Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (38 page)

At seven-fifteen, just as I was starting to panic about the show getting off to a late start and ruining the rest of my plans for the evening, the silhouette figures of the opening band marched out on stage carrying instruments. A fog of dry-ice smoke unfurled over the screaming girls in the audience.
 
That was my cue to inform Ralph that I needed to use the ladies’ room, and I slipped out the front doors of the theater ignoring whispers of
“Is that..?”
from teens. Outside, Lee was waiting in his Toyota Yaris at the curb, with Elliott buckled into the front seat, all according to plan.

“I feel super weird about this,” Lee said as I climbed into the back seat of his car. Elliott’s guitar case rested on the floor in an upright position behind the driver’s seat.

“Don’t,” I assured him, but I looked cautiously over my shoulder at the Fonda Theater to make sure no one from Ralph’s crew had followed me.

Lee clicked his left turn signal and merged into eastbound traffic. “I’m not going to, like, go to jail for aiding and abetting runaways, am I?” Lee asked with total sincerity.

“We’re not running away. We’re doing charity,” Elliott said from the front seat.

Before the stop light at Western Ave, Lee pulled over to the curb again without saying a word. In a swift burst of action, he unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door. He opened the trunk and withdrew a video camera entwined in some kind of crazy contraption.

“What’s he doing?” Elliott asked me as Lee darted around to the front of the car.

“No idea.” We watched Lee mash the four suction cups attached to the camera onto the hood of his car and then lift the hood to fasten the straps attached to the camera under it.
 

Lee popped back into the car behind the wheel, and we were off. “Sorry, guys. If we’re going to try to make this look professional, then we can’t cut corners.”

There was a small black remote control on the dashboard. After we resumed our journey, Lee tapped its green
record
button. “The car mount?” I asked, remembering that he’d been just as excited about receiving that for his birthday as he’d been to get a car.

“The car mount,” he confirmed. “Probably better quality than whatever those chumps at En Fuego Productions are using.”

Elliott made eye contact with me in Lee’s side view mirror. He smirked his familiar smirk—same old Elliott, unscathed by his date with Tawny.

My mom was waiting for us on the fourth floor of the Children’s Hospital in Los Feliz just like she had said she’d be. I hadn’t seen her in over a week since Thanksgiving, and she looked unexpectedly professional in a black dress and heels. A few other people from the St. Ambrose fundraising board who I recognized from church accompanied her, and all of them regarded me with a look of appreciation I’d never seen before. From the reaction of the doctors and nurses on staff at the hospital that night and the All or Nothing fangirls at the Fonda Theater, it was evident that I had truly become a celebrity in my own right. I could hear the
click-click
of phone cameras snapping as Mom hugged me.

“Thank you so much for participating in this, Elliott,” Mom said, making a sort of obvious but genuine attempt to single him out for kindness. When I’d called Mom on Tuesday morning and asked if she could work with the church board at St. Ambrose to pull together a quick opportunity for me and Elliott to sing for some of the patients at the hospital, she had seemed surprised that Elliott was involved because I hadn’t mentioned him for a long time.

“Yeah, of course,” Elliott said, making an effort to raise his voice and look my mom in the eye. He was trying to be polite and cordial, and he was trying for my benefit, which made me feel more goofy and fluttery than my whole afternoon with Nigel.

“And Lee, thank you for offering your services as a chauffeur!” Mom said.

Lee stood a few feet away from us with the camera balanced on his shoulder, already rolling. He tapped a button on the camera and looked out from around the viewfinder. “You’re welcome, Mrs. Burch. Could we try that again, and this time, pretend I’m not here? I want this to all be very cinema verité, very natural.”

“Oh, of course,” Mom said, and flashed a very quick, very tiny smile at me to convey that she hadn’t realized Lee took his filmmaking so seriously.

Once the camera was rolling again, Mom introduced me and Elliott to Nurse Gibbons, the head of administration at the Children’s Hospital. “We haven’t told the kids that you’re coming. We thought it might be better to surprise them,” the middle-aged woman with thick, short gray hair told us. “On this floor we have kids who suffer from genetic disorders, metabolic disorders, and some of whom are being treated for various stages of cancer. Not all of the kids can leave their rooms, but those who can have gathered in the television lounge. There are quite a few parents here, too.” She cautioned us with a warm grin. “When we notified them that you’d be coming in for a visit, they all asked if they were welcome. I hope that’s alright.”

The hospital was intimidating, with its harsh hallway lights and overpowering antiseptic smell. It was more cheerful than I expected, with a lot of kids’ art hanging in the hallway and bulletin boards plastered with colorful flyers announcing support groups for parents and outpatient events for kids. Nurse Gibbons led all of us down a long hallway and around a corner to a glass-walled room where a bunch of kids and parents were watching a prime-time cartoon.

“Wait right here,” Nurse Gibbons told us in a low voice. She stepped into the room with Lee and his camera, and from the hallway I heard her announce, “Good evening, everyone, and thank you for coming. I promised you a special surprise this afternoon, and it’s here.”

“Is it pizza?” a boy’s voice asked.

“No, it’s not pizza. But I think it’s something you’ll enjoy more than pizza. Please welcome to the Children’s Hospital—Allison and Elliott from
Center Stage!”

