America's Next Star

by Katie Dozier

  I thought I’d flushed down all my hope, but as I clutched Mom’s necklace, which in the white light from my laptop actually looked kind of dainty, even around my neck—I pretended, just for a moment, that my dreams were coming true.

  I was on the stage of the totally enormous new Solar Stadium, and the fireworks shooting up to impossible heights were going off for me. I had made it to the finals! Huck was holding a neon sign, with “Go, Ella!” written in glitter. I’d just done an acoustic version of Let It Be and I was going to the finals! I had a fifty percent chance of a ten million dollar recording contract!

  Mom ran on stage to hug me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ♪ Summertime Sadness ♪

  * * *

  I still didn’t want to face everyone at school, but it seemed better to just leave before Dad woke up then to have him harass me to go day after day.

  Back at school, I felt like Ella the elephant in the room. When I approached my locker, all the ones open around me snapped closed like off-key cymbals. Eyes darted in all directions but on me, as if I was one of those witches that could turn someone to stone just through eye contact.

  Whenever my earbuds fell out, I was surrounded by murmurs of gossip masquerading as sympathy. “That poor girl,” rang out in my head like a song played on repeat in hell. Everyone talked about me, but never to me—as though I was that one that had ceased to exist.

  Right next to me, the homecoming queen tried to close her locker, not realizing her copy of The Scarlet Letter was in the way. The book fell on my feet, and by the time I picked it up for her, she was nowhere to be seen—just like the night she was supposed to be little red riding hood.

  Right before sixth period, Huck came up to me and forced a smile.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” he said, but a lot more quietly than with his normally boisterous volume.

  “Are you?”

  “Of course I am,” he practically whispered.

  The students scuttling by acted like bystanders pretending not to look at a car wreck. They turned their heads to better hear my rising volume.

  “Then why are you speaking so softly?”

  “I’m not,” Huck said, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. “I’m not,” he said more loudly. “Did you make up your mind yet about prom?”

  “I made up my mind weeks ago. I’m not going! How many times do I have to say it?”

  As I swung my locker door closed, I realized that the only thing capable of making comfortable eye contact with me was the America’s Next Star poster of Zelina hanging inside. Huck was drooping beside me.

  “I’m sorry, Huck. I just…”

  “It’s okay,” he said, as tears I hadn’t seen coming overwhelmed me. When the bell rang for sixth period, I was still crying on his shoulder.

  I spent all my classes scribbling depressing song lyrics and doodling stars in my notebook—banking on the fact that the teachers wouldn’t dare failing the half-orphan that used to be a pretty good student.

  A few days later, I was lying on my bed with a huge bag of pretzel sticks and a jar of peanut butter after school. At first I dipped in a single pretzel stick at a time, adding a little drop of peanut butter so that each one ended up looking like a salty Q-Tip.

  I told myself I would just have a small snack, that I wouldn’t overdo it and then make myself throw up again. Because that day seemed like an especially sad one to make myself throw up. Three minutes later, I was shoving a handful of pretzels into the peanut butter at a time, and they emerged from the jar like a whole pack of lit cigarettes.

  Graduation was in a couple weeks, not that I was going, especially since Dad and I weren’t speaking. We’d managed to find a way to both technically live in the same house without seeing each other. I knew that he didn’t come home some nights, and I really didn’t care.

  My earbuds fell out of my ears and I heard the rumbling of Dad’s old truck rolling up our gravel driveway. I vowed to stay in my room for the rest of the night. Not that he wanted to see me anyway. He probably just ran out of bars to go to.

  Am hour or so later, a thick white envelope started to slide under the door. Then it stopped and reversed, and there was a knock. I threw a hoodie over the graveyard of junk food surrounding me in bed. I grabbed a bottle of Febreze, sprayed, and tried to believe a room like mine could actually smell like “fresh linen.”

  “Come in,” I said, with the cold formality of the butler from Downton Abbey.

  I saw my space through Dad’s eyes as he surveyed my room. A picture of Mom and me at Chicago on my dresser had been turned on its face— the back of the stand punctured the air like a spike . Lana Del Rey was crowing another sad tale from my laptop. The clacking ceiling fan swirled around the jarring scent of my room, forcing him to stifle a cough.

  “Uh, hi. These came for you today.” He placed the envelope by me on the bed, which had a huge FSU emblem.

  My trash can was overflowing with microwaved macaroni and cheese cups, but his eyes fell on my desk. An art deco rolltop desk, I’d fallen in love with it one of the weekends that I went with my parents to another junk auction down on Broadway Street.

  We’d walked around the desk before the auction, and I ran my fingers through the lacquered dowels that reminded me of ribs. Dad said we could go up to a hundred dollars, but when the final bid soared over double our limit, he looked into my widened grey eyes and his paddle was the last in the air.

  Worlds away from that memory, now my desk didn’t look like a valuable antique, but as if it were dying. The contents of an entire two-liter bottle of Diet Coke had stained it a mottled black. Then, his eyes rested on the most embarrassing part of my room, where I had scrawled “Kill Me” in orange nail polish. I didn’t even remember painting it.

  “I told you I’m not going,” I said, staring at the FSU seal.

