Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (3 page)

“Are your parents here with you today?” she asked.

I hesitated before responding. I
might
have fudged my age a little on my application to avoid the requirement of having one of my parents sign a release form and accompany me to the audition. “Um, no,” I said. “If I didn’t do well, I didn’t want them to know I’d failed.”

“Well, honey, you did anything but fail today,” Nelly told me, “and I bet your parents would be real proud of you if they were here right now. I would be honored if you would join us on the show, and particularly if you’d compete on my team.” The crowd roared. My throat swelled so tightly that I wondered if I was going to choke right there, on camera. Thankfully, the broadcast wasn’t live. The producers could edit out my demise if needed.

Chase sat back down in his chair and scooted forward to reach his microphone. “I have a daughter about your age, and you just made me miss her a whole bunch,” he said. I bit my lower lip. Of course he didn’t know that Taylor and I had bobbed for apples together at Halloween parties, traded Barbies, pushed each other on swings, and made each other friendship bracelets out of embroidery floss from my mom’s sewing kit. The realization that I was potentially going to have to come clean with Chase Atwood about knowing his daughter—and quarreling with her—if I were to make it onto the show hit me like an anvil dropped on my head. “You’ve got my vote, too. When I wrote that song, it was very personal and emotional for me, and you brought all of that sensitivity and energy to your performance. I’d like you to consider joining my team. I think we could turn your potential into something magical.”

Something just underneath my sternum broke in half, and I couldn’t breathe. I had my two required votes; I’d be on the show! But more incredibly, I had Chase’s complete attention. I knew how badly Taylor had longed for that, even if she had acted like it didn’t bother her that he was so uninvolved in her life before her mom died. Sometimes he would call on her birthday and send postcards from weird tropical islands every few months. He lived on the other side of the country with his new wife. Even though Taylor saw pictures of the two of them dining and cavorting in Los Angeles all the time in celebrity gossip magazines, he never requested to spend time with her when he was in town. And now he wanted
me
on his team. He wanted to be
my
mentor. It made me feel victorious and horrible simultaneously.

Before I had a chance to reply, Lenore James (who was as famous for her comically enormous earrings and messy divorce from a raunchy comedian as she was for her velvety voice) was rambling a mile a minute about what she believed she could do to shape my voice. And then the short guy who I would learn backstage was rap artist Jay Walk was telling me he thought I was hot. He said I had the potential to
go all the way to the top.
 

“What these other fools aren’t telling you, girl, is that I have my own record label. If you stick with Jay Walk, I can sign you to my label whether you win the grand prize or not. Something to think about,” the rapper was telling me.

My head was spinning. My vision was blurring. I heard the
Center Stage!
theme song rising and I knew that the camera was closing in on me, capturing every little twitch of my face as I deliberated which coach’s team to join. The voice of Danny Fuego informed the audience that this was the first time that season in all of the audition cities—New York, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, and Atlanta—that a contestant had been requested by
all four
coaches.

My eyes fell upon Chase Atwood, who was looking directly at me. I couldn’t deny it: Taylor’s dad was what my mom would have referred to as “a hunk.” It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if Taylor’s fancy boarding school classmates constantly hounded her for details about him.

“This is such a tough decision,” I muttered, sensing tension build in the audience. I knew I didn’t have long to make up my mind. I just had to blurt out a name, and I surprised no one more than myself when I sputtered, “Nelly. I’d like to be on Nelly’s team.”

Backstage, I was ambushed by Danny Fuego and a roaming camera crew.

“Allison Burch! Our first contestant to receive unanimous votes from all four coaches! How do you feel?” Danny asked, shoving a microphone under my nose and placing an arm around my shoulders. His woodsy cologne was overpowering.

“I feel like I’m… going to pass out,” I said, perhaps a little too honestly.
 
My pulse was thumping in my veins as if someone was beating a snare drum inside my heart. I just wanted to sit down, just wanted to drink some water and calmly think through what I was going to tell my parents. Before I arrived at my audition, I knew I was a halfway decent singer, but I never, ever in a million years expected to do as well as I’d done.
 
The only time I’d ever been acknowledged for my singing talent before was when Mrs. Flores, our choral group director, had told me, “Nice pipes,” after my audition for
Mame!.

