Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (9 page)

The deadline for submitting auditions to
Center Stage!
was the following evening, but I already knew I’d never dare to send mine in.

When I was four years old, I tripped over my shoelaces at the La Brea Tar Pits and fell on my face so hard that I broke one of my front teeth in half. Fortunately, it was a baby tooth, but that mighty tumble was the first in a childhood plagued by a remarkable clumsiness. In first grade, I begged to be enrolled in jazz dance class with Taylor. Once Mom enrolled me, I realized that my fascination with it had a lot more to do with the rainbow-striped leotard and tutu that Taylor wore to recitals than with learning how to dance. My parents, the terrorists, kept video footage of the few recitals in which I had performed (before throwing in the towel on dancing). In the videos, it was apparent that I had no ability or desire to follow along with the rest of the group, whatsoever. While all of the other little girls smiled and moved in unison through the rehearsed motions, spinning and raising their arms in sync, I was always off on the side, freestyling.

“She’s an improvisationalist,” Dad would reason whenever Mom reminded me that there was a dance
routine
that everyone was expected to follow.

In junior high gym class, on rainy days, boys and girls would be paired up for dance lessons taught by Mr. Medavoy, a former Marine and very unlikely dance instructor. I was hopeless at the polka, never able to follow my partner’s lead when it was time to turn, and the only part of square dancing that I was able to master was the do-si-do. I sucked at all of it, from the Grapevine to the Hustle, and developed a technique of lagging behind everyone else during line dances so that I could follow their movements.

That was a long time ago!
I assured myself the morning of my first day of production on
Center Stage!
as I pulled on the brand new yoga pants that Mom had bought me for dance rehearsals with the show. Surely I couldn’t still be so apocalyptically uncoordinated. However, I couldn’t remember the last time I had danced in public. Even at school dances, my friends and I lurked in the corner of Pacific Valley School’s gymnasium beneath the streamers, trading gossip and singing along to songs, instead of dancing. Senior boys would always venture into our dark corner in search of Nicole and pull her onto the dance floor for slow dances, but Kaela, Michelle, and I typically just drank a lot of punch.
 

On our drive over the hill toward Studio City on the 101 Freeway, I desperately prayed that some of my mom’s natural grace had blossomed within me since Mr. Medavoy’s gym class hoedowns. I was hopeful that an unlikely miracle would reveal itself in my dance class, like Superman finding out as a young Clark Kent that he had the unexpected power to lift a car.

When we reached the studio lot, the attendant at the gate checked a list for our names and waved his approval for Mom to enter. The studio where we would be shooting didn't look anything like I’d imagined. In my dreams leading up to this day, the studio was a majestic Hollywood campus encircled by a tall stucco wall and breezy palm trees. I had expected that there would be an ornate iron gate like the one at Paramount Pictures near my house, keeping mundane Los Angeles out and glamour
in
. I had imagined that a handsome production assistant driving a golf cart would greet me and that he’d whisk me away across the manicured lot to my mother’s astonishment.
 
The fanciest thing about
this
actual,
real
studio was the bright network sign along the road marking the entrance to the parking lot. Beyond the guard’s station, I saw several office buildings and two buildings that looked like warehouses. There were no emerald green, plush lawns. No cute little bungalows from which producers rushed with scripts tucked under their arms. This drab place, the network studio lot, would be where I would spend the majority of the next few weeks of my life.

Despite the humdrum appearance of the studio, I was almost psychotically excited. It was, at last, show time! The sensation that had seemed like a kind of a fun, Christmas morning excitement earlier that morning at home had boiled into anxiety so strong that I was queasy as Mom parked the car. Typical Los Angeles blanketed the sky, which had previously been pink with the promise of a sunny day at dawn. As we crossed the blacktop to the building’s entrance, I hoisted my huge canvas bag over my shoulder. In it, I had packed two changes of clothes, my makeup bag, a snack, a bottle of water, and magazine to read in case I got bored. Later that day I would marvel at how I could have ever thought I’d have time to get bored during production. It was painfully early in the day, and there were still a lot of empty parking spaces in the lot. I felt completely unprepared and wished I had at least allowed my mom to give me a few yoga lessons in the time I’d wasted since my audition.

