Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (10 page)

“Alright, everyone. Now that we’re all here let’s formally begin, shall we? I am Erick St. John, your dance guide. In this class, we will be studying the art of movement. We will condition our bodies to transition in controlled, practiced manners, rather than impulsively, which is the way most of us learn to dance at an early age.”

Erick spoke in what I was pretty sure was a phony British accent. He paced as he addressed us. “I have danced on the stages of New York City. London. Paris. I will instruct you in the principles of dance, teaching you to use your bodies as translators of energy.”

I thought of Taylor in the street style spread I’d just browsed in the magazine earlier that morning and half-wished she was there in dance class with me. She would have covertly grimaced at me in response to Erick St. John’s introduction. I didn’t want to be a translator of energy. I just wanted the ability to sway while performing without looking like I had a twitching disorder.

“It is imperative in this studio that you focus. You will study your reflection in the mirror so that you become accustomed to how it feels when your body is moving with correct form. This isn’t play time, people. You are here to work.”

He demanded that we all get up on our feet, and several of us scurried to the side of the room to dump our respective gym bags and canvas totes in a corner. We lined up in front of the mirror, and Erick stood in front of us in the center. He stared at his reflection as he led us through a series of warm-up stretches.
 
I was careful to step into the line at the end opposite from the brunette in the hot pink sports bra. Instead, I joined the queue between a heavyset guy and a tattooed woman who looked like she was at the high end of the age range for contestants on the show.

“Exhale as you raise your arms. Breathe in, breathe out,” Erick instructed, semi-squatting as he raised and lowered his arms over his head.
 
“Now lean to your right side, straightening your left leg, and fall into a deep lunge.”

The warm-up stretches were tough, but I was proud of myself for keeping up. After fifteen minutes of holding stretch positions, a few of the people in our group were already winded and sweating. I was feeling quite accomplished until Erick announced that the warm-up was
only just starting.

“Alright, everyone, now we’re going to start our jog-in-place. It’s very important to warm up all the muscles and get the blood moving before we start our work-out. If you can’t keep up, it’s okay to take a break, catch your breath, and pick back up when you can,” Erick instructed. All of us in the group looked at each other in disbelief.
More
warming up before dancing?
 
How difficult was the actual
work-out
going to be?

I reluctantly ran in place along with everyone else in line and fretted when Erick fell out of the formation and walked behind our row, inspecting everyone’s form. “Shoulders back!” he barked at a guy with a beard in his early twenties. “Exercising with poor posture is worse than not exercising at all!”

“Don’t hold your breath!” he ordered a black girl with long braids. “It’s very important to keep breathing!”

I tried to take to heart all of the instructions that Erick gave to everyone else so that by the time he reached my end of the row, he’d be unable to find fault with my jogging. My heart swelled with jealousy when he passed the girl in the pink sports bra and complimented her on her posture.

“I run marathons,” she replied.

Ugh,
I thought, a glimmer of hatred for her igniting in my chest. I seriously hoped her voice wasn’t all that great, whoever she was, because I already knew I would not enjoy her company for twelve long weeks.

I pushed my shoulders way back. I kept my spine as straight as possible. I lifted my knees up high as Erick had while he was still running, and I was breathing with more focus than ever before in my sixteen years of life. Watching my reflection, I cursed the beads of sweat rolling from my forehead down to my cheeks, and the blotch of dark sweat that had bloomed around the neckband of my t-shirt.
 
I saw Erick approaching in the mirror, and I averted my eyes away from him as he inspected the jogging of the guy to my right.

“Take a rest, big guy! I can’t have anyone passing out in this studio! Go get some water! People! It’s very important to take rests when you need them!”

The big guy on my right, who was at least a foot taller than me and probably almost fifty pounds overweight, fell out of line to cross the room and grab a water bottle.

“Run naturally!” Erick barked at me after observing me for a moment. “Everything about your form is unnatural. Relax your shoulders! Relax your spine! You’re not going to win any awards for throwing your back out.”

I saw shame register on my face in the mirror as I let my shoulders droop back to their usual slump. This didn’t please Erick either. “I didn’t tell you to relax
that
much! We are in a studio of dance, not leisure!”

I straightened up again, and tried to push my shoulders back only
half
as much as I had before, but it was useless. Obviously my shoulders were all wrong, my posture was all wrong. Erick shook his head at me in disappointment and moved on to the woman running on my left.

