America's Next Star

by Katie Dozier

  Great. Now I was losing to a cell phone.

  He began typing, and then I felt my phone vibrate in my purse on the counter.

  You look pretty

  Unlike Tiff’s fake blush earlier, mine was real—but I didn’t even try to hide it.

  The bartender plopped down two big plastic jugs with olives floating around in them, like buoys bobbing in the ocean.

  I texted him this time.

  What are these drinks

  Buzz.

  Martinis barely stirred and not shaken at all

  Alright, Mr. Bond, this was just getting over the top crazy.

  He paid, tapped his glass to mine, as he took a sip with one hand and texted with the other.

  Did you get in the program

  My smile disappeared faster than it had formed. I shook my head. He put his arm around me, drawing me under his cape. He pointed to the bartender, and held out two fingers.

  Under the cape, he said in my ear, “I’m sorry, but at least it’s all the more reason to drink tonight, my angel of music.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ♪ Whiskey River ♪

  * * *

  A fter three, or maybe five more martinis each, we’d gotten sick of texting, and David led me out of the bar. I didn’t even think of trying to say goodbye to Tiffanie.

  He held my arm, as our ears rang with the lack of bass on Tennessee Street. The air was thick with the breath of humidity, like I was Christine going into the lake under the opera house in Phantom . And while we waited for a blinking red light to turn green to cross, he flung his cape around me, and sang with exaggerated vibrato the freaking opening line from, “All I Ask of You.” Then his hand flew around my waist as we crossed the street.

  “I can see why you aren’t a voice major,” I said.

  As we laughed he pulled me closer to him, and threw his mask down on the other side of the street. A blinking street lamp above us seemed to wink.

  “Well a duet isn’t much of a duet if I’m the only one singing.” He took my hands in his and resumed the same broken melody. After his lyrics, he nodded to me with his eyes wide.

  I sang—as loudly as if I was in Solar Stadium on America’s Next Star —not caring that others on the street were turning towards us, not caring that I was likely getting too into it, not caring that I was singing about love to someone I felt like I was actually falling in love with.

  I stared into his green eyes as I hit every note, even though I was beyond drunk. And then he bent his head down, and I had my first kiss with a straight man. My face flooded with glee, but it melted as I stepped back.

  “But…Carrie,” I said, counting it as another moment I had managed to ruin in my own life. Why couldn’t I just have kept kissing him when I knew that, if the situation was somehow reversed, she would’ve?

  “We’re not exclusive,” he mumbled, as he kissed me again, this time not so soft, his lips tense across mine, his fingers nesting in my hair.

  Then he stopped with a staccato kiss on my cheek.

  Now I knew why everyone was so obsessed with getting kissed. He took my hand and it fit in mine as if we’d been together forever.

  “Come on. I’ve got to show you something.”

  The lights on Tennessee Street were a neon blur along the foggy sidewalk. I don’t know where I’d been expecting him to take me, but it certainly wasn’t somewhere I’d been only hours before.

  “The rehearsal rooms?” I asked. “Aren’t they locked?”

  He scanned a key card.

  “Go in there and I’ll be back in a second,” said David. “And take this card in case you ever wanna come back after hours. I have a ton of them.”

  At David’s insistence, I closed the door behind me in a particularly tiny rehearsal room, still buzzing from the kiss, but feeling kind of dirty like I had when watching Tiffanie with the doorman. Even if I was happy that David preferred me to Carrie, wasn’t it wrong to kiss him? Were they really not exclusive?

  He opened the door slowly with the mask back on his face.

  “Ahhhh,” I mock-screamed. He was holding a bottle with a red wax seal on it, that reminded me of the creepy font in my bedroom before we painted it all those years ago. Underneath his other arm was his violin case.

  “First we drink, then we’ll—I’ll—play.”

  He took off the top of the jug and handed it to me—but I hesitated.

  “No fancy plastic cups here, I’m afraid. Bottom’s up.” He put the bottle to my lips and lifted it. This was the one time where being able to control my gag reflex really helped me, or at least the first time that night.

  He took a swig, put a hand on my cheek, and turned off the fluorescent light, only leaving the little blinking hallway light in the distance.

  He astounded my bottom lip with little kisses, softly licking the burning booze from my lips.

  Swig, kiss, swig, kiss, swig, kiss.

  And then I was angled against the corner of that tiny room, until David guided me down and I was lying on the floor, the room barely longer than the edge of my toes.

  He unzipped my French maid costume and then slid my breasts out. I watched him stare at them in a different way than the doorman had with Tiff.

  “You’re beautiful,” he whispered in my ear.

  Then he started a trail of kisses, and I knew where that was leading.

  “David, I’ve never—”

  He straightened up, and ran a hand along my hair.

  “Don’t worry, look. Um…I’ll play for a bit now.”

  He unzipped his violin too fast.

  “This one goes out to Christine.”

  He swayed like a palm tree in the backyard of my house. His whole body seemed to be a music note—like the music he was playing wasn’t coming from the belly of the violin but all the way from his toes.

