Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  I’d fallen asleep on the sofa while we were watching re-runs of The Simpsons. I had no idea what time it was, but Elliott was shaking me awake. An awful noise coming from the hallway put me into a panic.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, my mouth moving more slowly than my thoughts.

  “The fire alarm’s going off. We should go outside.”

  I stood up uneasily, not fully awake yet, and walked over to the sliding door on the balcony. Sure enough, other hotel guests were filtering out into the parking lot through the lobby doors on the ground floor. Surprisingly and kind of infuriatingly, there were a few paparazzi parked in the lot. Photographer snapped photos of Center Stage! contestants as they stumbled out of the hotel, most of them wearing robes over their pajamas.

  We stepped out of Elliott’s room and into the hallway at exactly the same moment as one of the contestants from Group 4, who raised an eyebrow knowingly at us. I was about to say, “It’s not what it looks like, we were just watching TV,” but Elliott was already pushing me toward the stairwell. The alarm was ear-splitting, and it didn’t even occur to me that I didn’t smell smoke until we were in the stairwell mechanically following everyone else down the steps.

  “Where’s the fire?” someone behind us on the stairs asked.

  “I think it’s on the fourth floor,” someone in front of us answered over their shoulder.

  “It was on seven,” a third voice chimed in.

  Elliott and I had just been on seven. It hadn’t seemed like anything was on fire when we’d stepped into the hallway with its glamorous walls covered in black lacquered paint. The general state of confusion was just like a typical school fire drill. No one seemed to know what was going on, and rumors were running rampant even though it was hard to tell where they were originating.

  In the lobby, tired-looking hotel staff members with bags under their eyes congregated near the front doors as firemen in yellow plastic suits directed us to exit into the lot. Elliott threw his arm around my shoulders and held me close as we stepped out of the hotel and into the chaotic scene. Ian was raising hell and demanding for us to be allowed to go back to sleep. Paparazzi camera crews ran about, trying to capture unflattering photos of contestants and conduct impromptu interviews about the surprise middle-of-the-night fire.

  A video camera crew was interviewing Robin, who stood in a tiny satin nightie without a hint of shame in the center of the parking lot. The moment her interviewer saw me and Elliott, he motioned for his camera guy to follow him, rudely cutting Robin off mid-sentence.

  “Elliott! Allison! Did we just see you two together up there on the same balcony?”

  “Beat it,” Elliott told the interviewer, who was a hipster in his twenties wearing fake black glasses frames.

  “What happened up there?” the interviewer asked me, sticking his microphone directly in my face.

  I wondered if we were all going to be in serious trouble the next morning with Tommy, Susan, and the other senior producers for being caught on camera at the hotel when we’d been placed there specifically to avoid media exposure. “We were just sleeping and we heard an alarm,” I said, not realizing until after the words left my mouth that I’d just given the interviewer the hottest scoop in town.

  I’d made it sound like Elliott and I were sharing a room.

  “Oh, really?” the interviewer asked in an incriminating tone.

  “I mean, we were watching television and fell asleep,” I backtracked, my voice shaking.

  “Riiight,” the interviewer grinned knowingly. “So you two are a couple?”

  Elliott dropped his arm from around my shoulders and stuck his hands back in their usual place: the pockets of his jeans. “Seriously, man,” he warned the interviewer. “It’s none of your business.”

  “None of my business? I’d say it’s the whole country’s business. Haven’t you been reading the fan blogs about the show this season? You two are all anyone’s talking about.”

  Thankfully, a fireman with a bullhorn called the parking lot to attention before the interviewer from the Hollywoodland website captured more of our frustration on camera. “Alright, everyone. The excitement for the night is over. It looks like this was a false alarm. Apologies for the disturbance,” he said.

  There was a swell of grumbling and complaining as the crowd began pushing its way back into the hotel lobby. It was chilly outside. I was alert with fear that Elliott and I had just been framed in a scenario that could land us in very hot water.

  “Do you think they’re going to put that interview on their website?” I asked him worriedly as we climbed the stairs back up to our respective floors to avoid the lengthy wait for an elevator.

  “I sure hope so,” he replied.

  I stopped dead in my tracks. “Elliott, seriously? If my parents see that… anyone who sees that is going to think that we’re like—”

  “A couple?” he interjected. “What’s so wrong with people thinking that?”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that. But six weeks earlier, I’d never even kissed a boy, and now every television owner in the United States of America was going to think that I was sneaking around with Elliott at a luxury hotel. I was still only sixteen. It was a surefire bet that the awkward topic of sex was going to be raised during each and every interview I gave for the rest of the season.

  “Look,” Elliott said, growing frustrated but avoiding my eyes by looking at his feet. “All night you were freaking out about Friday’s show because you think Nelly’s plotting to get you kicked off. You still don’t see what’s going on here. She can’t kick you off if you’re getting ratings. They won’t let it happen.”