  He put his hands in the air as if I had a gun.

  “I know you said that. It’s just that no one has told them you’re not going, so it makes sense they’d send you stuff. And besides, it’s your birthday.” He studied my face. “You forgot?”

  I hadn’t forgotten that it was my birthday, I just knew it didn’t matter. I only knew it was my birthday because it was the same date as prom, but I forced my finger to make a crazy loop by my head. Maybe this would mean that we would get to order pizza again and I wouldn’t get screamed at?

  “Well, I know the final of that show you like is tonight. I thought maybe we could watch it, and you could invite Huck?”

  “Maybe he can drop by later.” Because he forgot it was my birthday, and would soon be getting into a limo in the same tux he wore to Mom’s funeral and having the time of his life. You know, all that stuff that being a senior in high school is supposed to be about.

  I made contact with Dad’s hand for the first time since it had slapped my face, and let him help me out of bed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ♪ Someone Like You ♪

  * * *

  T he first thing I noticed outside of my room was the smell. No beer stench. No stale breadstick odor. Instead of trash, the scent of oregano and garlic filled the kitchen. The herbaceous aroma was so intense that it likely would have crept under the door to my room if the stink of old laundry wouldn’t have drowned any pleasant fragrance.

  And then I noticed that Mom’s pink sweater—it was gone from the chair it had inhabited for weeks. The beer bottles—gone. The dead purple orchid — gone.

  On the kitchen table sat a little round cake with piped pink roses, candied violets, and eighteen white candles. Helium-less balloons were jumbled across the table in red, yellow, blue, and orange. From the plastic light above the kitchen table, there was a “Happy Birthday” banner.

  “I’ve just gotta boil the pasta,” he said, as if we did this all the time, as if we’d celebrated every day of our survival since Mom’s death. As if I’d ever seen him cook before, or seen him sober at all since she died.

  “But the violets? H
ow’d you make ‘em?” I picked a single candied flower off the side of the cake and let the sugar dissolve on my tongue.

  “Turns out there’s more in the freezer than just the pasta.”

  I came up behind him as he unwrapped Mom’s pasta, like it was hand-woven lace, and eased it into the boiled water. Without thinking, I hugged him.

  His eyes on the pasta, he said, “Don’t go thinking it’s all perfect though…No way am I making the meatballs.”

  Even though I was stuffed from the pretzels, and the jar of peanut butter, Mom’s spaghetti was the best thing I’d eaten since she died—even if the noodles were a little mushy. And even if I knew that she would have thrown out the whole batch and started again.

  Dad brought a box of matches over to the cake. As he struck the first match, our eyes locked for a moment as we both knew we were thinking of the very cake Mom would have made for this occasion. She made it on birthdays, for times to celebrate, or just because she felt like baking: a hummingbird cake.

  Eating it was so full of contrasts. The crunch of the hazelnuts, the whipped vanilla frosting—cake as light as the air under the wings of a hummingbird. Dad would always joke that he was going to eat it with rocky road ice cream, and she would mock horror at the thought of him ruining the delicate perfection of her cake by drowning it in chocolate ice cream. And I would remind her that Dad was kidding, and that the cake was perfect by itself.

  This cake was resting on top of its box from Publix, but he’d put her candied violets on it, and in some way—some new real way—it was perfect too.

  “Wait, am I supposed to do this in the other room and walk in to surprise you? Your m—”

  “I was surprised enough as it is, Dad.”

  “Well help me sing you ‘Happy Birthday,’ at least if you want it to vaguely resemble a song.”

  And then, with tears in our eyes, it was time for me to make a wish. My eighteenth birthday wish. I knew what I would have wished for a month ago, and though I didn’t exactly know the rules of wishing on cakes, I did know the rules of wishing on a magic lamp—at least according to Aladdin . So I figured the rules excluded bringing people back from the dead.

  I knew what to wish for. I wanted to have one moment, even just one moment of joy before my next birthday. Like intense joy—winning America’s Next Star level of happiness . A moment that where I didn’t miss Mom so much that it ached, but also didn’t pretend she was still there. Maybe it was super selfish, but all I wanted was one time where I was consumed with happiness instead of grief—where I felt like Mom’s candied violets weren’t wasted on me.

  Of course I had no idea whatsoever on how to accomplish this, but I made the wish anyway, even though I knew it was the more-adult version of when I was five and wished for a pink pony, which has somehow yet to materialize.

  I blew out the candles with one current of air and ate all the candied violets first—even the chipped ones with candle wax on them. I let them melt on my tongue, petal by petal.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Dad said.

  He ran up to his room, and came back with two presents. One was wrapped in crinkled newspaper without any ribbon.

  My eyes were drawn to the other. It was a large square box, with garnet paper striped with gold that read “Go Noles!” The wrapping paper was precisely folded at the sides without a hint of any visible tape, and topped with a gold bow that sprinkled glitter as I ran my hand over it. Only one person in my family could have wrapped that, and that person wasn’t in this room.

  “You know your mom… She was always buying presents way ahead.” He forced a smile, snapping my gaze back to his present. “Well this is mine. I know you like music, so I thought, well just open it!”

