Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (28 page)

A potent combination of dread and fury ripped through me like a tornado. I was pretty sure there had never been a nineteen-year-old boy in the history of the world who had ever done anything simply to be
kind.
Without even hearing another word out of my mom’s mouth, I knew with rock-hard certainty that my brother was dating Taylor. He was just keeping it quiet because he knew my mom had seen paparazzi photos of Taylor over the summer that had made her cluck her tongue in the checkout line at the supermarket. She’d said, “Oh, that poor girl.” As if Taylor had fallen into a life of slavery instead of into the lap of luxury. I’d mistakenly thought that their Back-to-School lunch in Boston had been a one-time-only deal, just for Todd to see how she was doing after her summer on the road with Chase Atwood. Obviously, it had turned into something more.

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically. “Very kind of him.”

“It sounds like she’s been having a tough time of it,” Mom continued. “It’s not that uncommon, for grief to sink in weeks or months after losing someone.”

“Funny. She hasn’t mentioned that she’s been talking to Todd,” I said, as if Taylor and I had been chatting and texting since she left Los Angeles back at the beginning of the summer. Now, on top of surviving the theatrics of
Center Stage!
I was potentially going to have to patch things over with Taylor before she arrived in Los Angeles. It was fair to assume that she’d waste no time in informing Chase that not only had I been unforgivably rude to her, but that she was also in love with my older brother.

Awkward.

It broke my heart a little bit on Monday when Nelly saw my fingernails at the studio and ordered Geoffrey to undo Nicole’s handiwork. I patiently sat as Geoffrey repainted my nails bright pink, realizing with full clarity that Nelly was doing her very best to wipe away everything about me that made me Allison Burch.

During the seventh week of production, the real drama began. The producers planned such an amazing surprise for the contestants of
Center Stage!
that none of us knew what was happening on Friday night when the band All or Nothing emerged from a cloud of dry ice smoke in the middle of the stage after a commercial break. They launched into their latest single while all of us went nuts in our prep rooms. I should have guessed that the producers were going to pull some kind of sneaky trick like that because the eighteen of us who remained had been assigned songs originally recorded by the band that week. Danny Fuego interviewed the boy band stars at some point before Friday’s broadcast, and flashy video footage of them answering his questions was sprinkled in between our performances.

In one of the brief segments, he asked the guys which of the contestants they hoped would win and go on tour with them. Blond, dimpled Colin leaned forward to raise an eyebrow at Nigel, my favorite, and at that, their band mates Eddie and Mike began laughing.

“Nigel has a crush on Allison,” Mike teased. “So I guess if we had to pick one, she’d be our choice so that he’d have a chance with her.”

“Allison, eh?” Danny shoved the microphone under Nigel’s nose as he blushed.

“Yeah,” Nigel admitted. “Allison’s well-fit.”

My heart exploded into confetti! I was, of course, the recipient of cold, hard glares in the Group 2 prep room. But the nasty looks I received from Robin, Ian, and Jarrett did not diminish my sheer joy in the least. There was no doubt in my mind that Nigel O’Hallihan and I were going to run away together, possibly that very night.

On my way down the hall to the stage when it was my turn, I was grateful that Aubrey, the stylist, had put me in a short leather mini skirt for a change. I desperately hoped that I’d bump into the band and get to meet them in person before my performance. The entire time I sang
“So Perfect to Me,”
I half-expected one of the famous Irish singers to stroll out on stage and join me. After all the curveballs producers had thrown at me that season, singing a surprise duet with an Irish hottie was one I would have loved. In my head, I was crooning passionately to Nigel O’Hallihan… that was until my song ended, and I happened to notice the lanky guy with messy brown curls waiting at the edge of the stage for me to finish, glowering at me with turquoise eyes.

Elliott. We hadn’t exchanged words since that miserable night when we’d argued in the hotel stairwell unless his one word/punctuation mark text messages counted. I still hadn’t seen high or low of his secret girlfriend. Since two long weeks had passed, and my stomach ached every time I thought about him, I figured there was no possible chance we’d ever be on friendly terms again. My apology was too long overdue, and I didn’t feel like admitting he’d been right anymore now that I knew he’d had some girl in his hotel suite.

Nelly drew the Wild Card that night. She stared up at me where I stood on stage quite obviously trying to decide whether or not to send me home. But the only contestants from the other groups she could have possibly wanted were Elliott and Tia. Since I was in the lead in her group, it would have looked absurd if she’d kicked me off the show instead of Robin, Jarrett, or Ian. Even still, I breathed a sigh of relief when she leaned toward the microphone on her table and said with the faintest air of regret, “I’d like to keep my contestants, Danny.”