  I was trembling. I didn’t know what he was trying to imply… that he’d only been pretending to like me to create an illusion for the cameras that we were romantically linked? As if that was a way to secure both of our positions on the show? He didn’t need any extra security—he’d earned more votes in his group than any other contestant since the first week of the show. We both fumed in silence as a contestant from Group 3 trudged up the stairs past us in his pajamas and slippers.

  “Hey,” the contestant grunted in greeting. Neither of us replied. I waited until we heard him pass through the door on the fourth floor above us before I spoke.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Rules were rules. I didn’t realize until we were arguing in that stairwell just how badly I still wanted to win. My feelings about Elliott complicated everything, but I yearned for fame. I wanted my picture on the cover of Expose Magazine. I wanted to tour with All or Nothing. I was in grave danger of losing my shot at those things on Friday night.

  “This whole thing is a mind game,” Elliott said simply with a shrug, his words laced with bitterness. “I mean, come on Allison. Do you think it’s any coincidence that I auditioned after you?”

  I was dumbstruck. Of course it was a coincidence. We were all assigned numbers at the audition on that Wednesday in September at the Dolby Theater, and herded into the waiting area… weren’t we?

  “Don’t you think they queued us up with a strategy based on our audition tapes? They taped us one after the other because they knew as soon as they listened to our submissions that we were the cream of the crop. They even made special accommodations so that we could both compete even though we lied about our ages. They were setting us up since before either of us even got our invitations to audition in Hollywood. We are the season finale. You and me.”

  Before I could even reply, he impulsively pulled me close, and greedily kissed me on the mouth. His tongue found mine and for a moment the stairwell was perfectly quiet as we both stopped being shy and gave into how much we liked each other. There were no parents watching through a living room window, no fans snapping pictures with their mobile phones. It was a real, passionate, grown-up kiss. I was stupefied and couldn’t even find words once he stepped back, caught his breath, and waggled his finger to indicate the spac
e between our bodies. “This is the only thing on the show that’s real. The rest of it all is make-believe.”

  He turned and hopped up two steps, and then hesitated to say, “All these weeks I’ve been kind of wondering how we could get through this together, but Chase was right. Eventually it’s going to come down to one of us, and if you can’t even see that I’m trying to help you do whatever it takes to stay on the show, then I guess that time is now.”

  His footsteps echoed as he dashed up the remaining three flights to the seventh floor in his Jack Purcells. I leaned against the cool cinderblock wall of the stairwell trying to figure out what had just happened. I could still taste him on my lips, and I was dizzy from the force with which he had kissed me. So. Elliott wanted to keep me around on the show badly enough to create a scandal that was certain to make my parents and kids at my school flip out, or so he said. And then something clicked in my head and everything made sense.

  Elliott had pulled the fire alarm while I’d slept.

  Chapter 13

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  “Maybe he’s just… you know. Peeta Mellark-ing you.”

  Lee’s candid hypothesis almost made me choke on a sweet potato fry as we both ate veggie burgers in my hotel suite Wednesday night

  “Lee,” I said after recovering, “You know an awful lot about The Hunger Games for a dude.”

  “I saw the movie,” Lee claimed in self-defense. “You know how I am about film adaptations. It’s grossed over four hundred million dollars. Look, everyone loves a love story, Allison.”

  Lee had a point. Maybe Elliott didn’t even like me. But he must have known that having a romance with another contestant—especially one that the audience supported—would better his odds if his grip on first place were ever in jeopardy. Fans sure did love a romance, and in the twenty-four hours, bloggers had not wasted any time in posting pictures of me and Elliott standing on his hotel room balcony during the fake fire emergency. There were two voicemails that I was ignoring from my mother on my cell phone. I already had an unpleasant suspicion about why she’d left them.

  The way Elliott had kissed me in the stairwell sure hadn’t felt like an act. There was no point denying it: he was probably going to win Center Stage! with or without the world believing that we were in love. I liked to believe that if I could just manage to follow Marlene’s instructions and survive the next Expulsion Series, I’d pose a real threat to him… but I wasn’t sure. He had a lot of girls texting in votes for him, and it was pretty hard to dissuade fan-girls once they’d set their hearts on a cute boy.

  So if he didn’t need the benefit of the storybook romance to win the show, then why had he bothered pursuing me? Elliott didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d waste his time on anything he didn’t truly care about.

  “I don’t know,” I murmured. “I know he wants to win, but I don’t think he needs me to do that.”

  “Well,” Lee said, using a more cautious tone, “Maybe, more specifically, he needs for you not to win.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lee lifted the bun off his burger and peeled away the slimy pickle, which he banished to one side of his paper plate. “Maybe he wants you to fall in love with him so that you let him win.”

  I squinted my eyes at Lee. “You mean, you think he’d want me intentionally to lose?”

  “Think about it. Who, other than him, has a shot at winning? Maybe that chick Robin with the skimpy outfits, but more girls than guys watch the show, and they’ll be more likely to vote for Elliott. Besides, you’re the contestant who girls our age can relate to. I mean, have you even looked at the show’s demographics? Seventy percent of the viewing audience is under the age of twenty-one.”

  I folded my arms over my chest, wondering how Lee Yoon had ever gotten to be so smart. “Would any guy our age go to all that trouble just to win a contest?” I wondered out loud.

