Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (12 page)

“It 
is
 a big deal,” Christa hissed. “Do you even know who Marlene 
is?
 She’s written at least ten top-forty hits. 
‘That's It’
 and
‘When it Rains,’
 by Tawny. 
‘You Must Have Known,’
by Kaydance. She knows everyone in the industry. 
Everyone.”

I felt a little guilty for eavesdropping on someone who was obviously upset with me, but I was glad that I did. It would never have occurred to me that rough-around-the-edges Marlene was, in fact, a behind-the-scenes celebrity, not to mention a multi-millionaire. I hadn’t looked past her Harley Davidson t-shirt to notice that the leather shoulder bag she had carried on her way into the room was Céline. If I had stuck around in the parking lot long enough to watch her leave the studio, I would have observed her climbing into the driver's seat of a brand new royal blue BMW convertible. 

I lingered just outside the front doorway of the studio as everyone else filtered out. A few contestants, presumably from the other groups, dug into their pockets and purses for car keys. All of the out-of-towners boarded buses bound for a corporate hotel where they were being put up by En Fuego Productions. This was probably, I reasoned, why I’d been overlooked that morning before the dance class; almost everyone else had arrived together on a shuttle bus.

Even though the school year had started, it was still technically summer, and the earliest hints of a classic Los Angeles summer sunset appeared in the sky as color-hued swirls. My dad, the cheeseball, referred to those fiery fuchsia sunsets as
smogsets
.
My brand new fear of having to perform
“All for You”
on national television had cast a heavy shadow over my entire first day as part of the show. I felt foolish; I should have known even before I auditioned that my ascension to fame wasn’t going to be as easy as just breezing through a reality television show. I should have expected this potential for world-wide embarrassment.

Motion across the parking lot caught my attention; someone was waving at me. With my eyes squinted, I saw that the someone was none other than Chase Atwood. He was grinning and holding his cell phone to his ear as he traversed the parking lot on his way toward an enormous black Hummer. Sunlight reflected off the shiny studs on his motorcycle boots. My body began to tingle a little with excitement when it hit me that his wave was a friendly one.
Chase Atwood recognized me.
An actual, world-famous rock star recognized me, Allison Burch.

Then
I noticed that Chase wasn’t alone; he was walking with another guy who strode at a slower pace a few feet away from him. A guy who was a little taller and slimmer than Chase.

Elliott.

Was Chase really giving Elliott Mercer a
ride home?
To Temecula, or wherever it was that Elliott Mercer lived, probably way more than an hour’s drive away? Even though it was early evening, it was still sweltering outside. For a fraction of a second, I wondered if perhaps what I saw was a mirage since heat rose off the pavement in waves. Or maybe the powerful tar smell wafting up from the blacktop was playing tricks on my eyes. But no, Elliott climbed into the passenger side of Chase’s Hummer. He made eye contact with me while wearing a solemn expression as the Hummer backed out of its parking space and rolled toward the guard station at the gate.

I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake in choosing Nelly Fulsom as my coach.

“How’d it go, tiger?”

Dad was in an unusually chipper mood when he pulled up to the curb in his Volvo to drive me home, interrupting my elaborate reverie about Elliott Mercer’s house and personal life. He even anticipated my next move and reached over to switch the car radio from his annoying political talk channel to alternative rock without my asking as I climbed into the front passenger seat.

“It was okay,” I said, trying to sound upbeat.

He pulled around to the guard station near the gates. “Just okay? I would have expected you to say that it was
wondrous! Magnificent! Thrilling!
It looks like you got yourself a new hair style.”

This was probably the first time in my entire life that my dad had made any observation about my hair or appearance.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “I’m not too happy about it.”

The guard nodded at Dad and opened the gate so that we could pass through.

“Let’s see what your mom has to say about that.”

Long hair was something I had in common with Mom; it was one of the few things we shared as mother and daughter. When I was in fourth grade and Taylor cut her hair in a cute ice skater style, I
begged
to be allowed to cut my hair like hers. Mom had not even entertained the idea.
She continued to wear her hair long after passing an age at which most women cut their hair shorter. Every morning she bundled her long brown locks into a bun before driving to Levity. I hadn’t considered my mom’s feelings while the stylist had been hacking off my hair at the studio, but Dad was right. She was probably going to be a little hurt.

“So what did you guys do all day?” my dad asked as he merged into traffic on the freeway. “Roll your lips and inhale steam?”

I glared at him out of the corner of my eye, not having any idea how he'd come up with such a notion. “All kinds of stuff,” I answered.

