Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (5 page)

“Oh,” I repeated.
Say something other than ‘oh,’
I commanded myself. “Did you… already talk to my mom about this?”

“No,” Claire confessed. “I wanted to talk to you first because our other contestant under the age of eighteen is a senior and has worked out details with his school so that missing classes won’t be an issue. I wanted to float that idea past you to see if it might be a possibility. If not, you could probably also be home-schooled, or perhaps take a formal leave of absence.”

Nausea overwhelmed me. Missing school for two months? Asking my parents to
home-school
me?
 
Even if I missed school for two weeks I’d probably never catch up again. My parents would
never
allow me to drop out of high school almost two years early just to be on a television show. Even
I
could admit that was a terrible idea. They’d also be opposed to the idea of my trying to keep up with school work without actually attending school, primarily because I hadn’t done such a great job of keeping up with school work while
going
to class every day for the last eleven years. But still, I couldn’t back out of the show just because of this wrinkle. Like Claire said, she hadn’t told my mom yet, so I still had a chance of figuring out how to rectify the school situation.

After all, I was willing to bet that the other contestant still in high school was Elliott Mercer. The mere thought of seeing him again made my temperature rise.

“I’ll talk to my parents. We’ll find a solution.”

As I walked back to where my friends were sitting, a prickly anxiety swept over me. There was a chance I was going to leave high school early! It made me sad to think about my friends graduating without me, but the idea of never having to endure another mid-term or state-mandated physical fitness test was just about the most magnificent thing I could imagine.

During freshman and sophomore years, I had kept waiting for high school to
feel
like high school, the way high school seemed on television. I thought one morning I’d wake up and everything would just fall into place; I’d drive to school in a shiny red Mini Cooper convertible; my cute boyfriend (preferably Oliver Teague) would be waiting for me at my locker; I’d be dressed in perfect-fitting skinny jeans, and I’d star in the high school musical.

It was already several weeks into
junior
year, and it was reasonable to think that if I remained at Pacific Valley until senior year, nothing would change. I’d never be asked to go to a dance by a boy; I’d never be as well-dressed as the other girls in the eleventh and twelfth grades. I’d never even get a major role in a school drama production, because it was widely accepted that the casting of our pithy plays had a great deal to do with the fame of kids’ parents.
 
After trudging through two years of being a
nobody
at a private high school, I couldn’t allow myself to get nostalgic about leaving to be a contestant on
Center Stage!

“What’s up?” Lee asked me back at the table when I sat down and observed that he’d eaten nearly half of my French fries. Lee was Korean and had a big crush on Nicole, who had an even bigger crush on my brother. Every once in a while I got a little jealous when I could tell Lee was saying or doing something specifically to impress her, and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t in love with Lee, and shouldn’t care if he was trying to win Nicole’s heart. He played clarinet and was a certifiable band geek. His dad was some kind of computer genius and worked at a big software company. Even though I didn’t like Lee
that
way, it sucked that
every
boy was always trying to capture Nicole’s attention, because she had shiny hair, big boobs, and a fake way of laughing that boys seemed to think was adorable.

“Nothing,” I quickly said, still not ready to tell my friends my big secret.

“Fine, be mysterious then,” Lee teased.

“A woman with a secret,” Colton taunted. Colton had a huge puff of curly rust-colored hair and we were all pretty certain he was gay, although he staunchly insisted that he was not. Kaela was madly in love with him, and I’d even seen them holding hands in the hallway before. But Colton had made a habit of calling all of us (including Lee)
girl,
and he had a suspicious interest in Coach Gannett, the boys’ blond, muscular baseball coach.

“Come on, Allison! It’s obvious that there’s something going on. You’ve never gotten a phone call at school before,” Nicole said.

“Yeah, fess up,” Michelle insisted. Michelle was pretty tough, and toward the end of sophomore year she had really started pushing it with Pacific Valley rules. She routinely dyed her hair wild colors and had even given herself (or so she claimed) a crude-looking tattoo in the approximate shape of a bat on the inside of her wrist. Unlike the rest of us, whose social lives revolved around the cafeteria, Michelle had other friends from elementary school who still went to public school. She played soccer in a community league with some of them, and from time to time silenced us with an announcement that she’d be attending a party with those other friends on a weekend. Sometimes, over the summer, Nicole, Kaela, and I would see her at the West Hollywood pool with girls we didn’t recognize, and we’d wave but not say hello.

