Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (42 page)

The show’s theme song played, the colored lights shifted across the stage, and Danny dashed out in front of the cameras as the audience clapped. The last episode of the season had begun. Just like on the first episode, when I’d been so nervous about my ill-fitting jacket that I could barely remember the dance moves, the opening act went by as if it were a lucid dream. When the spotlight fell upon me for my solo, applause swelled, and I hit the notes exactly as I’d exhaustively practiced them to spare myself the ire of Chase Atwood.

Backstage once again, I didn’t even catch a glimpse of Elliott before I was ushered back to the Group 2 prep room. A video montage of all of Tia’s turns on stage over the course of the season spliced together with footage of her in dance class preceded her final performance. It included a clip from her audition when she’d nervously taken the stage at a hotel in Miami and gripped the microphone stand for dear life. The segment ended with Secret Suite footage of Tia telling the audience how being on
Center Stage!
had changed her life. “Even if I don’t win tomorrow night, this has been an experience I’ll never forget.”

She took the stage in a stunning silver dress. “What song are you going to sing for us tonight, my dear?” Danny asked.

“I’m going to sing
‘Endless Sky,’
Danny,” Tia said. “It’s the first song I remember hearing on the radio when my family moved to Miami from the Philippines, and it shaped my idea of what it means to live in America.”

I had underestimated Tia. Either she had learned how to cast a spell on an audience during her time on the show, or her genuine instincts were spot-on. She tore through the song with unbridled emotion. Even though I’d only been half-heartedly paying attention to my competitors’ performances throughout the season, I could hear a difference in Tia’s voice since the earlier weeks. Her work with Lenore and her vocal trainer had given her more control over her range.

Pins and needles tickled my arms and legs as the show paused for a commercial break. The time had come to make my quick change into the outfit I planned to wear on stage. I pulled on my Pacific Valley School gym shirt and slipped into Taylor’s sky blue hoodie. I wiggled out of my skintight red pants and tugged on an old pair of jeans. It had been Nicole’s contribution to this endeavor to stop by my house on her way to the Neue Hotel the night before to pick up the elements of my costume from my mom.

When Rob appeared in the doorway of the prep room moments later, his face fell the instant he saw me. “What are you doing? You’re on in three minutes!”

“This is what I’m wearing,” I said, pulling the hairpins out of my French twist and letting my hair swing to my shoulders.

Rob shook his head and raised his walkie-talkie. “Go for Mark,” he said in the lingo that the crew used, and then paused for someone in the control room to acknowledge his request.

“Copy for Mark.”

“We’ve got a small problem down here,” Rob said. “I’m flying Allison in, and she’s changed out of wardrobe and into some clothes she—maybe found in a dumpster?”

We engaged in a hateful staring contest until the control room buzzed him back with directions. “Just fly her in,” a male voice commanded through the static on the walkie-talkie.

Rob walked so briskly down the hall that I had to trot to keep up with him. Every production assistant we passed paused to stare at me. “Radical hair,” a guy in a heavy metal t-shirt wearing a headset told me with a thumbs-up.

I lingered in the darkness of the backstage area while my video introduction played. It began, surprisingly, with an interview from Marlene. “The first day I met the contestants on Nelly’s team, I was just blown away by the amount of talent in the group. I thought to myself, it’s going to be simply impossible to select a winner from this fantastic assortment of singers. And then this little girl, maybe five-foot-three on the tallest day of her life, stood up and belted out an R&B classic and just knocked everyone’s socks off.” Marlene was beaming. “I knew on the very first day that Allison had what it would take to win. There’s nothing this girl can’t do. She’s star material; the real thing.”

My lower lip trembled. The heartfelt praise from Marlene made the rest of my video, which was a sensationalized chronicle of my life story, tolerable. I wondered what my parents were thinking in the audience as that video aired. They both knew all too well that I had hardly been considered a stand-out student at Pacific Valley prior to
Center Stage!.
They also knew that my self-professed love of working in soup kitchens was an outright lie since I’d never been to one prior to Tuesday. My segment ended just like Tia’s had, with my Secret Suite recording. “If I’ve learned anything on this show, it’s that nothing’s more important than being true to myself. One of the coaches told me that whatever I do in my career, it’s got to feel right, and that’s advice that I think applies to everyone’s life. You’ve just got to be yourself.”

If Danny Fuego was at all startled by my appearance when I stepped out on stage, he was enough of a professional to not let it show. The audience seemed to understand that my outfit had been explained by my Secret Suite statement, and their applause by the time I reached Danny was thunderous. “And here she is, the girl who’s vowed to be true to herself,” Danny greeted me, as if he’d been expecting me to step into the spotlight wearing a ratty hoodie all along.