“I imagined it would be like
A Chorus Line
. All of you lined up on stage in dancing outfits, spinning around,” he said with a goofy smile. He sang (totally off-key) a line from a song about a singular sensation.

“What’s
A Chorus Line?”
I asked, watching a Carl’s Jr. fast food restaurant whizz past us over the cement wall separating the freeway traffic from the everyday life of Studio City.
 

“Forget it,” Dad said with a wave of his hairy hand.

I was quiet for most of the ride home, wondering how I was ever going to make it past the first Expulsion Series. Everyone else’s assigned songs were preposterous, but mine was preposterous
and
deeply, personally embarrassing. There wasn’t a boy on earth who wanted
all of me,
or
any
of me, at least as far as I knew, although my performance was sure to spark the interest of perverted old guys.

“You know,” Dad said as we rounded the corner of our street, “if you hate it, you don’t have to go back. There are other ways of becoming a singer, Allison. It’s a free country. You can always change your mind.”

I picked at the purple fingernail polish on my nails. The mere suggestion from my dad that I could opt out of finishing the show reignited the fire in the pit of my stomach that had made me want to compete in the first place. The moment I heard him say those words, I knew that I still wanted, deep down, to win
Center Stage!
more than anything. Neither of my parents was especially competitive, so I didn’t know where I’d gotten my fierce desire to be the best. The idea of winning that record contract and going on tour with All or Nothing was too thrilling to abandon. I remembered how it had felt to stand on that big stage during my audition: the blinding lights on me, my voice pouring out from my heart and filling the entire auditorium, up to the last row in the top balcony. I loved that; I coveted that. I couldn’t imagine living my whole life without experiencing it again. Even though I was only sixteen, I already knew—like my mom—that I’d never be happy sitting at an office job as an adult.

Everything I had dreamed about was within reach. My name on the lips of radio DJ’s, my image on kids’ walls, nominations for music awards. All I had to do was persevere and do whatever the show asked of me with a smile on my face. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? Curtis Wallace had managed to survive the previous year, and I expected that Elliott Mercer would survive until the very end, too.
 
If they could do it, I could do it. There was no way that anyone wanted to win more than I did.

“I’m going back, Dad.”

I was telling my dad as much as I was making a promise to myself. I was going back to Studio City in the morning and figuring out a way to win that competition.

Mom clucked her tongue at me the next morning as I got out of the car in the
Center Stage!
parking lot. “That hair,” she murmured.

“It’ll grow back.”

Unfortunately my hair did
not
grow back before I was prompted to pose for a portrait. It would appear on the cover of
Expose Magazine
the following week as part of a special feature on this season’s contestants. I smiled as hard as I could, wanting to make sure my dimples looked extra cute since I was wearing a boring gray sweater.

I stumbled my way through Erick St. John’s two-hour ordeal on the fundamentals of hip hop dancing. He shook his head in disgust throughout my struggle to keep count
and
remember the dance moves in the correct order. I forbade myself from looking in the mirror at Robin’s reflection. She nailed every single routine and rubbed her hands all over her taut six-pack abs as if she were trying to seduce Erick St. John, who I had a strong hunch was probably not intrigued by girls like Robin (or girls, in general). The previous night I had given myself a stern talking-to in my head before falling asleep, and I could not waste a moment of energy on envy. I had to focus on what I
could
do well, and hip hop dancing was sadly not going to be one of those things.

Throughout the morning, everyone in Group 2 seemed to be in on some private joke about truffle butter from their group dinner at the hotel the night before. Naturally I felt a little left out and wondered if living at home with my parents was in some way hurting my chances in the competition. But as the day progressed, I rationalized that even if I was living at the hotel in Studio City with everyone else, I was
still
on average four years younger than the other contestants. I’d probably have been excluded from most of their inside jokes, anyway.

On our way to the cafeteria for lunch, I caught a glimpse of Elliott through a glass panel on the door of a rehearsal room. He was sitting on a plastic chair alongside the other members of his team, listening intently. What I saw next surprised me—sitting right next to him was Chase Atwood, looking casually cool in a black t-shirt with a gothic silk-screen print on its front and the sleeves cut off. I wondered with a little annoyance just how involved Chase Atwood and the other coaches were their teams. Nelly Fulsom certainly wasn’t sitting in on our vocal lessons and (thankfully) wasn’t participating in our dance lessons. It was a grim hunch, but it seemed possible that Group 2 was already at a disadvantage because our coach was so uninterested in our progress.