After twenty minutes of heavy cardio, we were all sweating through our clothes, red in the face, and greasy-haired. Erick told us to all take a water bottle, and he began screwing around with the audio system until pulsating dance music with heavy bass boomed from the speakers in each corner of the room. Finally, I assumed, it was dance time. During our water break, I checked my cell phone and almost screamed when I saw that we still had an hour more to go. Our warm-up had been more intense exercise than I had ever done in gym class at Pacific Valley. We were nowhere near finished, and I was already wondering about where and when I’d be able to shower.

Back in our line formation, our first challenge was to learn how to step side to side and clap. It sure had sounded simple when Erick had told us what we were going to do, but it was anything
but
simple. Erick wanted us to tap our feet together a certain way on step, move our hips without moving our torsos the wrong way, and bend our knees without bending too low. I watched my own body twist and contort in the mirror as I tried to step and clap. I sucked at the one dance move that I would have thought I’d mastered at school dances prior to entering Erick’s studio. There was no denying it: my dancing was disastrous. How was I ever going to win this stupid contest if I couldn’t even survive the very first two-hour dance rehearsal?

And then… I noticed the cameras. At some point, while we’d all been struggling to step and clap, a small camera crew had entered the studio to record us. The director noticed that I’d stopped “dancing” and motioned for me to turn back around and continue. Oh, the humiliation. I should have guessed that at some point, we’d be videotaped during our lesson. The show always demonstrated the evolution of contestants, from clumsy novices with bad hair to polished, camera-ready singers on the brink of stardom. How had I forgotten that my journey to fame on
Center Stage!
would include a ton of ugly duckling moments?

“Alright, people. We’re going to take a short break so that the camera crew can interview all of you about your training so far. Keep moving, keep your heart rates up. I don’t want to see anyone just standing around, idle,” Erick told us.

While walking in place, sipping water, I paid close attention to learn the identities of the contestants in my group as the camera crew made its rounds. The big guy next to whom I’d been warming up was named Chet, and he was a college student from Baltimore. The young woman with tattoos was named Suzanne, and she was from Arizona. Back at home, she taught fifth grade at a public elementary school. The heavy-sweating guy with the red beard was named Ian and he was a bartender from Brooklyn. He sang in a local rock band when he wasn’t in Los Angeles, taking more drastic measures to get famous. There was a young Latina woman studying to be a dental hygienist from Slidell, Louisiana who used her first moment in front of the camera to offer a shout-out to her daughter, who was staying with their grandmother while her mom competed on
Center Stage!
.

A bubbly blond college student named Christa told the camera crew that the dance class was more difficult than she’d been expecting, but she was determined to
work hard
and
triumph!
Christa concerned me even before I heard her sing; she was from Memphis and kind of
looked
a little like Nelly. It was no big surprise that Nelly had chosen her to be on the team.

The black girl with braids from New Jersey warned the camera crew that she was going to punch somebody if she looked sweaty and gross in the first footage of her seen by America. Her name was Eunice, and the director assured her that they'd shoot more interviews
 
throughout the day when we weren’t all sweaty. Brian, a skinny, pale guy from Dallas, repeatedly told the camera crew how happy he was to be there. Jarrett, a good-looking young black guy from Miami, bragged that the dance class was nothing compared to the rigorous training he’d recently undergone as part of a touring production of the stage version of the animated film
The Living Carousel.
It was about magical animals on a carousel in a park who sprang to life each night. Jarrett had played a sea horse.

The girl in the hot pink sports bra was named Robin. She was an aspiring model from Chicago and was so confident about her chances on the show, she seemed arrogant.
Relax,
I commanded myself as I watched her wink and flirt her way through her interview.
No one likes arrogance.

“Tell us your name and where you’re from,” the camera man of the small crew greeted me. A lavalier microphone had been clipped to the soaked neckband of my t-shirt.

“My name is Allison, and I’m from West Hollywood,” I said, trying to offer up a genuine smile. At least by going last, I’d had a chance to cool down a bit.

“How is your dance training going?” the camera man asked me.

“Well, I wouldn’t say I am the world’s greatest dancer. Maybe it’ll be okay if I just sing and… stand in one place? But it’s awesome to have the opportunity to try new things with some of the best teachers there are.”
Be humble,
I reminded myself.
Don’t showboat.

