrote on a whiteboard with a purple marker to explain the difference between whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes.

  I was nauseous with envy when Christa was chosen to stand next to the piano as the first pupil to receive instruction from Marlene. My cell phone gave the time as almost four o’clock in the afternoon, and I wondered if all of us would get a chance to run through our song assignment individually with Marlene before the day’s end. Christa opened the wad of paper she had balled into the palm of her hand when Claire had handed out our song assignments. “Tomorrow and Forever,” she read aloud.

  “Oh, great one!” Marlene bellowed, clapping her hands together for emphasis. “That was in one of the Rat Pack movies. It’s a crowd pleaser, for sure.”

  “If the crowd’s in a nursing home,” Ian muttered under his breath next to me.

  “It’s about having big dreams for yourself, but meeting someone you want to take along for the ride,” Marlene explained as Christa’s eyes scanned the lyrics. She nodded at the piano player, whose fingers rolled across the keyboard to produce a few jazzy chords. “I’ll sing a bar, you’ll repeat it,” Marlene told Christa.

  Marlene threw her head back and sang in her raspy voice with perfect pitch. She sang at a volume so loud that it was startling at first. “All I’ve got today is this precious dream.” Marlene knew the lyrics by heart and her blue eyes bore into Christa. She over-annunciated the words of the song, forming each syllable with precision to help Christa repeat the line when it was her turn. In my peripheral vision, I noticed Ian squirming as Christa crooned each line in her sugar-sweet Southern twang.

  “It’s so not fair,” Ian told me. “I have a voice like Sinatra’s. I should have gotten this song.”

  I agreed with him and thought of Nelly’s parting words earlier that afternoon about having to make our talent stretch. Christa had a saccharine voice and could hit notes, but her delivery was so feminine that she couldn’t sing the lyrics with much conviction. I didn’t know what the original version sounded like. But if Marlene’s performance was even close to it, Christa’s voice made it sound like it belonged on the soundtrack of an animated movie for kids.

  “You’re gonna have to work on giving this song some guts!” Marlene informed Christa. “This is a song about pride and bravado, as well as love. You’ve gotta sing it like you mean it! Is there anyone special back at home who you can think about? Someone you’d maybe... like to bring out to Hollywood with you, once you’re famous?”

  Christa blushed and denied there was any such person with whom she’d like to share her life tomorrow and forever. My cheeks vicariously turned red, too. I hoped that Marlene wouldn’t ask me if I had a boyfriend because of course I did not. The remote possibility that she might interrogate me about romance made me think of Elliott’s bright turquoise eyes looking down at me in the parking lot earlier that day.

  Christa nodded her head robotically at Marlene to acknowledge the feedback, but her fragile grin suggested that she wasn’t accustomed to hearing anything about her voice except praise.

  The late afternoon dragged on as all of the other contestants rose to their feet and took their turn standing next to the piano. I better understood Ian’s ire about Christa’s having been assigned the classic big band song when it was his turn to practice with Marlene. He bashfully informed us that he’d been assigned “It’s Raining Men,” and awkwardly proceeded to sing the song in his rich baritone voice. All of our assigned songs were so mismatched to our strengths as singers that I suspected the show’s producers had intentionally given us songs that would be humiliating and difficult to perform. It seemed unfair that most of us would have to take the stage facing such a burden on the season premiere, but then, there weren’t many weeks in the season. The producers were already trying to weed through us, and we hadn’t even started yet.

  Finally, when I was the last contestant in the room waiting for my turn, with only ten minutes left before my dad was scheduled to pick me up, I was called up to the piano. “Whadya got for us, Allison?” Marlene asked, motioning for me to hand her my piece of paper. She raised her eyebrows in surprise and then tilted her head at me, presumably trying to determine if I considered my assignment to be as absurd as she did. “This is a bit of a tall order for a young lady like yourself.”

  My assignment was the R&B classic “All for You,” originally recorded by legendary vocalist Reggie Bujol. I was pretty mortified, not just because the song’s lyrics were considerably adult in nature, but also because Reggie Bujol was almost seven feet tall and probably weighed over three hundred pounds. He had one of the deepest bass voices in the R&B industry, and somehow I was going to have to sing his song about an impressively large body being all for someone like I meant it.

  “I can do it,” I assured her, knowing that my only hope for performing this song without becoming the laughing stock of America was to aim for laughs. I intended to sing with exaggerated gusto, catch everyone off-guard and destroy them with giggles.

  Smiling expectantly, Marlene nodded at the pianist, and I took a deep breath as he produced the first few chords.

  “No way,” Ian said before I sang the first line.

  “These great big arms, baby, were made for holding you.” I pretended to flex my arm muscles, which, of course, were practically non-existent; I had barely been able to do five pull-ups during the Presidential Physical Fitness testing in gym class the previous week. As soon as everyone sitting around the piano recognized my song, there were eye rolls and cackling. “And here’s a big shoulder to cry on, if you ever need to,” I continued.

  Marlene couldn’t control herself. She cupped her hands over her mouth, trying to suppress laughter.

