Just in case Elliott actually showed up.
Mom made one of her typical well-intentioned, high-protein, vegan dinners (tofu with peanut satay sauce). Throughout our meal, Lee texted me furiously. He was insistent that he come over that night to help me practice for Friday’s broadcast, even though I patiently explained that he couldn’t. The producers of the show had started reminding us on a weekly basis that we’d all signed privacy disclosures. We technically weren’t supposed to tell anyone about what the next broadcast would feature, not even by innocently asking for help in preparing.
LEE 7:42 P.M.
Oh come on like who am I gonna tell?
Lee didn’t seem to understand the point; it didn’t matter that he was just a junior in high school with no connections to major media outlets. He was still a person, and I could have been thrown off the show if anyone found out I’d accidentally told him that I had to practice more than one song for Friday. The producers could have kicked me off if they found out that he’d helped me during the first week of the season.
I was sitting on my bed returning another one of his texts, assuring him we’d hang out on Saturday when my father appeared in my doorway.
“Your friend from the show is here to see you.”
“Oh,” I said, jumping to my feet and instantly checking my reflection in the mirror over my bureau. “Actually, Dad, would it be okay if he and I go out for ice cream?”
Dad put his hands on his hips. “It’s almost nine o’clock, Allison. You know that your mother doesn’t want you out after ten.”
“Dad, please,” I begged. “I never get to do anything with other people from the show and they do stuff together all the time.”
The muscles in his face loosened a little even though I was sure he was considering the same thought as me: that Mom was going to kill him. “Be home in an hour,” he warned me.
Outside, Elliott fidgeted on our stoop. It was a warm night. The sky above was clear and the stars shone brightly above the palm trees swaying across the street in the light breeze.
“Hey,” he said. “Is it cool if we…” he motioned to his car.
“Yeah, I just have to be home in an hour.” I may have been a reality television star on the rise, but I still had overprotective parents. Very unsophisticated.
I climbed into the passenger seat of his Fiesta and noticed as Elliott started the engine that both of my parents were watching us through our living room window. Elliott waved at them while he backed out of our driveway. As soon as we were driving down Rosewood Avenue, and my parents couldn’t see my face, I rolled my eyes at him. “God, they’re so annoying.”
“Hey, at least they care what you’re up to. It’s cute.”
The radio in his dashboard was set to a regular, old-fashioned FM station (both of my parents had satellite radio in their cars). Classic oldies were quietly playing, which kind of surprised me. Not even my dad listened to old-timer music like that. Usually, he listened to annoying public radio discussions about the horrible effects of fracking on the environment and reviews of the latest works of literary fiction from indie presses. Otherwise, Dad either listened to classic rock (the Beatles, Zeppelin, Hendrix) or Nineties jams from his college years (Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Jane’s Addiction, and Pavement).
“Who is this?” I dared to ask, revealing my ignorance of music from the Fifties and Sixties.
“Uh, the Lettermen, maybe,” Elliott informed me. “I like listening to music from that era. The songwriting was a lot more pure, you know?”
I nodded in agreement, peeved that his knowledge of rock history went back further than my own. I practically studied my dad’s old issues of Rolling Stone and Alternative Press magazines that he stored in the garage. There was an interview with Nirvana in the October 1993 issue of Spin that I had committed to memory, at least the quotes from Kurt Cobain. I knew everything there was to know about the personal histories of Madonna, Adele, Liz Phair, Tori Amos, P!nk, and Gwen Stefani… but just like that, Elliott one-upped me by namedropping a band that was practically ancient history.
“I thought we could go to Milk over on Beverly. Is that place any good?” Elliott asked, turning right onto Melrose.
Truthfully, I had no idea what Milk was like over on Beverly because my parents would never have taken me out for ice cream. Taylor and I were fond of sneaking off to Millions of Milkshakes but I hadn’t been there in over a year. If my mom were ever to find out that I had intentionally consumed so much dairy and refined sugar, she would have wept tears over my betrayal. “Yeah, sure, that’s fine,” I lied.