“We’re here to check in for
Center Stage!
” my mom informed the smiling receptionist in the front lobby.
 
The receptionist wore multiple earrings in each ear, and had rhinestones glued onto her impressive fake fingernails.

“You must be Allison,” the receptionist greeted me. She stood from behind the front desk where she sat to meet us on the other side. The lobby was so small that it was hard to ascertain anything else about the inside of the building from its appearance. Behind the big front desk was a wall of thick glass tiles and a big potted plant. Signs that boasted the logos for a few of the production company’s shows, including
Center Stage!,
hung on the cream-colored wall next to the glass tiles. To the left of the reception desk was a large wooden door with a security panel of buttons. There were three red chairs and a dirty-looking coffee table covered in greasy, folded magazines, but nothing at all in the lobby suggested that this was a place where dreams were fulfilled. Where magic happened.

The receptionist lightly touched my shoulder and said, “You’re in Ms. Fulsom’s group, and you’re the first to arrive.
 
One of the PA’s will take you down to Dance Studio Four in a moment.” We were embarrassingly early; I’d bounced out of bed at the crack of dawn and had rushed Mom through her coffee even though she’d repeatedly advised me to cool my jets. The receptionist flashed her amazing smile at me again and returned to her desk to call someone (presumably, someone behind the wooden door). “Allison Burch has arrived,” she said into the phone before hanging up. She nodded toward the red chairs. “Go ahead and have a seat.”

“Okay, hon,” Mom said, pulling my hair from my shoulders around to the back of my head. “Knock them dead today. Call me on my cell if you need anything, and Dad will be here at six to pick you up.”

I didn’t want her to leave, but didn’t want her to stay, either. I wondered if other contestants’ parents were going to walk all the way into the building with them. Then I remembered that most of the other contestants were probably driving themselves to the studio because they were adults.

I took a seat on the least-stained of the red chairs after Mom departed. As I thumbed through the first few pages of the magazine I chose from the selection, I realized it contained an entire full-page feature on Taylor Beauforte’s downtown style.
Downtown style!
I smirked. To the best of my knowledge, Taylor had never been
downtown
in any city, anywhere. There was Taylor, carrying a blue Coach bag and wearing skinny jeans with a white floral pattern on them. There she was again, briskly walking through an airport, wearing tight olive-colored cargo pants with a white eyelet sleeveless top and beige Grecian-style sandals. She was definitely dressing much more fashionably than she ever had when she lived in West Hollywood now that she lived with her dad. However, Chase Atwood’s wife was a stylist. It was a safe assumption that Taylor was getting some help.

“Allison!” a deep, booming voice called my name and I looked up from the magazine. A nerdy guy carrying a walkie-talkie motioned for me to follow him.
 
“I’m Rob. You’re supposed to come with me.”

Rob was my height, had a five o’clock shadow, and wore a wrinkled polo shirt. He punched a four-digit code into the access panel on the wall, and I followed him through the door and down a long hallway, its white walls scuffed with hand prints and dirt.
 
We passed several doors, some of which had signs with light bulbs over them blinking in red:
ON AIR.
Rob never slowed his pace near any of those doors, and when the hallway came to an end, we turned left and continued toward a glass door that appeared to lead outside.

“Are you taking me to my dance lesson?” I asked sheepishly, primarily to make conversation since I already knew my schedule for the day.

“All I know is they said Studio Four,” Rob told me brusquely. “Don’t know if they’re going to have you dancing in there, or tossing Frisbees, or what.”

Rob pushed the glass door at the end of the hallway open and stepped through it, barely holding it open for a split second for me to follow him. I was a little offended by his rudeness; didn’t he know I was about to become a big star?