After our grueling dance rehearsal, we were all relieved to learn that we would be assigned trailers so that we could shower, change clothes, and freshen up. More relief followed when I found out that we would be sharing trailers with at least one other person, and I was paired with Eunice instead of Robin. Robin would be sharing with Suzanne, who looked like she was in her forties and seemed tough enough to deal with the likes of the prima donna. A strange city of trailers had been arranged at the back of the parking lot. Twenty trailers, to be exact, parked in a four rows of five.

“This ain’t bad at all,” Eunice announced when we stepped into our trailer. There was a worn-looking couch, a stack of clean blankets, and a mini-fridge. Inside the fridge, she found bottled water and soda. “You can shower first,” she offered. “I’m gonna drink as much water as I can find after that crazy work-out.” Eunice was a cheerleader for her college’s basketball team, and even
she
was exhausted.

The shower was anything but luxurious in the trailer’s tiny bathroom. There was, however, very fancy organic body wash and shampoo in the shower that smelled like gardenias, presumably from one of the show’s sponsors. Fluffy white towels were stacked up in the bathroom cabinet. Even before cooling down completely from the dance rehearsal, I was sure that I was going to be in some legitimate pain the next day.

I stepped outside the trailer while Eunice used the shower, not bothering to blow my hair dry since we would next be taken back into the warehouse for hair and makeup consultations before lunch. What a strange little world it was on that studio lot, I marveled, with so many of us enduring such a bizarre process just for a chance to have a few minutes of singing on stage. I stared up at the puffy clouds floating past in the powder blue sky, wondering what my friends at school were doing at that very moment. They were only in their second class of the day, and I already felt like I had lived an entire day’s worth of events before ten A.M.

“So, you’re the one.”

I snapped out of my reverie when I heard a male voice interrupt my thoughts. I found myself looking directly into the over-saturated turquoise eyes of Elliott Mercer.

“Excuse me?” I asked, thinking for a second that perhaps I’d misheard him. “Which one?”

 
“You’re the one everyone’s saying is going to win.”

There was simply no denying it: Elliott Mercer had some kind of power over me.

My initial impression of him the day we’d auditioned had been correct: he was nothing spectacular to look at from a distance. He was at least five inches taller than me with a head of wavy chocolate brown hair that had grown far past the tops of his ears and the collar of his chambray shirt. There were angry pink starbursts of acne along his jaw and a smattering across his forehead, making me wonder why he hadn’t gotten some of that mail-order soap to control it in the weeks that had passed since our auditions.

But if you looked beyond the overgrown hair and the acne, it was plain to see that he had the face of a movie star. Square jaw, chiseled cheekbones, broad, straight nose, and full, soft lips. With a haircut and that skin condition sorted out, he would have been a veritable hottie. As I stood mere feet from him outside my trailer, my heart fluttered for a split second before I commanded it to stop.

“I don’t know about that,” I replied. “You’re the one who writes his own songs, like Ryan Adams or Coner Oberst. I’m sure the coaches eat that up.”

 
“More like PJ Harvey, if you feel the need to compare me to someone.”

I stared him down, wondering what kind of weird boy would prefer to have his talent compared to a woman’s instead of another guy’s. Certainly no boy at the Pacific Valley School would have felt that way. “Who’s saying that about me?” I asked, finally catching on to his rather atypical greeting.

He shrugged and kicked at the gravel on the ground with his filthy Jack Purcells. “Pretty much everyone.”

I wanted him to elaborate because I wanted to know
who
qualified as
everyone
. “Well, that’s dumb. The show hasn’t even started yet. No one has any idea who’s going to do well.”

Elliott cracked a wide smile so genuine and sweet that I wished I’d gotten to enjoy it longer before he looked down at his shoes again. “Wow, you have a lot to learn, don’t you?”

I put my hands on my hips. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Elliott shrugged in a way that was barely detectable as his shoulders swam in his chambray button-down, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. “You’ll see,” he assured me and walked away down a row in between trailers.

I stood outside my trailer letting the wind blow my damp hair for a minute or two, reflecting on that strange exchange. If Elliott was hearing rumors that I was the contestant he was going to have to beat, were the other contestants also hearing them? Had Robin been so snarky to me earlier that day because the word on the street was that I was going to out-sing everyone? Had information about auditions somehow been leaked to entertainment bloggers? In all the time that had passed since my audition, it had never occurred to me once to look myself up online to see if there was any industry buzz about my chances on the show.