“Thanks, Danny,” I said, speaking into the microphone. “Everyone at home has seen me dolled up throughout the season, so I thought that tonight, for the finale, they should see me as I am in real life. This hoodie I’m wearing belongs to my best friend, and she’s been going through a very hard time in her life, feeling like she’s all alone. Instead of supporting her these past few months, I’ve been here, trying to win votes. So I wanted to wear this tonight to show her that she’s always in my thoughts.”

“Well, that’s very sweet of you,” Danny said as the people in the studio audience collectively said
aw
.

“In fact,” I said, reaching into the back pocket of my jeans, “I was planning to sing one of Nelly’s greatest hits that she rewrote just for me tonight, but the song is so beautiful that I think it makes more sense for Nelly to sing it on her next tour. Instead, I would like to sing something else.”

Before Danny could object, I walked toward the pianist and violinist who had set up on stage for my performance of
“I Love You, But I Don’t Know What to Do.”
 
I handed them both the sheet music for the song I’d decided was a more appropriate send-off for me on the show, and shockingly, they both nodded in agreement. My heart was beating so hard I thought I might seriously have a coronary on live television if one of the producers were to dash onto the stage to stop me from doing what I was about to do.

Danny, stunned, looked around with his hand raised up to his forehead to block the bright stage lights. “Okay, Allison’s going to sing a different song. Can she do that?”

We were broadcasting live. Danny didn’t have much of a choice other than to cut to a commercial break. One of the producers backstage nodded at him, and he told the audience, “I guess she can do that! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Allison Burch.”

The lights lowered, and I stepped into the spotlight, taking care not to look down at the coaches’ table where fire was surely shooting out of Nelly’s eyes in my direction. As soon as the pianist plunked out the first few notes of Ben E. King’s classic,
“Stand By Me,”
another wave of applause swelled.

I sang the lyrics of the song from my heart, remembering all of the direction that Marlene had given me early in my training. But rather than focusing on my tonality or glottal attack, I just sang as if I were singing directly to Taylor. I was sorry,
truly
sorry, for the fight we’d had over the summer because now I understood for myself how stifling fame could be. My performance, I knew, would cost me the grand prize. As much as I liked to think that audiences at home would respect me for revealing my true self and singing a song that held personal meaning for me, my experience on the show had taught me otherwise. Audiences appreciated glitz and glamor, not genuine emotion. This was a sacrifice I’d agreed to make when Elliott and I had decided to take on the producers with our concept for the season finale.

By the time I reached the first chorus, the studio audience was swaying in the rows of seats, singing along with me. The pianist stopped playing, and the violinist withdrew her bow. The warm sound of hundreds of voices singing along with me filled the theater, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling.

When the chorus finished, the musicians resumed playing, and I cast my eyes downward to the coaches’ table to see Lenore and Jay also singing along. Sour-faced Nelly, of course, had her arms folded over her chest, but Chase’s seat was empty. As I sang the last line of the song, fully aware that I might never in my lifetime sing on a stage that size in front of a live audience again, Chase crossed the stage and squeezed me so tightly I could barely breathe. The applause in the Dolby was deafening.

Backstage, production assistants pushed me down the hallway into the very same control room I’d entered after my audition. Even though Chase Atwood was right behind me, I had no idea what was going to happen to me. Tommy Harper was so angry, he looked like his head was about to pop off. Susan DeMott was wiping goopy mascara-stained tears from the corners of her eyes.

“You are in quite a bit of trouble, Miss Burch,” Tommy snapped as I entered.

“That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on this show,” Susan sobbed.

Just three minutes later after the commercial break, #StandByMe, #VoteAllison, and #StarMaterial were trending on Twitter. I shrank into a corner as network executives strode into the room to argue with Tommy and Susan about what to do with me. I’d given them more of a conundrum than I’d ever aspired to achieve. The votes were pouring in, and now the producers realized they might have no choice but to give the grand prize to a contestant who’d blatantly broken rules. But I didn’t get my hopes up about the number of votes I was receiving; both Elliott and I had agreed that neither of us cared about winning anymore. The show resumed with Elliott’s video segment, which I watched on a video monitor over the shoulder of one of the show’s editors. The producers had mercifully abandoned their hope of making him meet his father, but they’d gone ahead and interviewed his dad in Texas, anyway.

A man who slightly resembled Elliott talked about how proud he was. “It’s nice to see he turned out good, and he always did have a way with that guitar,” Elliott’s dad said. He appeared to be older than he probably was, and wore a scraggly mustache. “Looks like his mom did a real fine job uh raisin’ him.”