  But he wasn’t playing for very long at all before we resumed our own game. A game where I didn’t really know the rules, but had wanted to play for quite a while.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ♪ Creep ♪

  * * *

  H uck threw a potato chip down on his plastic tray.

  “So you really did it? In the rehearsal rooms?”

  “Shhh! Yeah, well, let’s just say that I now understand why the Capitol building looks funny,” I said.

  “But you were like the last pure virgin in the world. I can feel the earth shattering around us. Wait, no, that’s just the football players leaving.” He turned around and watched them exit RFOC.

  He pointed, shielding his hand from the player’s view with the half of his hamburger bun.

  “God, to have an ass like that one,” he said.

  “I’d rather have a boyfriend that’s the best violinist in the world.”

  “So you’re exclusive already? So you get drunk for the first time…because I don’t think any of us really felt anything that night we split one of your dad’s light beers—he should be a one night stand, but you landed him just like that?”

  I don’t think I could land someone who hadn’t even yet replied to my texts, but at least Huck wasn’t ignoring me anymore.

  “I hope so.”

  “We’re both doing so great! Both with boyfriends and not even two weeks into school! And we’ve both lost weight!”

  Of course, he didn’t know the reason I had.

  I stabbed at an unripe tomato on my salad and plunked it down on the plastic tray. The lettuce squeaked in my teeth. Now there’s a food I would never want to deal with throwing up.

  “How can you eat that when you could be eating pizza? I thought given the choice, Ella Windmill would always pick pizza.”

  “It’s a bit less glamorous when you eat this food all the time, instead of with a friend’s free pass.”

  It’s also less glamorous when you’re as used to the taste of thrown up pizza as you are the gobs of hot mozzarella when it first enters your mouth.

  “So…you know what’s in a week?”

 
; “Your one week anniversary with the guy you haven’t let me meet yet?”

  “Two. Weeks. Actually. But he’s a doll. You’ll love him. But since he has a real job, he can’t just meet us at RFOC in the middle of the afternoon with no notice.”

  I took a swig of Diet Coke, and the coolness rushed down my raw throat.

  “But anyway, that’s not what I meant.” He waved around a fork speared with macaroni and cheese.

  I smiled and rolled my eyes, knowing that he was baiting me to ask, and loving the false dramatic pause.

  “What did you mean?”

  “Auditions for your show!”

  “It’s not my show, though I assume you mean America’s Next Star .”

  “You finally got laid, now say you’ll finally audition!”

  I laughed, but it became less funny the more I thought about it. Plus, if I couldn’t even make it into FSU’s program, how could I have any shot at beating out hundreds of thousands of people vying for one of twelve spots in Solar Stadium?

  “No thanks,” I said. “Failing one audition in a week is more than enough for me.”

  “Come on, at least think about it. If that bitch Veronica somehow crushed the sexy leather pants man, then you could win.”

  Veronica’s face of pure joy rushed into my head.

  “But I can’t even get into a freaking music theater program, let alone beat out everyone in America.”

  “Maybe you’re more of a Zelina, less of a Sarah Brightman.”

  I got up to refill my soda and Huck’s sweet tea.

  “Seriously, Ella, at least think about it. Chris and I are going to Disney in three days, and the auditions are right in Orlando. It’s fate! And I would love to be your chauffeur to stardom.” He tipped his cap downwards, then looked at my chipped white nails.

  “That is, I would love to take you as long as you get a manicure first. The time where I will excuse a hot mess on your hands has passed along with your virginity.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, as I threw my hands into my lap.

  “But if you really don’t want to go, why don’t you just send in that tape we made?”

  “No one has ever made it on the show by sending in a tape. It’s just a conspiracy to get more people to watch with no hope of ever getting on.”

  “Nice tin-foil hat there, Ella. Next you’ll tell me that we never landed on the moon! Come on—what do ya have to lose?”

  “No. You put so much red lipstick on me when we did it that I looked like I was auditioning for America’s Next Vampire.”

  We laughed.

  “That was fun. And I still contend that the lipstick made you look like a badass even before my special effects. But auditioning in person, sans red lipstick?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “But only because of the new Universe they built.”

  Three days, and exactly zero messages from David later, I’d packed and unpacked my duffel bag twice.

  Beep.

  Huck:

  We’re leaving at 3 lmk if you can make it

  “Hey Ella!”

  My dorm room’s door swung open a crack, revealing Tiffanie. Then it opened wider and there was a guy that looked like he had just walked off the set of one of those surfing tourism ads from California. He was wearing board shorts, and I swear I almost saw a tiny twinkle from his teeth when he flashed me a smile. “This is my boyfriend, Red.”

  Last I’d heard, she was back with the high school guy.

  “Hey, I’ve heard so much about you,” I bluffed.

  She eyed my duffel.

  “OMG you are going on a trip with your new boyfriend! That is so cute, I am always saying to Red how we should like, go to Bourbon Street or something. Aren’t I always saying that?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Could my roomie and I just have a minute alone here, Big Red?” She kissed him like she wouldn’t see him for days.