By the time I boarded the bus that night, my adrenaline levels were still peaking.
 
I was so antsy that I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a gritty voice from the seat behind mine say, “You don’t really
like
those guys, do you?”

I hadn’t been expecting Elliott to initiate a conversation on the bus of all places, especially since there were fewer than twenty of us left. All of the laughter and chit chat that had filled our rides to and from the hotel at the beginning of the season had been replaced with uncomfortable silence. My defense shields went up automatically. I’d been envious of Elliott’s mystery girl for two weeks. My immediate reaction was to try to make him jealous, too.

“Of course I do,” I coyly answered over my shoulder. “They’re adorable. I will completely freak out if I get to go on tour with them.”

Elliott groaned dramatically. “I would have thought you had more highbrow taste in music.”

“Nope, sorry,” I snapped, even though this was a lie. My favorite musician of all time was Patti Smith, thanks to my dad’s affinity for her. No one would dare to call
her
lowbrow.
 
“I like music that sounds good, and I’m sorry if I don’t pretend to like old stuff just to seem cool.” His smug silence goaded me to push his temper further. “In fact, if I win and go on tour with them, I’m totally going to marry Nigel.”

Elliott barked out in response, “Ha! As if he’s the marrying type.”

“Right,” I retorted sharply without thinking through the point I was attempting to make. “Like
you
are.”

“Um, what are we even fighting about?” Elliott asked as the bus pulled into the Neue Hotel parking lot.

Tia knocked on the door of my suite on Saturday morning to find out if my mom was going to be hanging out that weekend. It made me kind of sad to inform her that she wasn’t. Mom would have driven over if I’d called and asked, but it didn’t seem fair to do that. I reasoned that she shouldn’t have to give up her weekends just because I’d been sequestered at a hotel.

Without Mom present to lead the conversation, Tia and I sat together at the pool flipping through the magazines Nicole had brought over the previous weekend. It was pointless for us to make an honest attempt at friendship. The season would be over in five weeks, and competition was becoming so fierce that either one of us could be voted off at any time. Tia was also seven years older than me, which on the show made us among some of the youngest contestants but in real life meant we were worlds apart.

So instead of gossiping about other contestants or talking about our mutual hopes and dreams for fame, I thumbed through magazines, annoyed by how the ink on the pages stained my sunscreen-soaked fingertips. I looked at all of the holiday style guides, which were somewhat irrelevant to the residents of Southern California, since that day in mid-November it was over eighty degrees outside. In the gossip section of one magazine, I lingered on a paparazzi shot of Chase Atwood holding hands with a pretty blonde as they walked down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, each carrying shopping bags. The caption beneath the photo read, “
Center Stage! coach Chase Atwood spends a day shopping with his wife, Jill Cunningham, in Beverly Hills. The couple is reportedly working through a rough patch after allegations of Atwood’s infidelity over the summer.”

I closed the magazine. The photo of Chase was just a reminder that I was probably going to find myself face to face with Taylor within the next two weeks. I hadn’t worked up the nerve yet to ask Nelly or Claire about Thanksgiving. But I was pretty sure that if I couldn’t go home to West Hollywood for dinner, my parents would insist on bringing dinner (and probably Taylor, too) up to me in Studio City.

On Monday, we were informed by Harvey, Marlene’s official replacement as our vocal trainer, that we would be selecting songs that held great personal significance to us for our Friday night performances. Nelly was absent from the studio that day without explanation, and I dared to hope that she was relapsing into her negligent coaching tactics from the beginning of the season. Instantly, I knew the song I wanted to perform was
“Every Day,”
an old pop song that was on the radio the summer that my family spent a week on vacation in Hawaii. We sang it everywhere we went in our rental car; to the beach, to volcano parks, and to the zip-line tour where I cried because I was afraid of falling into a gully.
Every day, I love you more, more than every day before…

“Oh, I know what I’m singing,” Jarrett bragged to all of us. “I’m singing
‘Break Free’
from
Living Carousel.
I don’t even have to
practice
that song. I sang it twice a day, every day this past summer, and at every single show it brought the house down!”