My entire body felt magnetized by the adrenaline surging through me. I had not only landed a spot on the show, but might have had a legitimate shot at
winning
it!

“That performance was honestly just… phenomenal. Are you excited to compete on the show?” Danny asked.

“Yes, I’m so excited,” I managed to say. And before realizing how conceited I sounded, I blurted, “I came to win this thing.”

“That’s what we like to hear! A girl with some fire in her heart!” Danny exclaimed. “We’re so happy to have you here, Allison, and I wish you the best of luck in this competition. Next up, we have a young man named Elliott Mercer, who comes to us from Temecula, California. Give a warm welcome to Elliott!”

Beyond the camera crew surrounding me and Danny, I saw a tall, skinny guy with a mop of messy dark hair on his head being ushered toward the double doors by crew members. I assumed that this guy was Elliott. He looked more like a scruffy, foul-mouthed skateboarder than any kind of aspiring star. He had a little acne and wore dirty jeans, and as he passed me, we made brief eye contact. He had bright, sparkling turquoise eyes which made him cuter than I would have expected from his profile, but I still wouldn’t have placed him in the same bracket as Oliver Teague. Oliver was my long-time crush at Pacific Valley, our school’s star forward on the soccer team. Once, Oliver Teague sort of nodded at me in the hallway before American History, and I had to go to the nurse’s office to lie down on the cot for a while because I was hyperventilating.

I wondered if Elliott had seen my performance on the monitors in the waiting area, or if he had been trying to block me out just as I had been trying to block out #66. Not to sound like a braggart or anything, but
I
sure wouldn’t have wanted to follow my own performance.

A broad-shouldered woman in a bright red blouse who introduced herself as Claire, an associate producer on the show, led me across the waiting area. The parents of other contestants waiting to audition watched me with vague—but not necessarily genuine—smiles, probably wondering if I had just crushed their kids’ dreams of making it onto the show. As I followed Claire down a hallway, I heard Chase Atwood asking Elliott questions about his musical preferences on the overhead sound system. We stepped into a small conference room that had been set up as a temporary production office behind the stage, complete with computer stations and phone lines. We made our way toward Claire’s desk, and several people looked up from their computers and told me, “Great job out there!”

Claire told me to have a seat and prepared a stack of papers for me to review.
 
“We’ll need you to sign a release, terms and conditions in case you become our winner—fingers crossed—insurance forms, hmm… where is that tax form?”

As Claire distractedly searched through her file cabinets, I noticed that one of the people sitting closest to me at a long work table had a live video feed streaming onto the enormous monitor on his desk. The coaches were asking Elliott questions about his singing and background, and he seemed somewhat timid to be voluntarily performing in front of a rowdy audience. He looked down at his feet and mumbled into the microphone as if it pained him to be the recipient of so much attention.
I’m a senior in high school. Never really sang in front of a large crowd before.

Two more senior producers stepped into the office to meet me, which distracted me from Elliott’s introduction. Never before in my life had a grown-up wearing a fancy suit requested my acquaintance, and now there were two standing in front of me.

“Hi there, Miss Burch. I’m Tommy Harper,” a man wearing pinstripes with gray, thinning hair said, extending a strong hand. “I’m the Executive Producer of
Center Stage!”
Tommy was suspiciously tan, and the bald top of his head gleamed. When he shook my hand, I noticed his chunky pinky ring.

“And I’m Susan DeMott,” a woman with sleek dark hair introduced herself, pumping my hand up and down. Her forehead was oddly smooth in contrast to the area under her eyes, which was crinkly with wrinkles. “We are so excited that you were able to join us today and audition, Allison. We think this is going to be a
very
exciting season. Our staff will be in touch with you within the next few days to tape a brief segment for the first episode of the show.”

Behind them, on the monitor, I couldn’t help but notice that Elliott’s track had started playing, and he cradled the mic between his hands, getting ready to start his song. I didn’t recognize his audition song by its guitar introduction and wondered if maybe he was into cooler indie rock music than me. That was doubtful, though; I read indie music blogs like a fiend. I’d even been listening to Zenith, the side project of the Detroit Hobgoblins’ lead singer, on the way to the Dolby Theater that afternoon. Elliott squeezed his eyes shut and began to sing, and suddenly I knew the surefire ease in the competition that I had just presumed for myself only minutes ago was no longer a guarantee.