  Lee stated, “It’s not like it’s, you know, awful for him to hold hands and kiss a cute girl. He might even think he can be with you and use you to win. Like having his veggie burger and eating it, too.” He chomped into his burger for emphasis.

  We worked on my strategy for overthrowing Christa until it was almost Lee’s curfew. The previous afternoon, when Nelly had joined me and Christa for twenty minutes to supervise our progress on the duet, she had suggested that we add a little Country flavor to our performance. She'd said it would be cute to put a new spin on the song. I had pretended to be bummed out by that direction, but secretly, I applauded myself. For once, I had anticipated Nelly’s next move, and with Lee’s help, I’d be pitching her a curveball that she’d never, ever in a million years expect.

  I tossed and turned that night, thinking about Elliott. He’d avoided the bus and ignored me all day. What did I really know about him, anyway? That he came from a broken home, that he and his mom were financially struggling, that he didn’t enjoy high school and probably hadn’t given college much consideration. If someone could deserve to win simply by not having many other shots at happiness in life, then Elliott deserved to win the grand prize on Center Stage!.

  However, the criteria for winning didn’t have anything to do with personal hardship or even desire. The criteria were talent and votes from the at-home audience. Already, and a little shamefully, I could see Lee’s point. One pleading look from those intense turquoise eyes, and I might just have considered throwing the contest for Elliott. Something hardened inside of me. It was that burning hot coal in the pit of my stomach that I’d first felt the night before my audition in Hollywood. I wanted to win.

  Without even entertaining the idea of talking things over with Elliott, I decided that if winning were truly important to me, I couldn’t continue to have any contact with him. I was reminded of advice my mom had given me back in first grade when my crush at the time, Ryan McMahon, had given a Valentine to another girl. She’d said, “There are more fish in the sea.” I was simply going to have to find myself another fish one day. It was as easy as that.

  But as I drifted off to sleep, my determination faded. Sure, there were more fish in the sea. But did any of them have turquoise eyes, messy heads of hair, and voices that made every molecule in my body fizz like a shaken can of soda?

  On Friday evening, I sat in the Group 2 holding room on the couch listening to a meditation mix of jungle noises that Mom had downloaded for me and reading a book about werewolves. Or perhaps closer to the truth, I was trying to make it look like I was doing both of those things. In actuality I was sweating, watching the other contestants in my group prepare for their performances, and silently cursing the infernal, stupid costume I’d been forced to wear. Robin, not surprisingly, was using the Halloween costume element of the show to her advantage. She and Ian were both dressed as angels. In Robin's version of heaven, angels wore white sequined bikinis and platform high heels.

  I was more nervous than I’d ever been before taking the stage. Christa gave me a dirty look as she huffed steam at one of the dressing tables. I’d been sipping hot green tea and visiting the bathroom ever since we’d arrived at the theater, terrified about the plot that Lee and I had hatched. Even though it was almost time to step into the spotlight with Christa, I still wasn’t positive I’d have the nerve to go through with my big plan. I also wasn't sure that my voice would behave and hit the kind of insane note I was going to reach for when the moment arrived.

  Adding to my anxiety was the rather strategic Secret Suite interview I’d taped the day before. It hadn’t been posted to the show’s website yet, which made me suspect strongly that the producers were going to edit it into the broadcast.

  “Allison and Christa?”

  Evil Rob arrived to fetch us after the show’s second commercial break. I let Christa take the lead as we followed him down the hallway. She fastened her cowgirl hat, which hung on a cord around her neck, and the silver spurs on her boots clanged as she walked. My knees felt wobbly, my fingers were icy, and I barely felt Marlene’s pat on my shoulder
as I passed her on my way backstage. The commercial break drew to a close and the cheesy Center Stage! intro music blasted throughout the theater on overhead speakers. As Danny Fuego announced the next duet, I shuddered. It would be “Texas Highways,” performed by Elliott Mercer and Jermaine Frasier. When Elliott stepped into the spotlight from the other side of the stage, he was carrying an acoustic guitar.

  So far, no other contestants had insisted on playing their own musical instruments during the competition, but there he was, nodding over his shoulder at the house band as the applause died down. The lights lowered with one spotlight shining on him and Jermaine. He’d plugged his guitar into a massive amplifier, and he strummed the simple chords of the beloved song’s introduction. No wonder Elliott had been pleased about the song he and Jermaine had been assigned; it served as an opportunity for him to showcase his talent. The audience erupted into wolf whistles and wild applause.

  Elliott and Jermaine were both dressed like zombie hillbillies. Jermaine began the song, and when Elliott chimed in, providing harmony with his gravelly voice, a hush fell over the audience. Even in the darkness, I could see Chase Atwood sitting at the coaches’ table, clapping along and beaming like a proud father. My heart twisted into a knot at the thought of intentionally avoiding Elliott for the next few weeks. A uncomfortable reaction of desire and intimidation overtook me as I watched him. He looked out over the audience and I yearned to see a flash of his eyes.