  “These long legs, baby, would cross the world for you. There ain’t nothing, baby, that I wouldn’t do. Because every part of me... is all for you.”

  Even Bobby, the pianist, was grinning. The other contestants were clapping along, providing me with a beat. “Sing it, baby!” Jarrett bellowed, egging me on.

  Finally, Marlene waved her arms in the air like a referee as a signal for me to stop. She stuck two fingers between her lips and blew out an ear-splitting whistle as if she were hailing a taxi cab. "Star material!" she hollered. Everyone in the room was clapping, including Christa, who frowned as she clapped.

  “Alright, alright... you said you could sing it, and you weren’t kidding. However, the show doesn’t usually take too kindly to humor. Our challenge this week is to find a way for you to sing it earnestly so that you start off on the right foot,” Marlene informed me with an encouraging smile.

  My spirits slowly sank as I absorbed the impact of her words, wondering if I’d heard her
correctly. How could I possibly sing that song without giving the audience an indication that I knew how ridiculous it was? My face flashed with heat just thinking about telling Oliver Teague that each of my body parts were for him. Then I blushed even more thinking about how Oliver Teague and Morgan Flossmoore and everyone else at Pacific Valley were probably going to watch me sing, live, on Center Stage!. Lee had convinced the principal of our school to let him host a viewing party for the first broadcast in the cafeteria. There would be hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions, of witnesses to my heartfelt performance of “All for You.”

  The shame.

  The sense of exhilaration that I felt from the few moments of my performance was replaced by a frigid, paralyzing sense of dread as I followed the other contestants out of the warehouse to the parking lot. I had no way of knowing it that afternoon, but I’d heard the contestants in Group 2 clap for me with genuine amusement for the first and last time. More than once, I heard someone mumble, “unanimous votes,” presumably in reference to me. To the best of my knowledge, Elliott and I were the only contestants to have received votes from all four coaches during the auditions. I fell in step a few feet behind Liandra, the girl from Louisiana, who was rubbing Christa’s back. “It's not a big deal,” she consoled Christa in a comforting tone, trying to quell her jealousy over Marlene’s surprise at my voice. “She's just the voice coach.” I shrank and hoped they wouldn’t turn to see me following them so closely, not wanting to be the target of anyone’s anger so early in the process.

  “It is a big deal,” Christa hissed. “Do you even know who Marlene is? She’s written at least ten top-forty hits. ‘That's It’ and ‘When it Rains,’ by Tawny. ‘You Must Have Known,’ by Kaydance. She knows everyone in the industry. Everyone.”

  I felt a little guilty for eavesdropping on someone who was obviously upset with me, but I was glad that I did. It would never have occurred to me that rough-around-the-edges Marlene was, in fact, a behind-the-scenes celebrity, not to mention a multi-millionaire. I hadn’t looked past her Harley Davidson t-shirt to notice that the leather shoulder bag she had carried on her way into the room was Céline. If I had stuck around in the parking lot long enough to watch her leave the studio, I would have observed her climbing into the driver's seat of a brand new royal blue BMW convertible.

  I lingered just outside the front doorway of the studio as everyone else filtered out. A few contestants, presumably from the other groups, dug into their pockets and purses for car keys. All of the out-of-towners boarded buses bound for a corporate hotel where they were being put up by En Fuego Productions. This was probably, I reasoned, why I’d been overlooked that morning before the dance class; almost everyone else had arrived together on a shuttle bus.

  Even though the school year had started, it was still technically summer, and the earliest hints of a classic Los Angeles summer sunset appeared in the sky as color-hued swirls. My dad, the cheeseball, referred to those fiery fuchsia sunsets as smogsets. My brand new fear of having to perform “All for You” on national television had cast a heavy shadow over my entire first day as part of the show. I felt foolish; I should have known even before I auditioned that my ascension to fame wasn’t going to be as easy as just breezing through a reality television show. I should have expected this potential for world-wide embarrassment.

  Motion across the parking lot caught my attention; someone was waving at me. With my eyes squinted, I saw that the someone was none other than Chase Atwood. He was grinning and holding his cell phone to his ear as he traversed the parking lot on his way toward an enormous black Hummer. Sunlight reflected off the shiny studs on his motorcycle boots. My body began to tingle a little with excitement when it hit me that his wave was a friendly one. Chase Atwood recognized me. An actual, world-famous rock star recognized me, Allison Burch.

  Then I noticed that Chase wasn’t alone; he was walking with another guy who strode at a slower pace a few feet away from him. A guy who was a little taller and slimmer than Chase.

  Elliott.

  Was Chase really giving Elliott Mercer a ride home? To Temecula, or wherever it was that Elliott Mercer lived, probably way more than an hour’s drive away? Even though it was early evening, it was still sweltering outside. For a fraction of a second, I wondered if perhaps what I saw was a mirage since heat rose off the pavement in waves. Or maybe the powerful tar smell wafting up from the blacktop was playing tricks on my eyes. But no, Elliott climbed into the passenger side of Chase’s Hummer. He made eye contact with me while wearing a solemn expression as the Hummer backed out of its parking space and rolled toward the guard station at the gate.

