Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (11 page)

The guy behind the camera nodded.

A gust of air seemed to escape from Nelly, and she visually deflated before of our eyes. In less than one second she transformed from a sparkling, gutsy dynamo into a washed-out, cranky witch with dead eyes.
 
“Good,” Nelly snapped, sounding much tireder than she had a second earlier.
 
“Alright, people. Cathy, here, is gonna assign your songs for this Friday’s taping. If you don’t like what you get, that’s too dang bad. That’s the whole point of the show: findin’ out just how far you can stretch your talent.”

Claire didn’t even flinch as Nelly referred to her by an incorrect name. We watched in a state of horror, not wanting to believe that Nelly was behaving so rudely and unpleasantly toward all of us, including the show’s production staff. Glazed smiles stretched across all of our faces because we’d each arrived at the studio that day thinking we had our own special connection with Nelly. None of us were prepared to surrender hope just yet by enraging her with a scowl or an eye roll. This was the moment we’d been waiting for all day, to prove ourselves as worthy of being on Nelly’s team, and now she seemed completely uninterested in even speaking to us. If there hadn’t been so much riding on Nelly’s personal approval, there might have been smirking or mumbling among us.

Our frozen, surprised reactions might have indicated to her that her behavior was out of line. She softened her tone a little and added, “Your voice coach is going to give you your first lesson today on the basics of reading sheet music and warming up your vocal chords, and we’ll all start working together one-on-one tomorrow. Who’s their trainer, again?”

Claire, behind her, referenced her clipboard and cleared her throat before replying. “Marlene.”

“Great. You’ll be in good hands,” Nelly told us unconvincingly. I would have bet that Nelly probably couldn’t have picked Marlene, whoever she was, out of a crowd.

And with that, production assistants escorted Nelly through our little assembly and out of the room, leaving us with Claire. As Nelly passed me, the cool, crisp sleeve of her light denim shirt brushed against the skin on my arm, and I caught a whiff of her intoxicating, tuberose-scented perfume. She still—despite her bratty behavior—represented so much of the future that I wanted for myself. I longed for salon-perfect hair on a mundane Monday, the power to make everyone wait around for me, the glamour to make an otherwise tacky outfit seem chic. The moment she left the room, the energy fizzled out completely. For the first time since waking up at the crack of dawn, I realized I was extremely tired. This day was not turning out how I had expected it would at all.

A thought so hideous that I irrationally hoped no one could read my mind occurred to me: I wasn’t enjoying any of this.

In a single-file line, we followed Claire down the hall for vocal training in another room. When Marlene confidently strode in, my initial impression of her was dead wrong. What I saw when she entered the room was an over-the-hill woman with crow’s eyes and an unfashionable salt-and-pepper head of hair styled into an outdated feathered cut. She wore a faded black Harley Davidson logo t-shirt over tight distressed jeans with a white leather fringed vest. Her throaty voice, as she addressed us, “On your feet, soldiers,” sounded like the gravelly articulation of a man twice her size.

Claire nodded at Marlene with admiration before departing. “You’re in the army now, and this is boot camp,” Marlene told us, looking us up and down as she paced. “A lot of people who consider themselves to be good singers don’t actually know the first thing about singing. Singing doesn’t come from here,” she said, cupping her own throat with her hand. “It comes from here.” She placed both of her hands under her rib cage. “Between now and Friday, I’m going to turn you into
real
singers. This isn’t going to be easy. We don’t have much time to tear apart the bad habits you may have formed in learning to sing on your own without formal training. And you’re probably going to think that you can just get by in this contest by singing the way you always have. Let me assure you, if you think you don’t have anything to learn in this classroom, you
will
be voted off the show. Does anyone in this group have any formal voice training?”

Christa looked at all of us with a bashful smile before slowly raising her hand.

“What’s your name, little miss?” Marlene asked Christa.

“Christa Diane VandeKamp.”

Christa was delighted to inform our group that she was twenty years old and had taken voice lessons with a teacher named Noah Gifford in Memphis. She’d been performing with her brothers and sisters on the Country Western circuit all over the South since she was eight years old; she’d even performed once at the Grand Ole Opry. Marlene recognized the name of Christa’s former teacher and nodded with approval, sending a ripple of jealousy through me.