A minute or two passed in silence. It seemed like the ball was more or less in my court to start a conversation if I wanted to have one. “So… are you, like, staying at the hotel with the rest of the contestants now? Or driving up from Temecula every day?”
Elliott shot me a goofy, indecipherable grin as he drove. “Come on, Allison. I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew.”
“Knew what?”
We lingered at the light on Fairfax and Elliott’s smile became a combination of wickedness and embarrassment. “That I’m staying at Chase’s place. You mean, you really didn’t know?”
Blood rushed to my face, heating it. So he was actually living with Chase Atwood! Was that even allowed? Did the producers know? “Um, I thought maybe there was something going on since I saw him giving you a lift, but I haven’t heard anyone mention that you’re living with him.”
“Yeah, well, when I got onto the show, my mom wasn’t so thrilled. I mean she was happy for me, but it definitely complicated our lives.” He slowed down on Fuller Avenue looking for a place to park as we drew nearer to the ice cream shop.
“You mean, with like, school?” I asked. “My parents were not pleased that I had to take a leave of absence. They’d be even less pleased if they knew I was barely keeping up with my homework.”
“Yeah, well, school…” he eyeballed an open spot in between cars and paused to back into it. “And work. I help pay bills around the house.”
He raised the parking brake and shut off the Fiesta’s engine. “Couldn’t really be stocking shelves at the grocery store in Temecula and be taping a television show in Studio City at the same time, you know?”
“Elliott,” I geared up to ask the question that had been on my mind since the very first broadcast of the show. “Where’s your father?”
Elliott shrugged. “That’s a good question. Last I heard, Texas. But that was maybe, ten, eleven years ago.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, wishing I’d suppressed my curiosity.
“It’s okay. It’s not like I miss him or anything,” he said, and then sighed. “So, yeah. It really came down to gasoline. Even though getting by without my paycheck from the grocery store would have been hard, coming up with two extra tanks of gas a week on top of that would have been impossible. Once we did the math, I had to call Claire at the studio and say I was sorry, but that I just couldn’t be on the show,” he said.
“Oh my God. What did she say?” I asked, imagining Claire’s panic. “She couldn’t have been happy about that. I was there when you auditioned. I could practically see dollar signs in the eyes of the producers when they heard your voice.”
A strange sound escaped from Elliott, kind of like a half-hearted cough or an emphatic sigh. I’d never heard him laugh before, and it was adorable. “She said she’d talk to the producers. Then, when I got out of school that day, Chase was parked outside in his giant Hummer. He’d already worked everything out with my mom for me to stay with him in Malibu for the first couple weeks of the show.”
For a second I wondered if Taylor knew that a teenage boy was living with her father. Then I remembered that my brother had mentioned meeting up with her in Boston. She was back at her fancy boarding school. I didn’t know if that meant her summer on the road with Chase’s band had been fine and returning to boarding school in the fall had always been the plan, or if the father-daughter reunion hadn’t gone so wel
l. Perhaps it had been decided that it would be best for Taylor to return to her old routine. Whichever the case, I wasn’t on good enough terms with her to reach out and ask.
He opened his car door and I climbed out on my side, too. “So, what’s it like, living with him?” I asked, and before he could answer, I was overcome by a sudden uncontrollable impulse to confide in him. He’d shared a risky truth about his temporary residence with me, so I figured I’d share a risky truth about my relationship with Chase Atwood in return. “I used to be really good friends with his daughter. I’m not sure if he realizes that or not. It’s probably best if he doesn’t.”