  Even though the door was closed with him outside, Tiff whispered, “So, he is super hot, I mean David is super hot too, go us! But the thing is he’s a Phi-Delt and everything, but his house is closed for the summer and his roommate in his dorm is a total computer dork that never leaves his room because he mines bitcoins or something so we can’t use that room.” She finally took in breath, like a dolphin that had pushed it too far.

  “I’ll leave.”

  “ohmygoshthanks. Guess it works out well since you’re going on a trip with your hottie anyway. Have fun!”

  I threw my toothbrush in my duffel—just in case I was actually going somewhere.

  I paced around the rehearsal rooms, but they were all empty. I loitered by the instrument lockers, and watched one of them sway open and closed under the weight of an AC vent.

  There were three more hours to decide if I was going with Huck, when I realized I’d forgotten to do my stupid online math assignment that was due in a couple hours. And I knew I was barely passing the class, so I couldn’t just forget the assignment.

  But I didn’t have to decide that moment, right? I had to do the homework either way, so why not just do it now make the decision later?

  I’d left my laptop in the room—which I just hoped Big Red wasn’t mounted on at this very moment—so I went into Strozier Library, right across from Landis green. I don’t know if it was just because it was the summer, or because FSU isn’t exactly an ivy-league school, but the glass building was mostly empty except for the computer room.

  Rows and rows of old school monitors filled the white space—like some kind of workstation straight out of a Microsoft commercial filmed before I was born. But they were busy, likely because of the free printing for students, and the mammoth printers behind me spewed landfills of paper.

  “ID please?” Asked a guy at the front.

  Now this was one ID test I could actually pass. I handed him my student card, then he pointed to the solitary computer in the first row that was empty. When I sat down, I could see hundreds of yellowed computer screens behind me, most seemed to be streaming some boring looking YouTube video.

  I logged in, and was met with a popup.

  Welcome, ELLA WINDMILL. You have 5 new emails to E_Windmill@FSU.edu

  Just mass professors mailing, except for one.

  No subject, from H_Nasapunj@FSU.edu

  It only contained YouTube link.

  I clicked, and then was met with the same background I’d noticed flickering on several of the screens around me.

  The video was called, “Angel of Music.”

  Then I clicked to play, and I saw David, and he was in a rehearsal room, talking to someone. So it must’ve been David’s latest release, right?

  But then I heard my own voice.

  I saw my own hand pointing to David’s shirt, and saw the stain—that seemed small at the time but on screen looked like I’d been attacked by a pizza.

  My hair looked like a rotting cinnamon bun—my face had a zit the size of the pizza that had pounced on me. And I looked heavier than that bouncer at Bullwinkle’s.

  “So much for doing your own stunts, I guess!” We laughed. I hummed.

  “No good, I need you to sing it. All of it.”

  I was sweating more than I’d thought before. Huck would’ve said that I looked like a hot mess and he would have been right. I double checked that this really was my face I was looking at on YouTube. What the fuck. It really was.

  What an asshole David was. I never would’ve done that if I’d known he was recording it, but I sounded okay, right? Maybe all those people in front of me in the computer room weren’t snickering, but laughing because I sounded good?

  Uploaded three days ago by Fatome.

  Views 28,305—well 28,306 counting the time I’d watched it too. 17 upvotes. 307 downvotes.

  That wasn’t even the part that really sucked. That was when I spent an hour reading every single fucking comment.

  Arc7854- looks like she let her deodorant go too

  Bitcibee- Yeah it looks like she’s the
queen—the queen of the freshman 35!

  amIrite77- She literally let herself go

  I ran out of the room, leaving all my stuff.

  I threw up in the bathroom at Strozier, even though it wasn’t a private stall, and even though I hadn’t had anything to eat that day.

  How many people had recognized me today? With that view count, it meant that over half the school’s yearly population had seen it, but with less people there for the summer, did it mean that literally everyone had?

  That asshole David, uploading it as, “Angel of Music” to be like, “ha, now I’ve fucked you all over again!”

  It had all been a cruel prank—the date, the kiss, the singing.

  I had to get the fuck out of there.

  I pulled out my phone and saw a million texts from Huck asking for a status update. I didn’t even scroll through them before replying.

  But I still had time to get a ride off of campus to Orlando, right? Even if there was no way I was going to audition for America’s Next Star ?

  Yeah sorry I would like to go

  Beep.

  I texted you like a zillion times. We left

  I texted fast:

  Could you come back please? I’m just at the library

  No more beeps, while I sat there on the tiny white tiles of the bathroom floor as toilets flushed around me.

  So what if they could see someone’s fat outline under the doors of the stall? Nothing could be worse than that video anyway. Well, except for Mom dying.

  Then, finally. Beep.

  Look bf is driving and said we will miss our dinner rez if we turn back now. Sorry. We waited a long time to hear back from you and might be late as it is

  I cried when I couldn’t get any more bile into the toilet bowl, but my arm around the toilet was the closest thing I could find to a hug.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ♪ Wake Up ♪

  * * *

  S omeone was tapping me on the side.

  “Excuse me,” said a woman. “You need help?”

  I felt a pat on my leg and opened my eyes. I saw the little tiles, felt the hiss of the fluorescent lights above me, then I smelled myself. Neon bile on my sweatshirt. Where was I?