White gravel crunched beneath my feet as we walked toward two big warehouses I had seen from the parking lot. Rob led me to the far corner of the warehouse on my left, and up a small block of stairs. He knocked on a white plastic storm door that looked better suited for a residence than a warehouse, and a woman dressed in a mulberry-colored terry cloth jumpsuit answered.

“This is Allison Burch, the first of the Fulsom group,” Rob told the woman, reading my name off of a clipboard.

The woman inside the warehouse appeared to be confused. After looking at me for a second, she opened the storm door and told Rob something in Spanish.

“No hablo Español,” Rob told the woman impatiently. He then turned to me and said, “I think this is the cleaning lady. You can wait here until the rest of the group arrives.”

The cleaning lady seemed a lot happier to have my company than Rob did, and she chatted away as she mopped the cement floor of the warehouse. I sat down cautiously on an unsteady wooden chair and took in my surroundings as I waited (for what or whom, I wasn’t sure).
 
There were large bolts of white paper hung horizontally on the wall at the far end of the open warehouse space, which I guessed was probably used as a sound studio. Wires and ropes for arranging lights and microphones dangled from the very high ceiling.
 
Double doors suggestively beckoned to me on the other side of the room, but I resisted the urge to explore. It was an awfully large space for a dance practice, and as the minutes dragged on, I grew increasingly suspicious as to why Rob had left me in
 
this large, damp warehouse.

Fifteen minutes passed.

Then twenty.

The cleaning lady tired of my silence and slipped headphones over her ears. As she hummed along with music, a sense that I should have been somewhere else crept up on me. Where
was
everyone? Had Rob brought me to the wrong place? Was I going to be penalized for being late? Was this some kind of
Center Stage!
trick to determine if I was gutsy enough to find my dance lesson?

Just as I worked up the nerve to rise from my chair and walk back toward the storm door to peek my head outside, the double doors at the other end of the warehouse opened. A slim black man wearing a white t-shirt and gray knit pants appeared.
 
“Are you Allison?” he asked in a voice that sounded a little cross.

“Yes,” I admitted, although, at that very second, I wished I was not Allison.

“What are you doing in here? We’re down the hall in the rehearsal room. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

I threw my big bag over one shoulder and trotted as fast as I could without seeming like I was running toward the double doors. “Sorry! The production assistant brought me here, and I didn’t know where everyone was.”

My perfectly legitimate excuse met with silence, and I followed the man who I presumed to be the dance instructor down the brightly lit, fluorescently flooded hallway. We arrived at an open doorway, and through it I could see a jumble of people sprawled out on the hardwood floor. A floor-to-ceiling mirror spanned the length of one entire wall of the large, airy room. Speakers were positioned in all four corners, and an elaborate sound system control deck was built into one of the walls. Ten aluminum water bottles stood in alignment on the table at the back of the room like soldiers, all of which boasted the
Center Stage!
logo. The dance instructor strode into the room confidently ahead of me, and the people sitting on the floor straightened up in his presence.

“You may have a seat,” he told me in his practiced, perfect diction without turning to look at me, and made a dramatic arm gesture toward the floor. I felt the weight of nine glares fall upon me, and I immediately plopped down as instructed. These nine people would be my colleagues and competitors for the next few weeks… if I were to make it past the first Expulsion Series. It was a little odd to think that Nelly Fulsom had hand-picked all of us. We were a diverse assortment of sizes and races.

“Thanks for wasting everyone’s time,” a beautiful brunette with silky hair to her waist hissed at me. She looked a little older than me and was the same kind of beautiful as Nicole: self-tanner, a lot of eyeliner, naturally thin. I tried to imagine what she’d look like without all of the makeup she wore and thought smugly that she probably would look like a completely different girl. She wore nothing but a hot pink sports bra and skin-tight Lycra yoga pants, showing off her six-pack and bronzed abdomen. I fought the urge to explain about my lateness, not wanting to provoke the wrath of the teacher for talking in class. It was pointless to insist that my tardiness wasn’t my fault; no one cared.