Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (41 page)

But of course, I couldn’t tell her that.

On Thursday afternoon when I stood in front of the mirror practicing in the vocal training room, it struck me for the first time how much I’d physically changed since the start of the season. My body had firmed up from all of the morning exercise routines. Even my face was a little more contoured than it had been over the summer, making me look a little older.

But it was my poise that made me look like a different girl than I’d been that very first morning when Mom had dropped me off at the studio. I stood up straight with my shoulders back and carried myself like a real singer. In September, I’d been a girl with no confidence and no performing experience. I was finishing the season as a girl who’d captured the attention of an entire country every Friday night for eleven weeks.

“Very nice work, Allison,” Nelly praised me when my last note of the song trailed off. “You might just have a shot at the grand prize, after all.”

Claire instructed me to pack up any personal items in my trailer that evening before returning to the hotel. There wouldn’t be any reason to come back to the studio on Friday; we’d be rehearsing the finale at the Dolby all day. I folded up all of the dirty t-shirts and socks I’d abandoned in my trailer over the course of the last two months and sat down on the couch. It didn’t seem real that the show had already come to an end, and for a second I got a little nostalgic about the last few minutes I’d ever spend in my trailer. Then I remembered the silver envelope that Marlene had handed me on her last day at the studio. I’d been suffering from such an intense headache that afternoon; I’d slid it into my backpack, promising myself I’d open it at her suggestion—when it was the right time. I found the envelope in the external pouch of my backpack exactly where I’d put it weeks earlier. Inside of it was a notecard with a watercolor painting of a bird on it.

Dear Allison,

When you get to be my age, you realize that the only prizes worth winning can’t be handed to you on a stage, and the true definition of what it means to win isn’t found in a dictionary, but rather in your heart. Make me proud, star material.

I slid the notecard back into the silver envelope and returned it to my backpack, intending to cherish it forever. My experience on
Center Stage!
had taught me exactly what she’d hoped to convey: that sometimes winning isn’t really
winning.
Marlene’s words of comfort reminded me that there was one remaining loose end in the plan that Elliott had concocted for tomorrow. I called Marlene’s number on my cell phone. When she didn’t answer, I had no choice but to leave a rambling and probably insane-sounding voicemail for her.

Without another thought, I bid my trailer farewell.

Later that evening, I was a ball of nerves when Nicole, Kaela, and Michelle arrived at the hotel. I would have been nervous that night no matter what—even if I’d still wanted to win—but the kind of mutiny that Elliott and I were planning required a complicated balance of circumstances and luck.

“Are you
sure
you want to do this?” Michelle asked, reaching into the plastic bag from Savon. “Because seriously, there will be no turning back. If you don’t like how it looks and try to dye your hair brown again, you might end up looking terrible on the show tomorrow night.”

“I’m positive.”

Michelle and Kaela pulled on rubber gloves and sectioned my hair into chunks. As I sat in the chair by the little desk area in my suite, Kaela mixed powdered bleach with activator in a plastic bowl. Michelle wrapped each chunk around the bottom half of my head that Kaela had painted in a strip of foil.

“You look insane,” Nicole commented from the couch where she was watching television. “Like a robot Medusa.”

Michelle teased, “Way to help out.”

“I am here for moral support,” Nicole reminded all of us.

My cell phone rang, and Nicole answered it since I was in no position to walk across the room with such a delicate disaster balanced atop my head. “It’s someone who says she’s Marlene,” Nicole informed me, carrying the phone over to where I sat.

“Marlene!” I exclaimed. I’d left her that voicemail earlier in the day unsure if she’d be willing or able to help me out now that she was no longer affiliated with the show.

“You’re cleared on the rights, kid,” she said without even saying hello. “The publishing rights are owned by Sony Music, and they aren’t any more expensive than the publishing rights on Nelly’s song. You should be good to go.”

“Oh my God. Thank you, Marlene. Thank you so much,” I exclaimed. Once Nelly had brought up music licensing, I hadn’t been able to shake the fear that the producers of the show would come after my parents to pay outrageously expensive fees if I sang a song on live television without the network securing the proper rights in advance. That would have been a
very
unfortunate outcome of my reckless final performance on
Center Stage!.

“I have to admit, Allison, I am
very
curious to see what you have in store for tomorrow night,” she said, sounding humored.
 
“Just promise me you’ll be smart. They’re not very nice people when you cross them.”

“I’ll be smart,” I vowed. “This is about ratings and publicity. That’s all.”

After saying goodbye to Marlene, Michelle (whose own curly hair was a shade of toxic green that week) unwrapped all of the foil strips to reveal locks of pure white all the way around my head. “Now, the real fun begins,” she said, twisting off the cap on a jar of pink hair dye.

“Remember, nothing too close to the top or bottom,” I warned. The only way I was going to get to look the way I wanted on television was if I didn’t tip anyone on the production staff off throughout the day on Friday. My hair would have to look completely normal until it was too late for Martha and Geoffrey to do anything about it.

“Your mom is going to go seriously nuts,” Kaela said, dabbing blue hair dye onto one of the bleached chunks.

I didn’t think so. I was pretty sure my mom would understand exactly what I was going to do on Friday night.

When we were done, I called Taylor on video chat. “Check it out,” I said, running my hand through my hair and positioning my phone so that she could see Michelle’s hairstyling handiwork.