“Oh, really?” Elliott asked with more interest in his eyes than I was expecting. “That’s pretty weird. Living with him is… you know. He’s not there that much. In the past four weeks, we’ve had dinner together maybe twice. Usually in the morning he makes me coffee and breakfast, which is kinda nice,” Elliott admitted. “Hey,” he said. He took me by the elbow when we reached the corner. My elbow tingled where his fingertips made contact with my skin, and we both stopped. “Before we go in this place, you should know that this was Chase’s idea.”
I froze. It felt like all of my vital organs stopped functioning in unison. What an idiot I’d been to think that Elliott had wanted to go out for ice cream with me. Of course he’d asked me out at Chase’s insistence, and now he didn’t want me to get the “wrong idea.” I didn’t want to walk the rest of the way to Milk. I wished I’d never left my house. This situation was worse than if Oliver Teague had asked to borrow my pen because he wanted to write a note to his girlfriend. “You don’t have to hang out with me because Chase thinks you should,” I said sharply, taking a step back toward the car, breaking free from his light grip on my elbow. We hadn’t driven all that far. If I needed to, I could have walked home.
“No, no, no,” Elliott apologized with a solemn expression. “Ice cream. At this place. In public.”
I tilted my head at an angle, frowning in confusion. If he was trying to explain himself, he was only making things worse.
Elliott took a deep breath, frustrated with himself. He closed his eyes as he began, “Chase suggested that you and I make ourselves highly visible in the public eye this week. He thought it would be good for us to create our own paparazzi moment, you know? Give our fans something to talk about.”
“Oh,” I said numbly. Of course this made sense, but I still wasn’t sure I wanted to get ice cream with Elliott at that point. I’d agreed to go out that night only because I thought Elliott had been asking me out on a date. A real date. As if maybe whenever he saw me, he got all freaked out and flustered the way I did whenever I saw him.
“Come on,” he urged, taking a few more steps toward Beverly Boulevard. I lingered where I was, still uncertain about what kind of paparazzi moment Chase Atwood thought we were capable of creating, and whether or not that was what I wanted. “It’s not like I ever would have had the nerve to ask you to hang out if he hadn’t made me.” Elliott was looking down at the sidewalk when he uttered the phrase that changed my mind.
I took a step forward. Then another. He’d admitted he wanted to ask me to hang out but was too shy. My heart ballooned with so much hope it seemed like it was trying to escape through my throat. I swallowed hard to keep it in my chest, where it belonged.
Heads turned as we walked through the arrangement of canopy-covered tables outside the ice cream shop. “Is that..?” I overheard a female voice say.
Elliott held the door open for me. Inside, all eyes were on us as we stepped into the long line. “What looks good to you? Chase recommended the blueberry swirl sandwich,” Elliott said. The ice cream shop specialized in making ice cream sandwiches with brightly colored macaroon cookies. Awareness that there were at least twenty pairs of eyes on me made it difficult to focus on the menu over the counter. Even the air in the store smelled sugary.
I felt a sharp tapping on my shoulder and turned to find a woman my mom’s age holding up her cell phone. Her two young children cowered behind her. Her daughter mashed her fingers together nervously.
“Excuse me. Would you mind taking a picture with my kids? They’re huge fans,” the woman asked us both.
Elliott shrugged at me as if to say why not and then put his arm around me. “Sure, that would be okay.”
The woman motioned for her two kids to pose with us, and with that photo we took with them, the floodgates burst open. Suddenly everyone in line and sitting at tables flocked toward us and surrounded us with their cell phones extended. Even one of the kids working behind the counter came around to take a picture of us to hang on the wall of the store.
“What are you going to do if you win?”
“What’s Danny Fuego like in person?”
“Are you and Christa best friends in real life?”
Elliott and I both deflected questions, some of which were cute and some of which made me realize I should pay closer attention to the rumors on the celebrity blogs about myself instead of just Google-stalking Elliott. Were headlines really claiming that Christa and I were friends? It seemed like revealing the bitterness between us to fans could only lead to trouble. Instead of answering truthfully, I grinned sweetly and said, “We’re very close, and it’s going to be awful for us when one of us has to leave the show.”