So fervent was my speculation about Elliott that I barely paid attention as I sat down in the chair of a scissors-wielding stylist. A production assistant herded all of us in “Group 2” (as we were being referred to by everyone on staff) back into the warehouse where we’d had our dance rehearsal. This time we were delivered to a room with salon chairs, sinks, and mirrors. Our group was split in half, and I was among those seated for attention first.

“What are you going to do to me?” I asked the stylist to whom I’d been assigned. I thought grimly of fashionable Martha and Geoffrey, who’d seen so much promise in my looks back at my house a week ago. I wished
they
were there to deliver on that great makeover they’d promised me, but it seemed childish to ask where they were.

“I’m thinking… layers. You’ve got a lot of weight, here. We could make you look a little older with soft layers,” the stylist said.
 
She wore a sun-bleached t-shirt with a frayed neckline and had jarring blond streaks in her dry, curly hair. I wasn’t sure if I trusted her opinion when it came to personal style, but I didn’t have much choice. Everyone else in Group 2 was either reading magazines, awaiting their turn or nodding agreeably at whatever their personal stylist was suggesting. I had avoided experimentation with my hair since a very unflattering perm in seventh grade and was pretty satisfied with it just the way it was. However, I didn’t want to gain a reputation as being the
difficult
one in Group 2, especially since I’d been almost half an hour late to dance rehearsal. I thought it would be best just to go along with whatever the show wanted for me.

With my back turned to the mirror, I was oblivious to the stylist’s progress until she spun me around thirty minutes later and sang, “Ta-da!”

My heart jumped into my throat at the sight of my reflection. She had cut short, severe layers into my hair, the shortest of which fell just above the top of my ears. She’d also curled every layer outward, making me look like I’d just stepped out of a clothing advertisement from the 1980’s.
 
I saw my horror reflected in her hopeful, wide eyes.

“What do you think?” she asked cheerfully.

“I-I-I…” I couldn’t find words that would assure her that I loved it but also magically turn back time to prevent this horrible atrocity from having happened to my hair. “It’s… great.” At least there wasn’t a camera crew present to capture my wooden performance.

My fake smile was as stiff as if someone had let plaster harden over it. On the other side of the room where everyone else was waiting, I plunked down on the black leather sofa. Numbly, I picked up a magazine and overheard Robin say, “There’s no
way
anyone’s doing that to
me
.”

As my anger percolated, Rob, the evil production assistant, appeared in the doorway and pointed to me and Brian, the skinny guy whose head was shaved. “Are you two ready to go?” he asked. “Anyone who’s ready for lunch can follow me.”

Brian hopped up eagerly from the black leather couch. I returned the magazine to the Lucite tabletop. Following Rob anywhere seemed like a bad idea, and I wasn’t ready to face the world with my new hair style yet. But I couldn’t deny the fact that my stomach was rumbling. All I could do was solemnly pray that Elliott was suffering at the hands of a stylist in a similar manner. I was already dreading the moment when my friends would see my new look for the first time.

We followed Rob past the maze of trailers and across another parking lot to the studio commissary,
Da Giorgio,
which was a cafeteria no fancier than the one at my high school. “Don’t let the name fool you,” Rob warned me and Brian. “Their pizza sucks and that’s just about the only Italian specialty they serve.”

Brian and I both filled our trays with food from the salad bar and sat down awkwardly together at a table in the otherwise empty cafeteria. Although even the oldest contestants were no more than eight years older than me, it seemed like their lives were totally different from mine. Brian had been training as a classical opera singer in college but had to drop out to take care of his parents two years ago after they were both seriously injured in an auto accident.

“I don’t care about winning,” Brian shrugged, and I believed him. “I gave up on my dream of being a professional singer a while ago, so even to have made it this far is kind of blowing my mind.” I considered how awful it would be if both of my parents were seriously injured, and I hoped I would never find myself in that situation.

I heard my cell phone buzz with a text message as I ate the last of my romaine lettuce. I was digging through my bag to find it when Rob reappeared in the doorway of the commissary with another delivery of
Center Stage!
contestants. Out of the corner of my eye, I happened to notice with great annoyance that Robin was among them. The only change that had been made to her silky dark hair was the addition of a trendy purple streak.

The text was from Lee, surprisingly the only one of my friends who’d checked in with me so far that day.

LEE 12:18 P.M.

Sup?