It crossed my mind as I ate my peanut butter sandwich that maybe the people on Chase’s team hadn’t been assigned such ridiculous songs for Friday’s show. Then I started wondering if his team had been
assigned
songs at all.

I couldn’t imagine what kind of song they’d assign Elliott to make him look like a total fool on stage.
“Nine to Five”
by Dolly Parton?
“I’m Every Woman,”
the Whitney Houston smash hit? As I entertained humorous possibilities, I began to suspect that there was no way Elliott would ever go along with such a travesty.
 
In my very limited experience with him, he seemed like the kind of loner in the back of the classroom who knew all the answers to the teacher’s questions but intentionally failed tests. A guy like that played by his own rules, no matter the consequences. I didn’t think for a second that he’d jeopardize his chances on the show by refusing to go along with this silliness. Instead, he’d probably find a way to bypass whatever the coaches had in mind for him. By the time we filed into Marlene’s classroom, my suspicion had grown so strong that I interrupted her cheerful greeting with, “Question.”

Marlene looked a little surprised. “Of course,” she said, permitting me to continue.

“Were all of the groups
assigned
songs? Or were other coaches’ groups allowed to choose whatever they want to sing on Friday?”

Marlene appeared to be caught off-guard for a second. Everyone else in my group chimed in with similar sentiments about how unfair that would be if it were the case.
 
Marlene urged us to calm down with her hands. “To the best of my knowledge, the show’s producers assigned
everyone’s
songs. They wouldn’t typically give any contestants an unfair advantage so early in the game,” she told us. “Now... for those of you who might make it to the final rounds, you can expect that they won’t make it
easy
to win the show.
 
But it’s my understanding that Friday’s Expulsion Series is simply about seeing who has artistic range, and who might have difficulty with different styles of music.”

That afternoon, Marlene taught us to sing scales. She had us practice our range by instructing us to match random notes produced by the piano, and (just as my dad had predicted) she made us roll our lips. It felt more than a little crazy to be standing in a room full of people making buzzing noises, but it also felt cool, like we were becoming real singers. The purpose of the lip rolls was to get us accustomed to sensing the position of our larynx as we pushed our voices to hit lower and higher notes. The idea that I could train myself to have more control over my voice was exciting.

“This is just stupid,” Liandra complained under her breath.

But I didn’t consider it stupid. If Marlene said lip rolls were important to becoming a professional singer, I’d do them gladly. I wanted to perfect them. I remembered what she’d said the previous day about people thinking they could get through the show without mastering the vocal exercises, and I had taken her words to heart. Any routine she could help me to establish for myself as a singer, I was willing to adopt.

When it was my turn to practice my song, Marlene and I sang each note slowly, abandoning the lyrics and focusing on the tune itself.
 

“Hold it right there, Bobby,” she told the pianist after I held a note for as long as she kept her finger raised, encouraging me to continue. “Do you hear that?” she asked me. She then turned to the other people in the rehearsal room, most of whom were playing games or checking e-mail on their phones out of boredom.

“Hear what?” I asked.

“That. You. Your voice at this tempo. It’s powerful. Maybe for Friday we take this song, slow it down, and then it becomes something else when you sing it. It’s not the confident bragging of a big man anymore. It’s the humble offering of a young woman. Practice it at a slower pace tonight. See what you come up with,” Marlene told me. She turned to scold the rest of the people in my group for not paying attention. “C’mon, people! You always have to be listening for when the music is sending you signals.”

By the time I got home that night, however, I had completely forgotten what Marlene had thought was so great about my singing the song more slowly. Throughout dinner, my mom talked about the upcoming carnival at our church that she was helping to plan as a fundraiser for the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Afterward, I hid in my room with my sheet music. Several times I had to pause my singing because I forgot the melody when I slowed down the tempo. When I referenced Reggie Bujol’s original music video on YouTube, it made me lose track of the pace I was supposed to be practicing. By eight o’clock, I was so frustrated that I was tempted to ignore Lee’s text messages, but took the time to write back to him and explain that I was rehearsing.

“Why don’t you just forget all about the original version of the song and use the sheet music?” Lee asked.

“Because,” I said, looking helplessly at the sheet music in my hand, which looked like a bunch of nonsensical doodles drawn on top of lines. “I only learned how to read this stuff
yesterday
and it’s
hard.”

“I’ve been reading music since second grade,” Lee reminded me. “I’ll come over and help you.”

Lee’s father drove him over to our house from their home in Beverly Hills half an hour later. Together we sat on my bed reviewing the sheet music.
 
First, I sang a few lines of lyrics as best I could remember the tune at a slow pace, and on an app on his tablet, he rewrote the sheet music for me with longer notes.
 