“Are you guys a couple?”
This question caused Elliott and me to look at each other with bewildered expressions. Thankfully we were saved from having to answer by the Milk employee who’d taken our picture. He returned from around the counter carrying a plastic bag of ice cream treats for us, which he handed to Elliott and said, “For you guys. On the house.”
We dashed back to Elliott’s car because photographers from the Hollywoodland website had arrived with real cameras—expensive DSLR’s with big flashbulbs on top. They chased us, calling our names as they followed us down Beverly Boulevard and around the corner onto quiet, residential Fuller Avenue. I felt like a criminal as I slammed the passenger side door of the Fiesta. Elliott tried to pull calmly out of his parking spot and act like it wasn’t a big deal that he’d gotten a parking ticket. That was my fault. As a lifelong resident of West Hollywood, I should have warned him that non-residents who didn’t have stickers fixed in the lower corners of their windshields got tickets on residential streets without meters.
“That was insane,” I gasped as we turned left onto Beverly Boulevard. “And you’re going the wrong way.”
“I know, I know,” Elliott said, “I’ll turn around on one of these streets up here.”
We drove in awkward silence back to my house, and as we slowed down, Elliott said, “Sorry you didn’t even get to eat your ice cream.” He reached into the back seat and handed me the entire plastic bag.
“Oh, I don’t want all of this!” I exclaimed, and withdrew just one ice cream sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. “Actually,” I reconsidered, “I’ll take two. One for my dad. But the rest, you can keep.”
“Hey, Allison,” Elliott said just as I was about to close the passenger side door of the Fiesta. “So, I guess people are probably going to think we’re together now.”
“They can think whatever they want,” I said curtly.
“Is there anyone who might be… I mean, do you have a boyfriend who’s going to get angry about that?” Elliott asked.
“Uh, no,” I admitted, kind of wishing that I wasn’t single so that he’d have a reason to be jealous.
“Alright. Good,” he replied with a shy smile. My heart blazed.
The next morning, several celebrity blogs featured photos taken of us at Milk under the headline, Are They, or Aren’t They? The number of comments underneath the posts speculating about our romantic entanglement surprised me. It seemed ridiculous that there were so many people in the world who cared enough about whether or not we were coupled up to comment. A little more than a month earlier, Kaela and I had held a pity party for ourselves at her house on the night of the Back to School dance because n
o one had asked us to go. Now, seemingly everyone in America had an opinion to share on whether or not I could do better than Elliott, or he could do better than me (there were a lot of those, which was my introduction to how very vicious girls my age could be online). There was an overwhelming sentiment online that we were simply perfect together.
What I had been least expecting in terms of a reaction about our ice cream outing together were the two text messages I received on the way to the studio the next morning.
LEE 7:21 A.M.
Um is that guy your bfriend or something
NICOLE 7:15 A.M.
Srsly I thought you were going to introduce me to him!
I sighed. Even something as simple as a trip to get ice cream with someone who was practically a stranger could produce layers of consequences now that I could be classified as a celebrity.
Chapter 11
Perfect Harmony
“Our next performer is a girl who you voted to the number one spot on Team Two for the first consecutive two weeks of this season. Tonight, she challenges Robin Karpov to reclaim that spot after a week spent in second place. Please give a warm welcome to our hometown girl, Allison Burch!”
What followed Danny Fuego’s voice on Friday night were not the introductory chords for any of the three songs that I’d been practicing throughout the fourth week of the show. An expression of distress crossed my face as I strode across the stage, which I’d watch again and again online later that night after getting home from the studio. By the time I hit my mark on the stage, I’d figured out that the song the band was playing was “You Don’t Know Me at All.” It was a pop ballad by Tawny that had been a big hit over the summer, the very same song that the girl who had auditioned before me had sung back in September. Good old contestant #66, who’d been lambasted by the coaches.
Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) Page 18