All of my friends had paused eating and were waiting for my big announcement.
 
Lee cautiously reached over and grabbed two more fries off my tray, but continued to stare at me even as he inserted them into his mouth. “There’s nothing to tell yet. I promise I’ll tell all of you my big news as soon as I know for sure that it’s real,” I vowed.

“Does it have to do with
Todd?”
Nicole asked coyly.

“It has absolutely nothing to do with Todd,” I snapped at her, annoyed that anyone would think that the only way something newsworthy might occur in my life was if it involved my brother
.

“I bet it has to do with—Oliver Teague!” Lee exclaimed, looking across the cafeteria to where my long-time crush was roughhousing with the other hot guys from the soccer team. Oliver Teague looked as gorgeous as ever, showing off a new tan with a white polo shirt. His eyes looked even darker and shinier than usual, and his summer buzz haircut was growing in, which I happened to find extremely sexy. He looked over at our table most likely because everyone at
our
table was looking over at
his
table, and then he smiled at his girlfriend, Morgan Flossmoore. Morgan was a senior and had thick caramel-colored hair that fell to her waist. She also had huge, brown, equine eyes, framed by abundant lashes that she lengthened with clumpy blue mascara.

I turned around to swat Lee on the shoulder.

“God! Shut up, Lee!”

“Ha ha,” Lee chortled. “You want him.”

As we cleared our trays at the end of the lunch hour, I felt my phone buzz in my handbag again, and this time it was a text message from my brother.

IDIOT 1:03 P.M.

congrats on the big news!

Todd’s text was an indication that my mom was excited enough about my shot at stardom to have mentioned it to my brother. My mom and Todd spoke at least once each day, which I thought was for sure some kind of Oedipal weirdness.

Claire’s words remained on my mind throughout Calculus and French. When only fifteen minutes remained of the school day as I sat in Madame Peterson’s classroom staring at the clock, I wanted to kick myself for scheduling my two most difficult classes at the end of the day. I was at my day-dreamiest after two o’clock. I had a feeling I needed to get back to Claire with an answer. At the very least, I wanted to have a solution secured in my head before I raised the topic at the dinner table that night with my parents. As soon as the bell rang, I walked slowly toward Mrs. Gambaryan’s office instead of my locker to collect my books for the bus ride home.

“Knock knock,” I said quietly in the doorway of my guidance counselor’s office. Mrs. Gambaryan looked up from the laptop on her desk and waved for me to enter.

“Allison Burch. Why, what brings your lovely self to my office?”

I sat down in the chair across from her desk and was momentarily distracted by the extremely cheesy framed poster hanging on the wall behind her.
Top 5 Reasons to Visit your Guidance Counselor! #1 – Resolve conflicts!
 
#2 – Discuss your future! #3 – Learn about financial aid!
 
#4 – Search for scholarships! #5 – Ask for support!

Collaborate on a secret plan to graduate early and go on tour with a boy band!
was not on the list.

“Well,” I began, “You may not know this about me, but I like to sing. I’m actually pretty good. Or at least, I used to think I was good, and then I auditioned for this show, and they chose me to be a contestant, so I think that means I
am
pretty good because it’s not just my own opinion.”

Mrs. Gambaryan nodded slowly at me, probably assuming I was nuts. “So, you want to change your elective from photography to choral group?”

I twiddled my thumbs nervously. Pacific Valley was a small school of about eight hundred kids, considering that its student body included pupils from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade. The classes were small enough that someone on the administrative staff, like Mrs. Gambaryan, knew just about every student by name. “Not exactly. I made it onto the cast of this show called
Center Stage!
and there’s a small problem in that they want me to stop going to school during production.”

Mrs. Gambaryan shrugged at me as if to say,
what’s the big deal?
I should probably mention that because my school is in West Hollywood, it’s not so out of the ordinary for a kid to miss a few classes to shoot a sitcom pilot or a commercial. So I probably shouldn’t have expected a more dramatic reaction from Mrs. Gambaryan about my announcement.