“First, we’re going to do some warm-up exercises, troops,” Marlene told us. She passed out sheet music, and the pianist plunked away at keys corresponding to the notes. Smiles appeared when those of us (myself included) who couldn’t read music realized that the little circles and lines on the grid in our hands were the notes for
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
.
Marlene then sang each note of the song using the name of the note as a lyric, “C-C-G-G-A-A-G,” and encouraged us to repeat each note after her. As we echoed her in a multi-octave chorus, she wandered among us, adjusting our shoulders and hips with a light touch to correct our posture. We sang the song at a painfully slow tempo, repeating each note after Marlene twice. Then she wrote on a whiteboard with a purple marker to explain the difference between whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes.

I was nauseous with envy when Christa was chosen to stand next to the piano as the first pupil to receive instruction from Marlene. My cell phone gave the time as almost four o’clock in the afternoon, and I wondered if all of us would get a chance to run through our song assignment individually with Marlene before the day’s end. Christa opened the wad of paper she had balled into the palm of her hand when Claire had handed out our song assignments.
“Tomorrow and Forever,”
she read aloud.

“Oh, great one!” Marlene bellowed, clapping her hands together for emphasis. “That was in one of the Rat Pack movies. It’s a crowd pleaser, for sure.”

“If the crowd’s in a nursing home,” Ian muttered under his breath next to me.

“It’s about having big dreams for yourself, but meeting someone you want to take along for the ride,” Marlene explained as Christa’s eyes scanned the lyrics. She nodded at the piano player, whose fingers rolled across the keyboard to produce a few jazzy chords.
 
“I’ll sing a bar, you’ll repeat it,” Marlene told Christa.

Marlene threw her head back and sang in her raspy voice with perfect pitch. She sang at a volume so loud that it was startling at first.
“All I’ve got today is this precious dream.”
Marlene knew the lyrics by heart and her blue eyes bore into Christa. She over-annunciated the words of the song, forming each syllable with precision to help Christa repeat the line when it was her turn. In my peripheral vision, I noticed Ian squirming as Christa crooned each line in her sugar-sweet Southern twang.

“It’s so not fair,” Ian told me. “I have a voice like Sinatra’s. I should have gotten this song.”

I agreed with him and thought of Nelly’s parting words earlier that afternoon about having to make our talent stretch. Christa had a saccharine voice and could hit notes, but her delivery was so feminine that she couldn’t sing the lyrics with much conviction. I didn’t know what the original version sounded like. But if Marlene’s performance was even close to it, Christa’s voice made it sound like it belonged on the soundtrack of an animated movie for kids.

“You’re gonna have to work on giving this song some
guts!”
Marlene informed Christa. “This is a song about pride and bravado, as well as love. You’ve gotta sing it like you mean it! Is there anyone special back at home who you can think about? Someone you’d maybe... like to bring out to Hollywood with you, once you’re famous?”

Christa blushed and denied there was any such person with whom she’d like to share her life tomorrow and forever. My cheeks vicariously turned red, too. I hoped that Marlene wouldn’t ask me if I had a boyfriend because of course I did not. The remote possibility that she might interrogate me about romance made me think of Elliott’s bright turquoise eyes looking down at me in the parking lot earlier that day.

Christa nodded her head robotically at Marlene to acknowledge the feedback, but her fragile grin suggested that she wasn’t accustomed to hearing anything about her voice except praise.

The late afternoon dragged on as all of the other contestants rose to their feet and took their turn standing next to the piano. I better understood Ian’s ire about Christa’s having been assigned the classic big band song when it was his turn to practice with Marlene. He bashfully informed us that he’d been assigned
“It’s Raining Men,”
and awkwardly proceeded to sing the song in his rich baritone voice. All of our assigned songs were so mismatched to our strengths as singers that I suspected the show’s producers had intentionally given us songs that would be humiliating and difficult to perform. It seemed unfair that most of us would have to take the stage facing such a burden on the season premiere, but then, there weren’t many weeks in the season.
 