Of course, by Tuesday afternoon, when Nelly begrudgingly showed up for our afternoon training, she shot down my selection before she even heard me run through it. “Oh, Allison. I don’t know if anyone but you remembers that song. And whatever happened to that girl who sang it? Didn’t she pose for
Playboy?
I don’t think you want to perform a song by some one-hit wonder.”

There were only five weeks left of the season. If I didn’t seize this opportunity to perform the song
I
wanted in the way that I wanted to sing it, then I might not have another chance. “Yeah, but the assignment is to perform a song that means a lot to me,” I argued. “I love that song. It reminds me of my family.”

Nelly dramatically rolled her eyes. With a kindly smile, she joined me beside Bobby’s piano and draped her arm across its lid. “Have I taught you guys nothing this season?”

Little more than nothing,
I thought secretly.

“This is about showmanship. It doesn’t matter if a song means a lot to you, personally. You should all be selecting songs that you know will resonate with your audience on Friday. For example, my mother used to sing
‘May I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister’
to me every night when I was a girl. And that’s a folk song from Arkansas about a hobo knockin’ on your door, lookin’ for a place to spend the night. That song brings me right back to my childhood bedroom in Jasper, and the smell of the crab apple blossoms blowing in through my window in summertime. But no one in America gives a hoot about that silly old song! You’ve gotta make sure the song you’ve chosen is going to strike a sentimental nerve with people watching at home.”

I couldn’t help but notice that beneath Nelly’s cloying floral perfume, I detected the sour, stale smell of alcohol. My parents never drank, so I had limited experience in recognizing drunkenness. It was hard to tell whether Nelly was drunk or sober, although she was certainly more chatty than usual, and that smell... It was a smell I recognized from Taylor’s house. It was the same smell that used to trail after her mother as she banged around in the kitchen with her satin sleep mask propped up on her head. Sometimes she’d still be wearing her robe at three in the afternoon when we’d get out of school. It had not been unusual to find the recycling bin at Taylor’s house full of empty wine and beer bottles.

Naturally, after Robin, Jarrett, and Ian practiced their selections and received abundant praise from Nelly, she tossed out a few ideas for me to consider. All of her suggestions were Country-Western classics by Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, and Reba McEntire. It didn’t seem wise to try to point out to her for the
millionth
time that I was not interested in becoming the next American Country-Western superstar. Instead, I stuffed my notebook and my hoodie back in my tote bag and climbed aboard the bus, still fuming.

I was angry enough as I waited for the other contestants to pile onto the bus that I focused my attention on Nelly’s gold Jaguar in the parking lot. I ardently wished that every seagull from Studio City to Santa Monica would leave a dropping on it. Then I wished that an earthquake would split the pavement of the parking lot in two halves, and that Nelly’s Jaguar would fall right into a giant crack in the earth and be zapped into vapors by the high temperatures at earth’s molten core.

I was so caught up in hating Nelly that I didn’t notice until after I ate dinner alone in my suite at the hotel that I’d left my phone at the studio. It crossed my mind to ask the hotel concierge to arrange for a cab to take me back to Studio City. But the studio was probably empty at that late hour except for the night receptionist and janitorial crew. No one would be there to let me in. I went to bed furious with myself for being so absent-minded, certain that I was missing out on life-changing text messages from all my friends.

The bus for the studio didn’t depart from the hotel until nine o’clock each morning to avoid rush hour traffic. I woke up early and took a taxi to the studio by myself so that I could try to locate my phone before dance class began. When my cab entered the parking lot, I noticed immediately that strangely enough, Nelly's gold Jaguar was still parked exactly where it had been the previous afternoon. The only reason it had even struck me as noteworthy was because I’d lavished so much hatred upon the car the previous afternoon.

That’s odd,
I thought to myself. It was very uncharacteristic of Nelly to be at the studio so early in the morning. I couldn’t think of a single time when she’d shown her face before lunchtime since the first week of the season.

The studio was as quiet as a church that morning. I checked in Erick St. John’s studio and didn’t find my phone in there. Then I remembered taking my phone out in my trailer—the trailer I had once shared with Eunice, but now enjoyed as my own.
 
Sure enough, I found my phone resting on the plaid sofa. Somewhat disappointingly, only Nicole had texted me the night before and the content of her text upset me far more than it should have. Nicole suspected that Lee and Courtney Von Haas, the preppy, snooty editor of the yearbook, were becoming an item. They’d gone to a movie together at The Grove that weekend. Even though Lee wasn’t my boyfriend and my heart was set on Elliott, the news felt like a profound betrayal.