  I tore into the package. “ Beats by Dr. Dre, the studio ones !”

  “Well, yeah I know you like music, and those earbuds are always falling out of your ears, and you always lose—”

  Second hug of the day, and likely a lifetime record for Dad and me.

  He pulled something shiny from his pocket.

  “I thought you might want this too,” he said.

  I traced my fingers along the cool metal back of Mom’s old school iPod. How had I not thought of trying to find it before?

  “Thanks.”

  And then, I held her garnet and gold present in my hands like I was lifting a newborn.

  “Well, you can’t blame her. Last she knew you were almost as excited about going to FSU as she was that you were going to her old school.”

  As I ran my hands along the corners of the box, my hand caught the corner of a sticky note with Mom’s handwriting on it. I flung it in my lap, thinking I could save her note, reading her words for later, for my last present before bed.

  “You okay? It’s just a present, it can’t hurt you.” Dad forced a staccato chuckle that came out in the ill-fitting pitch of B.

  I peeled back the paper, retracing the steps she’d gone through to wrap my present, as if I would find her hands on mine in the unwrapping of it.

  Instead, I found an FSU sweatshirt in a size I could no longer fit into, an FSU travel coffee mug, all inside of an FSU duffle bag.

  Dad dared to fill the silence before I could find any words. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she would’ve been so disappointed in me, and how I’d become so completely aimless since her death.

  “Well, it was a nice thought at the time.” He took her presents from in front of me, placed them back in the box like cupcakes and set them on her empty chair which he slid under the table.

  Chapter seventeen

  ♪ Riptide ♪

  * * *

  H uck didn’t end up showing up to watch the finale of America’s Next Star with me and Dad—not that I really blamed him with how I’d been acting lately. Just because his best friend was busy getting birthday presents from dead people didn’t mean he should have to live in the past along with me instead of dropping by after Prom.

  As I fast-forwarded through a commercial, Dad turned to me.

  “So I know that this is the most popular show ever, but why do you like it so much? I mean, I get that it is entertaining, and but why is it an epidemic?”

  “Sounds like you’re writing another article,” I said.

  “Is there’s one I should write? Come on, it’s your favorite show. Can’t a dad ask his daughter about her favorite show?”

  I paused for a second, realizing I’d never really stopped to think about why it was the only thing I liked before mom died, and perhaps even more after she was gone.

  “I guess it’s because anyone can win if they are a good enough singer and try hard enough at all the stardusts,” I said. “Anyone with a good voice can win and change their life if they really want to.”

  “Stardusts?”

  “They’re just the talent, or skill, that the Comets learn every week during the Supernova Schooling. It changes every week.”

  He pointed to the screen where a flurry of neon pyrotechnics was pulsing off and on.

  “The special effects don’t hurt the entertainment value either,” he said.

  “Everyone says that this season will have nothing on the next one. They literally built a whole city called the Universe. The new Solar Stadium is surrounded by a lake.”

  “It does put the budgets of the shows I watched growing up to shame. I guess I just don’t understand how this crazy ‘talent’ has anything to do with who’s the best singer.”

  “Well the talent’s only part of it. And it proves who’s willing to work the hardest, since they train on the talent every week with a pro. I think it shows who wants it the most.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous?” Dad asked.

  “Sometimes, but apparently so is performing in a high school musical.”

  We laughed, then silenced ourselves for Veronica’s last performance of the season. The special effects always grew bigger with each episode , and I braced myself for what was sure to be a showstopper.

  “And for the
final performance of season nine of America’s Next Star , here is Veronica Stylo singing Vance Joy’s ‘Riptide ,’” said Sam.

  A blue haze of light washed over the most spectacular set in Solar Stadium that I’d ever seen—even on my favorite show. Dad let out a gasp, and I couldn’t blame him, it was almost too insane to believe.

  A craggy mountain of rocks soared hundreds feet into the air, culminating in a rocky platform high above the edge of a pool.

  “What the hell?” said Dad, before I shushed him.

  The frothy waves were crashing onto the rocks in time with the music, as Veronica, in a sheer blue dress with an enormous train, climbed as she sang a slowed-down version of “Riptide” in a higher key. A smattering of flowers lining the rocks swayed with the music.

  When she reached the top of the cliff, her blue train still reached all the way to the bottom of the mountain. Then a huge burst of wind caused it to be lifted out and spiral high above her as she sang.

  Her toes dangled on the edge of the cliff over the fake ocean below her. She swan dove into the fabricated ocean below her, with her long train spiraling down behind her.

  The audience screamed. How could a fake ocean be deep enough to support a dive from hundreds of feet up? Was it supposed to happen? Was this suicide?

  Even Dad leaned in toward the screen, and only reclined when Veronica resurfaced. She swam to the edge of the faux ocean, and belted out the rest of her song as the waves crashed against her.

  The lights became bright in the stadium, and without the background music, the waves from the ocean even sounded real.

  Sam appeared on stage as if from nowhere, powered by some technology so crazy that it was basically magic to me.

  “What a way to finish our performances for the ninth season of America’s Next Star ! Well done, Veronica!” he said.