The producers were already trying to weed through us, and we hadn’t even started yet.

Finally, when I was the last contestant in the room waiting for my turn, with only ten minutes left before my dad was scheduled to pick me up, I was called up to the piano. “Whadya got for us, Allison?” Marlene asked, motioning for me to hand her my piece of paper. She raised her eyebrows in surprise and then tilted her head at me, presumably trying to determine if I considered my assignment to be as absurd as she did. “This is a bit of a tall order for a young lady like yourself.”

My assignment was the R&B classic
“All for You,”
originally recorded by legendary vocalist Reggie Bujol. I was pretty mortified, not just because the song’s lyrics were considerably adult in nature, but also because Reggie Bujol was almost seven feet tall and probably weighed over three hundred pounds. He had one of the deepest bass voices in the R&B industry, and somehow I was going to have to sing his song about an impressively large body being
all for
someone like I meant it.

“I can do it,” I assured her, knowing that my only hope for performing this song without becoming the laughing stock of America was to
aim
for laughs.
 
I intended to sing with exaggerated gusto, catch everyone off-guard and destroy them with giggles.

Smiling expectantly, Marlene nodded at the pianist, and I took a deep breath as he produced the first few chords.

“No way,” Ian said before I sang the first line.

“These great big arms, baby, were made for holding you.”
I pretended to flex my arm muscles, which, of course, were practically non-existent; I had barely been able to do five pull-ups during the Presidential Physical Fitness testing in gym class the previous week. As soon as everyone sitting around the piano recognized my song, there were eye rolls and cackling.
“And here’s a big shoulder to cry on, if you ever need to,”
I continued.

Marlene couldn’t control herself. She cupped her hands over her mouth, trying to suppress laughter.

“These long legs, baby, would cross the world for you. There ain’t nothing, baby, that I wouldn’t do. Because every part of me... is all for you.”

Even Bobby, the pianist, was grinning. The other contestants were clapping along, providing me with a beat. “Sing it, baby!” Jarrett bellowed, egging me on.

Finally, Marlene waved her arms in the air like a referee as a signal for me to stop. She stuck two fingers between her lips and blew out an ear-splitting whistle as if she were hailing a taxi cab. "Star material!" she hollered. Everyone in the room was clapping, including Christa, who frowned as she clapped. 

“Alright, alright... you said you could sing it, and you weren’t kidding. However, the show doesn’t usually take too kindly to humor. Our challenge this week is to find a way for you to sing it earnestly so that you start off on the right foot,” Marlene informed me with an encouraging smile.

 
My spirits slowly sank as I absorbed the impact of her words, wondering if I’d heard her correctly. How could I possibly sing that song without giving the audience an indication that I knew how ridiculous it was? My face flashed with heat just
thinking
about telling Oliver Teague that each of my body parts were for him. Then I blushed even
more
thinking about how Oliver Teague and Morgan Flossmoore and everyone else at Pacific Valley were probably going to watch me sing, live, on
Center Stage!.
 
Lee had convinced the principal of our school to let him host a viewing party for the first broadcast in the cafeteria. There would be hundreds of thousands, and maybe
millions,
of witnesses to my heartfelt performance of
“All for You.”

The shame.

The sense of exhilaration that I felt from the few moments of my performance was replaced by a frigid, paralyzing sense of dread as I followed the other contestants out of the warehouse to the parking lot. I had no way of knowing it that afternoon, but I’d heard the contestants in Group 2 clap for me with genuine amusement for the first and last time.
 
More than once, I heard someone mumble, “unanimous votes,” presumably in reference to me. To the best of my knowledge, Elliott and I were the only contestants to have received votes from all four coaches during the auditions. I fell in step a few feet behind Liandra, the girl from Louisiana, who was rubbing Christa’s back. “It's not a big deal,” she consoled Christa in a comforting tone, trying to quell her jealousy over Marlene’s surprise at my voice. “She's just the voice coach.” I shrank and hoped they wouldn’t turn to see me following them so closely, not wanting to be the target of anyone’s anger so early in the process.