Elliott’s voice was as raw as sandpaper, but he hit every note as clear as a bell. He seemed to have practiced, professional-level control over his volume, murmuring softly during his first verse and then revving up like an engine for the refrain. By the time he reached his chorus, his voice was so loud that I could hear him through the wall of the office as well as over the theater’s inter-office loudspeaker system. Since there was only one camera feed on that monitor, I couldn’t see the coaches’ reactions, but I could hear the crowd going absolutely bonkers. The boy who was passionately roaring into his microphone with a wild blaze in his eyes didn’t seem like he could have possibly been the same guy who had just been shyly shoe-gazing moments earlier. Not only did Elliott seem like he was already a real rock star, but he also seemed to have the potential to become a
legend.

Elliott’s jaw-dropping performance had captured the attention of Tommy and Susan, too.
 
Susan had trailed off mid-sentence, her mouth agape with the word “season” dangling from her upper teeth. Tommy strummed his fingers on Claire’s desktop.
 
I noticed Susan turn to Tommy and shake her head like she simply couldn’t believe there would be two impressive contestants in a row. Elliott ripped through his chorus a second time, and I distinguished a few lines of the song to be about some painful lies a girl had told him. He finished at the end of the chorus, and Susan turned to me and said,
“That,
kid, is who
you’re
going to have to beat.”

When the applause finally quieted down, Chase Atwood told Elliott, “My, oh my, son. You just knocked that audition out of the park.”

“Home run,” Jay Walk agreed.

Elliott was blushing, looking at his feet again.

“What was that song you just sang? I didn’t recognize it,” Chase said.

Elliott bit his lower lip, and his eyes flickered upward and out into the crowd for just a quick second.
 
“I wrote it,” he said.

I wanted to groan. He had that incredible voice, and he was a
songwriter
,
too. I wondered if anyone in the Dolby Theater other than me remembered my performance. Just ten minutes after I’d stepped off the stage, I’d been outdone.

Since my brother left for college earlier that fall, the whole structure of my family had changed. My parents were home less frequently, and even though I’d thought my entire life that I’d love being an only child, I hated it. I never hurried home from school because I knew I’d be alone for hours unless Nicole came by to do homework with me. My mom, who teaches yoga, had committed to teaching a third day of classes every week now that Todd was off studying on the East Coast. She had also taken on the extra responsibility of co-managing Levity, the yoga studio where she had undergone teaching certification. Even on days when Dad got home from work first, he waited for her to start dinner instead of attempting to cook on his own. My dad is a pretty smart guy, but completely helpless in the kitchen.

The night I won a spot on
Center Stage!
, both of my parents were home already by the time I arrived. It was after dark, uncharacteristically late for me to be returning from school. Through our front windows, I could see my mom in the kitchen standing over a boiling pot as I stuck my key in the lock on the front door. Before even entering the house, I knew my dad would be watching one of his favorite true crime television shows, the kind with a lot of cheesy re-enactments and dramatic music.

Sure enough, there he was, barely looking up from the television as I stepped into the front hallway and set my backpack down on the credenza.
 
I unzipped its external pocket and withdrew the folded forms that Claire had given me to review and sign.

“You’re home rather late,” Dad commented.

“I had to work on something at school,” I lied. I had no idea why I instantly decided to lie. I could have told him about taking the bus to Hollywood and auditioning right there and then. But for some reason, was too ashamed of my desire to become famous to come right out with it.

In the kitchen, Mom was straining pasta into a colander at the sink. “Hi, honey,” she greeted me without turning to face me. She wore a cashmere wrap over her yoga pants. It was pretty rare that my mom wore anything other than knitwear. “Long day at school?”

“Actually, no,” I admitted, sinking down into a seat at our kitchen table. A few months earlier, our table had been covered in mountains of college catalogs addressed to my brother.
 
“I have to tell you something.”

This immediately got my mom’s attention, because I never told her
anything
.
The last time I announced having a serious matter to discuss was when Taylor’s mom died, and I had been hoping my parents would attend the wake. I had
really
been hoping they would consider letting her live with us for the summer so that she wouldn’t have to leave Los Angeles with her father, but then I realized how dumb that plan was. It was ridiculous to think that a famous rock star would let his daughter shack up with a middle-class family in West Hollywood so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her. What would the gossip magazines have said about that? But anyway, my mom was always asking me how school was, how my friends were, and trying to gain insights into my life. She never believed me when I informed her that nothing of interest was going on at school or with my friends.