  I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake in choosing Nelly Fulsom as my coach.

  “How’d it go, tiger?”

  Dad was in an unusually chipper mood when he pulled up to the curb in his Volvo to drive me home, interrupting my elaborate reverie about Elliott Mercer’s house and personal life. He even anticipated my next move and reached over to switch the car radio from his annoying political talk channel to alternative rock without my asking as I climbed into the front passenger seat.

  “It was okay,” I said, trying to sound upbeat.

  He pulled around to the guard station near the gates. “Just okay? I would have expected you to say that it was wondrous! Magnificent! Thrilling! It looks like you got yourself a new hair style.”

  This was probably the first time in my entire life that my dad had made any observation about my hair or appearance.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. “I’m not too happy about it.”

  The guard nodded at Dad and opened the gate so that we could pass through.

  “Let’s see what your mom has to say about that.”

  Long hair was something I had in common with Mom; it was one of the few things we shared as mother and daughter. When I was in fourth grade and Taylor cut her hair in a cute ice skater style, I begged to be allowed to cut my hair like hers. Mom had not even entertained the idea. She continued to wear her hair long after passing an age at which most women cut their hair shorter. Every morning she bundled her long brown locks into a bun before driving to Levity. I hadn’t considered my mom’s feelings while the stylist had been hacking off my hair at the studio, but Dad was right. She was probably going to be a little hurt.

  “So what did you guys do all day?” my dad asked as he merged into traffic on the freeway. “Roll your lips and inhale steam?”

  I glared at him out of the corner of my eye, not having any idea how he'd come up with such a notion. “All kinds of stuff,” I answered.

  “I imagined it would be like A Chorus Line. All of you lined up on stage in dancing outfits, spinning around,” he said with a goofy smile. He sang (totally off-key) a line from a song about a singular sensation.

  “What’s A Chorus Line?” I asked, watching a Carl’s Jr. fast food restaurant whizz past us over the cement wall separating the freeway traffic from the everyday life of Studio City.

  “Forget it,” Dad said with a wave of his hairy hand.

  I was quiet for most of the ride home, wondering how I was ever going to make it past the first Expulsion Series. Everyone else’s assigned songs were preposterous, but mine was preposterous and deeply, personally embarrassing. There wasn’t a boy on earth who wanted all of me, or any of me, at least as far as I knew, although my performance was sure to spark the interest of perverted old guys.

  “You know,” Dad said as we rounded the corner of our street, “if you hate it, you don’t have to go back. There are other ways of becoming a singer, Allison. It’s a free country. You can always change your mind.”

  I picked at the purple fingernail polish on my nails. The mere suggestion from my dad that I could opt out of finishing the show reignited the fire in the pit of my stomach that had made me want to compete in the first place. The moment I heard him say those words, I knew that I still wanted, deep down, to win Center Stage! more than anything. Neither of my parents was especially competitive, so I didn�
�t know where I’d gotten my fierce desire to be the best. The idea of winning that record contract and going on tour with All or Nothing was too thrilling to abandon. I remembered how it had felt to stand on that big stage during my audition: the blinding lights on me, my voice pouring out from my heart and filling the entire auditorium, up to the last row in the top balcony. I loved that; I coveted that. I couldn’t imagine living my whole life without experiencing it again. Even though I was only sixteen, I already knew—like my mom—that I’d never be happy sitting at an office job as an adult.

  Everything I had dreamed about was within reach. My name on the lips of radio DJ’s, my image on kids’ walls, nominations for music awards. All I had to do was persevere and do whatever the show asked of me with a smile on my face. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? Curtis Wallace had managed to survive the previous year, and I expected that Elliott Mercer would survive until the very end, too. If they could do it, I could do it. There was no way that anyone wanted to win more than I did.

  “I’m going back, Dad.”

  I was telling my dad as much as I was making a promise to myself. I was going back to Studio City in the morning and figuring out a way to win that competition.

  Chapter 7

  Flirting

  Mom clucked her tongue at me the next morning as I got out of the car in the Center Stage! parking lot. “That hair,” she murmured.

  “It’ll grow back.”

  Unfortunately my hair did not grow back before I was prompted to pose for a portrait. It would appear on the cover of Expose Magazine the following week as part of a special feature on this season’s contestants. I smiled as hard as I could, wanting to make sure my dimples looked extra cute since I was wearing a boring gray sweater.

  I stumbled my way through Erick St. John’s two-hour ordeal on the fundamentals of hip hop dancing. He shook his head in disgust throughout my struggle to keep count and remember the dance moves in the correct order. I forbade myself from looking in the mirror at Robin’s reflection. She nailed every single routine and rubbed her hands all over her taut six-pack abs as if she were trying to seduce Erick St. John, who I had a strong hunch was probably not intrigued by girls like Robin (or girls, in general). The previous night I had given myself a stern talking-to in my head before falling asleep, and I could not waste a moment of energy on envy. I had to focus on what I could do well, and hip hop dancing was sadly not going to be one of those things.