“And production might be as long as twelve weeks if I don’t get voted off early,” I added.

Now Mrs. Gambaryan sat back in her chair and folded her arms over her ample bosom. She stared me down for a moment with a frown and then removed her glasses from her face. “Well. Twelve weeks. Now that’s quite a significant amount of time away from school.”

“Yeah, so,” I shifted in my seat uncomfortably. “I was wondering if maybe it makes sense for me just to prepare for the GED.
 
You know, so that in the worst case scenario, I’ll be covered.”

Without saying a word, Mrs. Gambaryan began typing into her laptop and then said quietly, “Hmph.”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, you won’t be turning seventeen until February. Unfortunately, the GED isn’t an option for you. In the state of California, that test is primarily for adults over the age of eighteen who want to receive a high school diploma. You’re not an adult, and unless you’re fewer than sixty days away from your seventeenth birthday, you don’t qualify to take the test.”

I felt all my brilliant cunning wither away, and in its place, dread and hopelessness flooded my throat. I wouldn’t be sixty days away from my seventeenth birthday until the
Center Stage!
season was practically over. I was young to be a junior. My parents had fought about whether to enroll me early or hold me back a year when I’d started first grade. I had my brother to thank for being among the youngest in my class; they had decided to go ahead and enroll me under the incorrect assumption that I’d be bright, like him.

“So, with your parents’ approval, of course,” Mrs. Gambaryan said, putting her glasses back on, “we could arrange for an off-site study program. Or, if you feel like you’re ready to finish high school early, one of the local public high schools might allow you to enroll in a program to earn accelerated credits and get your diploma.”

I grinned to hide my revulsion to the idea of doing more school work to graduate early. The whole point of early graduation was to
avoid
doing more work that might distract me from performing well on the show.

“But I’d hate to see that happen,” Mrs. Gambaryan continued. “It’s a pleasure having you here at Pacific Valley.”

My mother had done more than listen closely when she’d spoken with Claire earlier that day. She’d taken copious notes and requested that Claire e-mail everything related to the production over to her for careful review. Sometimes it blew my mind that my mom was a part-time yoga instructor and not a world-famous corporate attorney the way she nit-picked over contractual language. At dinner time, the three of us sat around the kitchen table eating gluten-free, dairy-free pizza from zPizza, which was the closest thing to junk food delivery my mom would permit. Armed with a yellow highlighter marker, she poured over the paperwork.

“Shooting begins on Monday, September 18th. We’re supposed to drop you off in Studio City at seven A.M. for your first day on set,” Mom read aloud. “We have to bring two forms of legal ID for you in order to gain admittance to the studio lot.”

“Is that for practice with Nelly?” I asked hopefully. September 18
^th
was almost two weeks away. That seemed like an eternity of days during which I’d have to go through the motions at school before my new life began. I was eager to put on some headphones and grab a microphone.

“No,” Mom said, reading more closely. “First, you have a dance training session for two hours. Then, it says you have a break; then you need to report for hair and makeup.
 
Then you have lunch,
then
a lesson with Nelly, a group seminar, and a lesson with a voice coach. You’re supposed to bring exercise clothes, a robe, a white t-shirt, a pair of jeans, a pair of athletic shoes, preferably cross-trainers.”

“Can I see that, Mom?”

She handed me the packet, which was open to the Week 1 schedule. Lesson after lesson packed every day of the week. The days were scheduled from seven in the morning until six in the evening. The prospect of dance classes scared me a little; I was pretty uncoordinated, and there was no way on earth I was going to wear a leotard in the vicinity of camera equipment. I hadn’t brought up the topic of schoolwork with my parents yet that evening. Already I was wondering how I’d ever manage to keep up with lessons if I were running around nonstop every day.

What was most troubling was that I’d only been provided with the schedule for Week 1. The first Expulsion Series would be broadcast on the internet the first Friday of production, and four of the forty original contestants would be sent home after the season premiere. There was a chance I’d be one of those four.

“What’s this?” Dad asked, looking through a different stapled packet of papers. “The Get-to-Know-the-Contestant shoot?”

“I didn’t read that one yet,” Mom said, but Dad was already thumbing through the pages. As terrifying as all of this was, I was so excited I could barely chew my pizza.