“What’s going on?” she asked, this time putting the pot of spaghetti down on a ceramic tile to prevent it from burning the counter.
 
She turned to face me, trying a little too hard to appear casual when it was plainly obvious that she was dying to hear my news.

“So, there’s this TV show,” I began, wondering how far into the story I should backtrack. “It’s called
Center Stage!
.
People from all over the country audition for it, and then there are these battles every week, and contestants are eliminated.”

“I’m familiar with the show, Allison. You watched it all last spring. Do you think I live under a rock?”

“Yeah, so...” I continued, weaving my fingers together and cracking my knuckles.

“You want to audition for the show,” Mom guessed.

“Not exactly.” I fanned the forms from Claire out across the table. “I kind of
already
auditioned for the show. And made it. I mean, they picked me. They chose me as a contestant.”

My mom’s face contorted rapidly from happy to surprised, to angry. She was still in angry mode when she pulled the potholders off her hands and opened her mouth. “Allison, how could you have auditioned for a television show without our knowledge? You’re a minor! No production company would invite someone your age to audition without having parental permission!”

“Well,” I began, deciding just to lay it all out, “they think I’m eighteen. So, they didn’t ask me for parental permission. But now that I made it onto the show, I obviously have to be honest with them about my age. They gave me all these forms to sign.”

I slid the forms suggestively around on the table. Mom didn’t take a step closer to the table to review them. “And
why
do they think you’re eighteen?” she asked in an incriminating tone.

I shrugged innocently and fibbed, “Maybe they just jumped to conclusions.”

Mom eyeballed the forms on the table, leaned back against the kitchen counter with her arms crossed over her chest, and bellowed, “Rich! Rich, can you please join us for a conversation in the kitchen?”

My parents are very formal with each other. I used to think it was funny how they’re always so polite, but my mom says that respect is the cornerstone of a lasting relationship. She reads a lot of non-fiction books about marriage and raising children to be responsible adults, so she’s full of little sayings like that.
 
My friend Nicole’s parents always refer to each other as
honey
and
sugar
and
baby
,
but with my parents it’s always
Rich
and
Lisa
.

My father joined us in the kitchen, glancing once over his shoulder back toward the living room, obviously still a bit engrossed in the television show he had abandoned. He carried a can of diet soda in one hand and rubbed the bridge of his nose, where his glasses rested.

“Allison has auditioned for a talent competition television show without our knowledge and has been chosen as a contestant,” my mother said. She informed him with her tone that she was upset and expected him to be, too. I scowled. Any other parent in Los Angeles would have said those words with pride, but not my mom. My parents were born and raised in Los Angeles, both in the west-side neighborhood of Palms. My father’s father had worked at Boeing, just as my father went on to do, and my mother’s father had owned a chain of car washes around Culver City. We might seriously have been the only family in Los Angeles without a single Hollywood showbiz connection.

“Is this true, what your mother’s saying?” Dad asked me. “Did you really audition for something without thinking it might be a good idea to tell us first?”

“Yeah, well...” I stammered, “I just sent in a taped audition. I didn’t think anything would come of it. Honestly, I didn’t. But then they invited me to go to the Dolby Theater and audition in person, and I wasn’t sure if I should go or not, you know, because it seemed like a long shot and I’ve never performed in front of a real audience before except for that one time at school and I thought I might get freaked out and blow it—”

Both of my parents were staring at me as if I were speaking in tongues. This was pretty much how they looked at me whenever I talked about anything related to celebrities or movies.

“What kind of talent show is this?” Dad asked.

“It’s singing,” I told him, not surprised that he was oblivious. “A professional singer coaches you, and then you sing a song every week, and either you get eliminated or you keep going, and at the end of the season, the winner gets a record deal.”