Since Elliott had refused to cooperate with that interview, the rest of his segment featured videos from the other contestants who’d trained with him on Chase’s team. There was footage of Jermaine at the beginning of the season saying, “I’m calling it right now, Elliott’s going to win.” Laura from Texas said, “I think Elliott Mercer is kind of in a class all his own. If Bob Dylan had turned up on a singing competition show at the age of seventeen, that’s the kind of talent this kid has. I mean, how do you compete with that?”

Elliott strode out onto the stage carrying his guitar. I strained my ears in order to hear his discussion with Danny over the frantic calls to Sony to negotiate the licensing fees for the song I had just performed.

“What are you going to sing for us tonight, Elliott?” Danny asked.

“There’s this girl in my life, and I haven’t been able to tell her how I feel about her because of some extraordinary circumstances. But if it weren’t for those circumstances, we probably never would have met,” Elliott explained. A few whistles emerged from the back rows of the studio audience.

Danny walked off the stage, and the lights lowered. Elliott strummed his guitar, and without any accompaniment from the back-up band, I knew what song he’d chosen as he sang the first lyric.

As if in a daze, I stood up in the corner where I’d stationed myself. There was so much ongoing commotion in the control room that I walked right out into the hallway without anyone even noticing. What I was about to do wasn’t part of our plan, but felt I needed to do it anyway, to show Elliott and everyone watching on television just how much I adored him. Once I stepped through the double doors leading to the backstage area, I saw Chase leaning against the wall, nodding along with Elliott’s song. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and smiled at me. “The kid’s in love with you, hon,” he said.

Out of all the songs in the world that Elliott could have chosen to perform that night, he’d chosen the song I’d been named for, Elvis Costello’s
“Alison.”
It was a song that my dad had loved in college, and even though my mom wasn’t much of an Elvis Costello fan, she’d liked the name enough to indulge him.

Not a single production assistant tried to stop me as I stepped out onto the stage. The audience was on its feet in a second, stomping and whistling and hooting. I walked up to Elliott, and as he finished his song, he pushed his guitar aside, pulled me close, and kissed me right on national television.

And
that
was how we both lost the grand prize to Tia.

The story of Chase Atwood’s affair with Nelly Fulsom broke the morning after the season finale when some paparazzi shots of the two of them driving together to the Chateau Marmont surfaced online. Taylor called me as soon as she saw the pictures to ask me if I’d had any idea what was going on between them. I told my last lie of the season by insisting that I was as surprised as everyone else.

As it turned out, the producers of
Center Stage!
had been fielding tons of offers for both me and Elliott during the season. They’d just been keeping us in the dark about potential opportunities so that we’d remain focused on the grand prize. The January page of the calendar in our kitchen quickly filled up with meetings scheduled with agents, managers, record label executives, television executives, and talk show hosts. Every night over Christmas break, I conferred with Elliott over who’d been calling him and what he thought he’d be most inclined to do next.

“Did you get a call from that guy at Fairfax Talent? The one who wants to make a reality show about us getting married and moving into the wilderness to survive like pioneers?” he asked. Some of the opportunities offered to us were completely off the wall but proposed by legitimately big names in the industry.

“Yeah, I think I’ll pass on that. I’m not using an outhouse on television,” I said.

“Where’s your sense of adventure? We could scare off wolves at night with songs sung around the campfire.”

Unlike me, Elliott didn’t see much point in resuming his high school classes. He hadn’t enjoyed high school before the show had started. Now that kids he barely knew were driving past his house all the time and sending him congratulatory e-mails, he didn’t think he could stand it. It made me nervous to think of him drifting around Temecula without any commitments after my classes started up again in January. We hadn’t gotten to spend much time together during the show’s production, and now that the show had wrapped, it was undeniable that our lives were going to veer rapidly off in opposite directions.

And then, four days after Christmas, Mom got an e-mail from a television producer about an idea for a show starring me and Elliott that seemed genuinely promising. It was a reality television show about the two of us going on the road to perform as a second stage act at several big spring and summer concert festivals… Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Counterpoint, Sasquatch. We’d be traveling around from April until August.

“What about school, Allison? Aren’t you worried about keeping your grades up before you apply to colleges in the fall?” Mom asked when she saw how much the idea excited me.

But I wasn’t thinking about school. I was thinking about how I could use the opportunity to start over, to shake free from the image that Nelly had created for me, and hang out with rock stars. And of course, traveling around the country with Elliott would be the icing on the cake.