I hesitated before writing back. There was a possibility—given everyone’s weeknight curfews—that Lee, Nicole, Kaela, and the rest of my friends wouldn’t have a chance to see my new hair in person before the first broadcast of the show. For a second, I considered leaving my new hairstyle as a terrible surprise for them. Then, as proof of my impatience, I took a selfie picture of myself and texted it back to Lee.
They butchered my hair and I’m hideous now.
I tapped the send button on my phone and picked nervously at the remaining pumpkin seeds on my plate.

LEE 12:21 P.M.

You’re not hideous. You’re fine.

I exhaled with so much exasperation that Brian looked at me in surprise. Of course Lee wouldn’t understand the horror of having to appear on national television with awful hair. He was a boy, and not even the kind of boy who wore hair gel or sexy-smelling body spray. I couldn’t trust his opinion at all.

No one in the commissary knew what we were supposed to do next. We all had an idea of the general plan for the day, and everyone was on edge because our first big meeting with Nelly was supposed to follow lunch. However, we had no clue how long we were supposed to wait in the commissary, or where our meeting with her would take place. After Brian and I had been in the cafeteria for far longer than an hour, I started wondering if we’d been forgotten just like I’d been taken to the wrong place earlier that morning by Rob. It was a little bit comforting that this time at least all of Group 2 was together, so if we were all late or missing from our next lesson I wouldn’t be the only one in trouble.

“It’s already one-thirty,” Christa complained. She was turning out to be a despicable, prim Class President-type; she’d even returned her turkey burger to the cafeteria employee behind the grill and asked for a new one, claiming it tasted
gamy.
 
“How long are they going to leave us here?”

Finally at almost two o’clock in the afternoon, an older guy wearing a sports jacket with elbow patches drifted into the commissary toward the two tables where we had all congregated. He cleared his throat and said, “Hello, everyone. I’m assuming you must be Group 2 on the
Center Stage!
production. I’m Tim Collins, an associate producer with the show. I just wanted to assure you that everything’s just fine. Miss Fulsom ran into some traffic trouble on her way to the studio, and she’ll be here shortly. I apologize for this delay in your routine today. We’ll be moving along again in just a little while.”

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief. We hadn’t been abandoned; Nelly Fulsom was just late. Traffic trouble. At least that was a plausible excuse, actually the
most
plausible excuse for being late to appointments in Los Angeles. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, everyone in Group 2 drifted away from the table and back into the cafeteria area to grab a second helping of something or other. After another half hour, when it was nearly three, two production assistants arrived to fetch us.

In a large room where a full camera crew had already been set up, Nelly sat on a stool with her guitar balanced on her lap. The makeup artist who had been patting oil-absorbing powder onto her face scurried away as we shuffled in from the hall. Wearing a rhinestone-studded denim button-down shirt and suede miniskirt, with her shoulder-length golden hair blown out into loose waves, Nelly looked every bit the Country music superstar she was. A few feet away, a pianist sat at a baby grand piano lazily playing scales. The bright production lights were practically baking the room, and I became very aware as we congregated around Nelly that the cameras were already rolling.

Not only were the cameras rolling, but they were pointed at
us
.
No one had warned us, but suddenly it was show time. We blinked, astonished and unprepared, in the bright lights. Impulsively I reached to hide my hair, and quickly realized there was no point in trying. In the back of the room, far behind Nelly, I caught a glimpse of Claire and her clipboard.

“Welcome, everyone, welcome! Welcome to
Center Stage!
” Nelly bellowed in her Arkansas accent. “I’m so happy that all of y’all are finally here and we can get started makin’ your dreams come true. Now—î Nelly hopped off her stool and clapped her hands together. “I’m sure y’all know how the show works, but just to refresh your memories, you’ll either be selecting—or I’ll be assignin’ you—a song to perform each week. You’ll work under my guidance to practice that song to perfection. Then, each Friday night, you’ll perform in front of a live studio audience on national television, and our at-home viewing audience will vote on who goes home, and who continues to compete… on
Center Stage!
”

She went on to explain that we’d each be responsible for checking into the Secret Suite twice a week at assigned times to log our video journals. Sometimes we’d just tell the camera set up in that room how we’d been feeling about our progress. Other times, the producers would leave questions specifically for us to answer. If we were to remain on the show until the final weeks, viewers at home would be able to submit questions to us through social media.

Nelly’s temperament was so bubbly and unnatural that it was surprising when she said with an abrupt drop in enthusiasm, “Did you get all that?”