I intentionally left out the part about going on tour with All or Nothing. Neither of my parents would be in support of my boarding a private jet with Irish boy band stars and gallivanting around the world. Especially if either of them had any clue about my fantasy about marrying one of the members of the band, Nigel O’Hallihan. There was even a slim chance that my culturally ignorant father knew who All or Nothing was because posters of them covered the walls of my room. He had commented numerous times in the past that he didn’t understand how they managed to get their legs into pants so tight, and about how when he was their age, boys wanted to look tough and wouldn’t have used so many hair styling products intended for girls. Ugh.

 
“I just can’t comprehend this fascination of yours with becoming famous,” my father sighed. “Isn’t it enough for you to just be a high school student and get good grades? You have your whole life ahead of you. You can try to become a singer, or an actress—or whatever you want—after college.”

“Dad,” I said sternly. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You have to let me do this.”

Dad exchanged an annoyed glance with my mother. “That’s where you’re incorrect, Allison. We’re your parents. We don’t
have
to let you do anything.”

“Dad,
seriously
,”
I grumbled.
 
This
was why I had made my audition video in secrecy. My dad had a way of making me hate myself for even
wanting
to succeed. This conversation was turning into the same one we’d had a week ago when I flunked my first pop quiz of the year in French class. Then, my parents had made me resign from my part-time job at Robek’s, making juice, to concentrate more on my grades. It hardly concerned them that now I didn’t have any pocket money for concert tickets, or for lunch at Del Taco whenever my friends wanted to go off-campus. Their mutual belief was that there would be plenty of time for me to see live bands and buy myself tacos
after
high school.

“Really, Allison,” my mother agreed with him. “Does this have anything to do with Taylor?”

Heat flashed across my face, and I fought off humiliation.
There is no reason at all to be ashamed
, I reminded myself. I had just earned myself an incredible opportunity. “No! It has nothing to do with her. It has to do with
me
and
my talent,”
I insisted. “Why can’t you guys acknowledge that I’m good at something?”

However, it
did
have to do with Taylor, at least a little bit. Taylor never desired to be super-famous, at least not the same way that I did. Ever since we were little girls, she had wanted to study music, become a violinist with a symphony orchestra, and travel the world. The endless craving for fame that was all too common in Los Angeles sickened her, primarily because her mom had a bad case of it. Before her death, Taylor’s mom infrequently landed guest roles on TV shows and sometimes sang commercial jingles. She’d wear racy dresses to school events intending to flirt with our classmates’ fathers who worked at movie studios. Her tireless, hopeful auditioning and habit of scheduling life around parts she never won infuriated Taylor. One of Taylor’s most frequent complaints was that her mother’s preoccupation with cosmetic face fillers and minor plastic surgeries prevented them from ever having enough money to go on vacation or buy a new car. My mom used to say, “She’s got a good head on her shoulders, that Taylor,” and then she’d kind of trail off before saying what I knew she was thinking:
despite her mother’s influence.

“What happens if we let you compete on this show, and you don’t win?” Dad asked me. “You’ll be devastated, and you’ll probably have to miss several weeks of school. Has that thought occurred to you? That if you don’t win, the entire country will watch you lose?”

Leave it to my dad to casually crush my dreams. That exact thought
had
occurred to me, but now that he was mentioning it, suffering a major failure on prime-time
would
be the worst. And I hadn’t given much thought to school because I never did. Todd was the scholar of the family, not me. I was lucky to earn straight B’s with each report card, and I fantasized about the outfits I’d wear to college classes more often than I thought about which subjects I’d study.

“You can call the producers and ask them about school,” I assured my parents. I was confident that Tommy Harper and Susan DeMott would have much more expertise than me in convincing parents that television shows were more important than junior years of high school. “And I won’t freak out if I lose. I promise. I want this more than I have ever wanted anything in my whole life, Dad. Please, please at least let me try. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if this were about Todd and not me. You’d never try and stop him from achieving his dreams. Ever.”

I hated myself as I fumed in my chair throughout dinner for playing the Todd card, but it was true. My parents never denied Todd
anything
.
 
Maybe they pitied him a little because he’d needed cleft palate surgery when he was a baby, but he had turned out just fine. His scar did little to deter girls from throwing themselves at him. When Todd turned sixteen, he got a car so that he could drive himself to his job in Century City. When
I
turned sixteen, my dad resisted taking me to the DMV for my license for an entire
month
while he made me drive around Glendale for extra practice.