The reaction I received when I returned to Pacific Valley after New Year’s confirmed for me that there was no way my life was ever going to go back to normal. Paparazzi snapped photos of me exiting the bus and out on the track during gym. Girls I barely knew were inappropriately mean to me, sliding anonymous notes in my locker informing me that I wasn’t good enough for Elliott. Boys I barely knew followed me around and struck up awkward conversations with me. Even Oliver Teague stared at me in the cafeteria, which I would have once enjoyed, but now found creepy.

“What do you think about this concert festival show idea?” I asked Elliott one night in early January. I’d found myself daydreaming about performing on stage several times throughout the school day. As much as it would disappoint my parents, I was eager to find a way to perform again. Even though I’d fantasized about returning to high school during the most stressful points of the season, it was impossible to sit through classes without trying to determine how I’d one day utilize the lessons in my future life as a pop star. French future perfect tense?
J’aurai gagné un Grammy dans deux ans.

“It’s less objectionable than all the other crazy reality show ideas,” Elliott admitted. “Actually, Chase kind of liked that one.”

Not wanting to sneak around behind my parents’ backs a second time, I informed them patiently at dinner that I was interested in pursuing the concert tour show. Rather shockingly, they listened to me without objecting. It was almost disappointing how supportive they were acting, since I’d spent all of study hall preparing intelligent, mature responses to the objections I thought they were going to have.

“We want you to go to college, Allison,” Mom reminded me. “But we realize that regular high school isn’t going to be possible for you now. As long as we can arrange for you to keep up with your lessons, we think it’s a good idea for you to continue with your musical training. I’ll call the production company in the morning.”

The next morning on the drive to school (which had quickly become our morning routine when paparazzi encircled me at the bus stop during the first week in January), my dad said, “So, do you think you’re going to sign with that agent? What was his name, Sharky Tankwater?”

“Sharko Tankowitz,
Dad,”
I groaned, foiling what he thought was a funny joke. “Maybe. If I’m going to sign any deals, I’ll need an agent. Or an entertainment lawyer. Or something.”

“Well, we should at least meet a few contenders, don’t you think? To make the best choice?”

“You and Mom are being suspiciously cool about me continuing with this singing stuff.”

Dad smiled and took a sip of his coffee as we rolled to a stop at a light. “We don’t have much of a choice. Your principal called Mom last week and let her know that your presence at Pacific Valley has become a bit of a nuisance. They’re urging us to enroll you in a private school with higher security.”

So, there it was. I was essentially being kicked out of school. Even though it was a relief that I was being gently urged to leave because of my disruptive fame (instead of for excessive talking in class), it was still a weird feeling to know that my teachers wanted me
out.
What my father hadn’t explicitly said was that a private school with higher security was out of the question since my parents were already financially strapped to pay my modest tuition at Pacific Valley.

“Anyhow, your mom is confident that you’re responsible enough to make your own choices about what you want to do next,” Dad told me.

“
Really?
Because I did well on the show?” I asked.

“No,” Dad said, pulling over to the curb in front of school. “Because you toughed it out until the end.”

On a Thursday afternoon, Mom picked me up from school and we drove to Santa Monica for a meeting with the producers at Penguin Squad productions, the reality television company that was “packing” the show idea about me and Elliott on the summer concert circuit. Their office building was far more corporate and professional than I was expecting, and they’d ordered a tray of fancy cookies for our meeting. Manners tended to impress my mom, so I was appreciative that they’d taken the time to provide snacks.

“We think Allison and Elliott have such a strong following that it would be a waste of momentum to not plan for this show and start a marketing campaign for it while their presence in online media is still strong,” a youngish producer named Caleb informed my mother. He seemed as nervous about pitching the show idea to me as I was about having to make a decision. “This is an opportunity for them to test their musical abilities, and to build up a fan base all across the country.
 
We’ve already floated the concept past a few of the major concert organizers, and everyone’s on board. They think this could help them sell tickets. It’s a big win for everyone.”

When we climbed back into the Sentra in the parking garage, I asked Mom, “What do you think?”

“I think,” she said, starting the car, “You probably know better than I do whether this is the right next step for you or not.”

That night in my room, I made a custom map on the internet of all the places I’d visit that spring and summer while shooting the show. The thought of performing twenty times in different cities with different band line-ups was both thrilling and terrifying. It was going to suck not seeing my parents at all for almost five months, but the situation wouldn’t have been any different if I were some kind of brainiac graduating from high school early to depart for college. I was on the brink of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and this time, all of the power to fail or succeed was in my own hands.