“Uh oh. Mom’s not gonna like this,” Dad said with a smile. “The production company tapes a segment at the homes of every contestant prior to the first broadcast to introduce them to audiences. A camera crew is coming here next Thursday morning to interview all of us.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous! I have to be at Levity on Thursdays. And that’s just another day that Allison will have to miss school,” my mom rambled. “I’m going to call them and see if they can tape our segment on a Saturday instead. And I don’t like the idea of a bunch of strange men in our home. What about electricity? I hope they bring one of those big production trucks with an exterior generator because I don’t want all of those lights driving up our power bill. We’ll have to ask if their insurance policy will cover our house in case anything gets broken.”

Dad held up the packet of papers and pointed to a line of copy with his index finger. “They’re already one step ahead of you, Lisa. They have to shoot on a weekday because of union rules. The production won’t pay the crew overtime to tape on a Saturday. And their blanket insurance policy covers all incidentals on location. There are insurance forms in the packet for us to review and sign.”

Visibly annoyed, Mom snatched the packet away from him and began reading. To my surprise, Dad turned to me with a big grin and pantomimed a box around his whole head. “Am I in frame?” he asked me. “How’s my hair?”

“It’s mostly gray, Dad,” I told him, humored that he seemed into the idea of taping a segment at our house.

He took a swig of diet soda. “Maybe I should get some of that Just for Men stuff. Get rid of all the salt and pepper for my big television debut.”

Mom shot him a dirty look, and he shrugged innocently. “I’ll stay home from work that day to do the taping. We can’t let American audiences think that Allison is a neglected child.”

“Thank you, Dad,” I said, genuinely meaning it. I wouldn’t have thought that of my two parents, my dad would be the one latching onto the idea of my TV stardom first.

“I am ready for my close-up,” he said.

“Really, Rich,” my mother scolded him.

The next day at school, everyone was restless since it was a typical Friday in early September, when it still felt like summer. Pacific Valley didn’t air condition its classrooms. Sometimes in the fall when the Santa Ana winds blew, the heat was enough to make you want to put you head down on your desk and fall asleep in a puddle of sweat.

“The new Sanborn Meyers movie opens tonight, and it’s playing in Burbank,” Lee announced at lunchtime as he unwrapped his sandwich. “Who’s in for a field trip tomorrow?”

“I’m not taking the bus to Burbank,” Colton replied.

“Well, if it’s a group field trip, then no one has to take the bus because one of our close, personal friends will drive.” Lee looked directly at Nicole with pleading eyes. “Right, Nicole?”

“Ugh, I am so not driving you guys to the Valley tomorrow if it’s going to be hella hot. Especially if it’s to see some dumb gangster movie.” Nicole rolled her eyes as she wiped excess mayonnaise off of her sandwich bun with a paper napkin. I hid my smirk. Taylor always used to make fun of Nicole secretly when she said the word
hella
back when we were all in junior high together before Taylor went off to boarding school.

“Sanborn Meyers does not make stupid gangster movies,” Lee argued. “He’s the future of independent cinema.” Lee made no secret of the fact that he aspired to be a filmmaker. He spent his weekends running around Los Angeles with his tiny digital video camera, and constantly harassed us to star in the little screenplays he penned while he should have been paying attention in class.
 
Even though we were only in eleventh grade, he had already been pestering the admissions staff of the film and television department at USC since freshman year.

“I’ll drive if you want,” Kaela offered. Kaela’s parents had bought her a new Lexus when she turned sixteen in the spring. She and Nicole were the only two among us who had wheels, and Nicole was very stingy about offering rides. In her defense, Nicole had been working part-time at Robek’s since she’d taken over Taylor’s shift in June. She truly didn’t have time to be hauling all of us around to movies on weekends.
 
“But seriously, you guys have to chip in for gas money. Burbank is far.”

“Done,” Lee agreed.

“Allison,” Colton called my name from the other end of the table. “Did you hear in the announcements this morning that the auditions for
Fiddler on the Roof
are next week?”

Of course I’d heard the announcement about the high school fall musical during Homeroom. I’d gotten quite excited about the prospect of getting a singing part as one of Tevye’s daughters, but then realized there was little chance I’d be cast. Furthermore, I’d be too busy
taping a television show
to be bothered with a silly high school musical theater production.