At a couple of points he had me repeat a lyric and gave me feedback.

“I think you should hold that last note longer.”

“Start lower and raise your voice a little higher at that last part.”

It was strange to receive such intelligent instruction from Lee, and little goosebumps formed on my arms from having his undivided attention.

When we had a draft of the whole song, he defined some instrumental tracks and added a beat in his app. He e-mailed me the finished track so that I’d have background music at the right speed to listen to as I practiced. Lee was showing off a little, but I appreciated that he was trying to impress me. By the time Mr. Yoon arrived to retrieve his son at ten o’clock, I had loaded up my iPod with practice tracks to take with me to
Center Stage!
the next morning. I could see what Marlene had been trying to make me understand earlier in the day: the song was completely different now. It was mine.

“Thank you so much, Lee,” I said, feeling such profound gratitude that I wasn’t even sure how to express it. My friends and I were pretty generous with hugs, but this kind of spur-of-the-moment favor on a school night seemed like it deserved more than just a hug. Maybe a kiss on the cheek would have been more appropriate, but I sure wasn’t about to give him one of those in front of both of our nerdtastic dads, who were lingering in the doorway as we said our farewells.

“Not a big deal,” Lee shrugged. “And actually...” he trailed off for a second and then said, “I didn’t know you could sing so well, Allison. I mean, I only ever heard you sing before in the car, and it was hard to hear you over Nicole.”

Nicole’s voice was like the warbling of a demon summoning its colleagues back to the first circle of Hell, but either she was oblivious or didn’t care. She sang at top volume whenever one of her favorite songs came on the car radio. Sometimes her passengers feared for their lives because of her tendency to lean back and close her eyes to hit high notes as she drove.

“Yeah, well, I haven’t had too many opportunities to sing at school,” I said bashfully. “You know, Mrs. Flores only casts people in musicals who are already like... stars.”

“Well, Mrs. Flores is an idiot.”

“And I didn’t know you were so good at, like, everything,” I said. I knew Lee played clarinet, but because he was the only kid in our group of friends in band, his band life was a bit of a mystery to the rest of us. His membership in the school band meant that he didn’t sit with us at football games, and that he spent two weeks every summer upstate at band camp close to Santa Barbara. I hadn’t ever thought too much about whether or not Lee was
good
at playing clarinet (which he must have been, after eight years of lessons) or that he
knew
much about music theory (which he most certainly did).

“Yeah, well... text me tomorrow and let me know how it goes,” Lee told me. “Thanks for the grapefruit juice, Rich,” he waved to my dad.

“It’s Mr. Burch,” Dad corrected him.

“Mr. Burch,” Lee concurred.

“He’s a nice kid, that Lee,” my dad commented after I locked the front door, and the Yoons drove away in Mr. Yoon’s black Mercedes. My dad was eating an enormous bowl of soy ice cream, presumably negating the health benefit of eating soy instead of dairy by consuming a quantity large enough to exceed the average daily requirement of
everything
.

“Yeah, he is,” I agreed.

The next day, just two short days before the first Expulsion Series, Nelly was at the studio bright and early, greeting us in Erick St. John’s dance classroom when we arrived that morning. Naturally, a camera crew accompanied her.
 
“Surprise, everyone! We’re goin’ on a little field trip this morning to run through informal rehearsals for Friday’s big show. You won’t be expected to sing today in front of the other groups. Today’s purpose is to lock down everyone’s blocking and lighting arrangements. Then we’ll return here to the studio for your vocal coaching. But tomorrow we’ll have a sound check, so y’all better be ready to deliver the goods by then.”

Five limousines awaited us in the parking lot.
 
“Now
this
is what I’m talkin’ about,” Liandra raved when she saw the line of stretch limos.

“Y’all are acting like you’ve never seen real limousines before,” Christa commented, acting unimpressed. I had noticed that she had a tendency to go a little overboard with her Tennessee accent in the presence of Nelly, who had already driven away in her gold Jaguar without even saying goodbye to us.

I tried to get a good look at all of the contestants in the other coaches’ groups while we were all standing around outside. I’d never yet seen all of us together in one place other than in the cafeteria. However, at Da Giorgio it was impossible to differentiate the diners who were contestants from those who were production assistants and receptionists at the studio. There we were that morning in the blazing parking lot, all forty of us under the hot sun, piling into limousines in our pre-defined groups of ten. Over the heads of the unfamiliar contestants in the other groups, I caught a glimpse of Elliott. He was lingering at the back of Chase’s group,
smoking a cigarette
.