“Wow. That looks so cool,” Taylor said. She sat at her desk in her tiny dormitory bedroom. “Are you nervous about tomorrow night?”

“Totally,” I confessed, although I couldn’t tell her
why.
I hadn’t even told the friends who were flipping through the thousands of cable channels on the television in my hotel suite the full extent of what Elliott and I planned to do. Elliott was upstairs in his room, rehearsing the song he intended to perform, which he was keeping a secret even from me. “Are you going to be watching?”

“Of course,” she said. “I mean, I’m supposed to be practicing for this symphony thing in Spain, but I’ll take a break to watch.”

Taylor would be traveling to Madrid at the very same time as Todd, a little fact that I was sure my brother had strategically neglected to inform our parents. Her stepmother had agreed to let her join her boarding school’s symphony on the trip to play a special holiday concert. She believed that a change of scenery would be better for Taylor than spending the week before Christmas in New Jersey immersed in family drama. Even as Taylor described her school group’s itinerary she sounded morose; it would be the first Christmas she had ever spent away from West Hollywood in her whole life.

“Just don’t forget to watch tomorrow. There’s going to be a surprise for you, and don’t tell your dad,” I said.

“You don’t have to worry about
that.
I’m never speaking to
him
again.”

When I ended my conversation with Taylor, Kaela asked, “Hey, can we order, like, whatever we want from room service?

It was probably my last night as America’s sweetheart, so I reasoned, why not?

“One more time. And one, and two, and action…”

By the third time Mark ran all of us—Chase, Jay, Nelly, Lenore, Tia, Elliot, and me—through our opening number on Friday morning, I was already having fantasies about just bursting through the front doors of the Dolby Theater out onto Hollywood Boulevard to escape the insanity. The song we would perform that night, an absurd mash-up of musical styles, was cheesy and abrasive, but tolerable only because the coaches were participating, too. My stomach was tied in knots as I wondered what would become of me before midnight. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to assume I’d be permitted to go out for dinner with my parents that night after the show wrapped.
 
There was a possibility that I was going to end up in some kind of show business jail cell.

“I’m so nervous, I think I’m going to be sick on stage,” Tia confessed to me during our lunch backstage.

“Don’t be nervous. It’s going to be exactly the same as any other Friday night,” I assured her. Tia would perform first before Elliott and I pulled the rest of the broadcast to pieces. The order of our performances helped us rationalize what we had planned. If there had been a chance we were going to upset Tia’s shot at winning, we would have reconsidered.

That afternoon when I changed into the outfit Aubrey had chosen for me to wear on the show (a black leather shirt with a zippered front and red fake snakeskin pants), I eyeballed the plastic bag I’d brought with me from the hotel. It inconspicuously waited on a countertop next to the steamer that the producers had provided me with to warm up my vocal chords. In it, the
real
outfit I planned to wear on stage was balled up, but I couldn’t put those clothes on until moments before I took the stage for my performance.

“Let’s get this hair blown out,” Martha said as she stepped into the Group 2 prep room, which was now my private dressing room. It was three in the afternoon: two hours before the studio audience members would take their seats, and the cameras would start rolling. Far too late for any of the production assistants to dash off to a pharmacy to buy a box of brunette hair dye. I’d pulled my hair into a tight bun on top of my head that morning, careful to hide all of the colored strands. Martha gasped when pink, purple, green, and blue tumbled out to my shoulders.

“What did you do?” she asked in horror.

“I wanted something special for the finale,” I said, figuring that just acting like a selfish, impulsive teenager was the best way to explain my actions. “It’s not that different from what we talked about a few weeks ago, right? I thought it would be cool.”

Martha ran her hands through my hair, and I watched her face contort into an expression of utter anxiety. “Cool, sure, but… I think I need to go tell someone about this.”

She rushed off down the hall to summon a production assistant, and I dug my phone out of my backpack to text Elliott with an irrepressible smile on my face.

Ten minutes later, an emergency task force had gathered to determine what to do with my hair. “What in the
world
were you thinking?” Nelly demanded, hands on her hips. “I just
knew
you were going to do something foolish to ruin tonight’s show.” She turned to Martha and ordered, “Put it in an up-do. I don’t want to see a single weird color when she’s up on that stage.”

Grumbling the whole time, Martha teased and sprayed my hair into a French knot. Shortly before five o’clock, Rob the evil production assistant knocked on the prep room door to fetch me for the opening number. As we walked toward the double doors leading to the backstage area, butterflies fluttered in my chest just as they had the first time I’d taken this walk, the day of my audition. I could hear the studio audience talking and laughing, waiting for the show to begin. The coaches and Tia were already in formation, and Mark rushed around wearing a headset, snapping out his last round of orders before he would disappear into the control room to direct the live broadcast.

I felt warm fingertips stroke the inside of my palm and turned to see that Elliott had crept up behind me. We shared a stealth smile, and I was humored that he’d stayed true to his refusal to let the stylists dress him right up until the very end of the season. He wore a denim shirt and jeans, along with the same dirty Jack Purcells he’d been wearing since the first time I’d ever seen him.

“Alright, everyone, this is it!” Danny Fuego cruised over to us to give us one final cheesy pep talk. “This has been a fantastic season, the best ratings we’ve ever gotten. So I want to thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart for contributing to the ongoing success of
Center Stage!
, and I wish you guys—Tia, Elliott, and Allison—the very best of luck tonight.”