“I think you’d have a good shot at playing Hodel or Chava,” Michelle chimed in. “You’ve got the right hair and everything.” Michelle worked behind the scenes on school theatrical productions in the winter when her soccer league was on break, dressing in black and moving furniture around in between scenes. She didn’t seem to have any interest at all in performing, which was baffling to me. Painting flats and hanging curtains on sets without ever being acknowledged by the applause of an audience was incomprehensible, in my opinion, even more now that I had finally heard applause intended for
me.

“Actually,” I began, setting my sandwich down on my orange plastic lunch tray. I had decided that morning before school that I’d tell everyone about
Center Stage!
after making Mom scour the paperwork to ensure that I wasn’t breaking any rules by telling people before the show’s first airdate. As it turned out since at-home viewing audiences could text in their votes for singers, contestants were encouraged to start building fan bases early. There was no sense in putting my big news off any longer. “I can’t try out for
Fiddler on the Roof
because I already have a part in something else.”

Now all eyes were on me. Nicole lifted one eyebrow, a little trick that she thought made her look irresistibly sexy. Kaela stirred her Greek yogurt and commanded, “Spill it!”

“Well,” I said, lowering my voice because I wasn’t sure I wanted the entire student body of Pacific Valley to hear me, “Do you guys know that show
Center Stage!
?”

“Uh,
yeah
.
Danny Fuego is like,
hot,”
Nicole said, taking a monster-sized bite out of her sandwich now that it had been relieved of the offending mayonnaise.

“Ew, not even,” Michelle disagreed. “He looks like he has major B.O.”

“How can someone
look
like they have body odor?” Nicole challenged.

“Guys,” Lee urged them both to be quiet.
 
“Allison’s talking.”

“So, I ditched school on Wednesday to try out for the show, and I made it. I’m going to be one of the contestants,” I announced, trying to sound casual about it.

Lee exclaimed, “Holy crap. That’s major!”

Nicole was confused. “Wait a minute. On Wednesday? You said you were in the nurse’s office on Wednesday.”

“God, Nicole! I
lied,
okay?” Sometimes I wondered if Taylor was right about Nicole, and she really was just dumb even though she was in advanced classes. “I didn’t want anyone to know I’d cut school to try out for a TV show until I knew whether or not I’d made it.”

“Wait—so you’re, like, really going to be on the show?” Colton asked me.

“I’m really going to be on the show.”

Lee pushed his lunch tray aside and leaned forward across the table toward me. “Allison, do you know how
awesome
this is?”

“I didn’t even know you liked to sing that much,” Kaela muttered, licking yogurt off her plastic spoon.

“Like, this is the biggest thing ever to happen at our high school,” Lee continued, as if in a trance.

“It’s
not
that big of a deal, Lee,” I corrected him. For starters, a girl named Megan Humboldt, who’d been four years ahead of us in classes, had been cast in an adventure movie about Egyptian mummies when we were in ninth grade. She’d become a gossip magazine regular and was engaged to marry a famous action movie director thirty years older than her. One of the kids in the seventh grade, Brendan Lopez, played an autistic child genius on a sitcom and had already been nominated for an Emmy.
 
My little victory seemed very insignificant compared to some of our classmates’ who were practically celebrities. “I could get kicked off in the first Expulsion Series.”

“No way,” Lee argued. “That can’t happen if you get a ton of at-home votes, not even if you epically screw up.”

“How am I going to get a ton of at-home votes?” I wondered aloud. “No one in the world knows who I am.”

“Yet,”
Lee said. “We can fix that.”

“Well, you’ve only got about a week and a half to fix that because the show starts taping the Monday after next,” I informed my friends. “And I basically can’t come to school anymore until the last episode of the show airs. It’s in their terms and conditions. So, I might not be here again for… a while.” I didn’t dare suggest to my friends that I might be kept out of classes until after Christmas break. It seemed like even voicing the possibility might jinx it.

“This is crazy,” Kaela marveled.

“Crazy
amazing,”
Michelle clarified.

“And next Thursday, I won’t be in school because the production company is taping a segment at my house for my introduction on the first show. They’re, like, interviewing my parents and stuff,” I said, a little embarrassed.