As Elliott and I entered the television lounge, I tried not to look right at Lee’s camera. A girl who was probably not much younger than me who’d lost all of her hair and was hooked up to an IV drip was shaking her head, muttering, “No way. No way.” Hands covered mouths in surprise. Eyes were huge with delight. Stepping into that room and seeing how much joy my presence created was even better than stepping into the hot spotlight on a stage. I remembered Nigel’s comment from a few hours ago about wondering if he’d be better off back in Dublin selling shoes. At that instant, I knew that at in my case, this was exactly where I was supposed to be and what I was meant to be doing.

“Hi everyone,” Elliott said shyly. “Allison thought it would be cool if we came by and sang a couple of songs for you.”

A boy with very swollen cheeks who looked to be around twelve years old in a striped robe raised his hand as if he was in a classroom. Elliott nodded at him. The boy asked, “Are you guys, like, boyfriend and girlfriend?”

My eyes flashed up at my mom as I turned crimson. Luckily Elliott answered with a sideways glance at me, “We’re best friends. That just about covers it.”

Elliott showed off his impressive guitar skills as we took requests from the kids. He effortlessly jammed out the chords to songs by Coldplay, the Beatles, and one annoying but obligatory round of
“This Little Light of Mine,”
which had been ordered by the youngest kid in attendance.
  
Two nurses rolled in a table boasting Dixie cups full of orange Kool-Aid and potato chips (which could only be eaten by kids who weren’t violently allergic to gluten and didn’t have feeding tubes). In just about every single way, it was the least cool party I’d ever been to in my life, but it was still the
best
party I’d ever attended. When it was time for the kids to return to their rooms, one mother hugged me with tears in her eyes and told me that she and her daughter watched
Center Stage!
every Friday night together in her hospital room.

It was critical to our plan that Elliott and I return to the hotel separately to keep the producers from suspecting that we’d met up at any point that night. Lee drove Elliott back to the hotel, and I rode back with Mom. I’d already texted Ralph to tell him that I had become ill at the Fonda Theater and that I’d told one of the production assistants—
how could I be sure which one? Someone in a plaid shirt
—that I had phoned my mom to come and get me.

However, I hadn’t been completely honest with my mom about the show’s sanctioning of our impromptu hospital concert. When she asked, “Are the show’s producers going to mind that Lee shot all that video of you guys before the season’s over?” I coolly replied, “We’re just going to put some of it on social media. I mean, it was for sick kids. What are they going to do, throw us in jail?”

A few weeks had passed since Mom and I had shared any one-on-one time. We hadn’t discussed what had happened on Thanksgiving, and she didn’t waste much time beating around the bush before grilling me about Elliott.

“Just exactly what is going on, Allison? You are under a contractual obligation not to leave that hotel,” she reminded me.

“I know, I know,” I said. My parents’ potential legal culpability was a big factor in the plan Elliott and I had created. We’d ruled out several potential ways of defying the producers entirely because they might have put my parents in litigious jeopardy. “There’s a lot going on with the show, Mom. I can’t even explain all of it, just—don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry!” she exclaimed as we merged onto the freeway. “How can I not worry when you’re staying at the same hotel as that—that—
troublesome
boy with practically no adult supervision? I
knew
there was something going on between you two when he showed up at the house unannounced back in September.”

“Mom.
Mom,”
I interrupted her while trying to keep my voice low. “There’s
nothing
going on. The show just generates all these dumb storylines for publicity. And Elliott is a nice guy. He’s just shy.”

My mom hadn’t been referring to Elliott’s reluctance to make eye contact when she chose the word
troublesome
to describe him. She’d been referring to his broken home, his smoking habit, his falling-apart car. Factors that qualified him as a risky potential boyfriend, but made him all the more irresistible to me. Even merely talking about Elliott made my heart beat a little faster. However potentially troublesome Elliott was, I was already blindly in love with him. Mom fell silent for a second and then asked, “You’re not really dating that guy?”

Although Elliott and I had carefully plotted to deceive the producers, I couldn’t bring myself to lie to my mom. “We like each other, but that’s it. It’s been kind of hard to figure out what’s real and what the producers are just trying to make us
think
is real.”

After I listened to my mother’s excessive cautions about not making foolish decisions while under extraordinary stress, choosing between nice boys from nice families and dangerous boys with chips on their shoulders, and most awkward of all—about safe sex and if how I considered myself ready to have a mature relationship with a boy, she’d take me to Dr. Walters to discuss options—we finally pulled into the Neue Hotel parking lot, where Elliott was leaning against a pillar near the hotel’s entrance. My mother harrumphed upon seeing him as if his slouchy posture and permanent scowl confirmed every single concern she’d just voiced.

Still mortified by mom’s lecture after hastily saying goodbye and slamming the car door shut behind me, I grinned at Elliott. He was playing with his fancy Zippo lighter, striking a flame and then catching it. “Late night smoke?” I greeted him.

“No, just playing with my lighter. I’m trying to quit,” he replied. He waited for my mom’s car pull out of the parking lot before he placed a hand on my shoulder and gave me a quick kiss.

“Why’s that?”

Elliott pocketed his lighter and said, “There’s this girl I’m trying to impress whose mom doesn’t like smokers.”

I stifled a giggle and pulled him closer by the collar of his plaid shirt. “Really? Tawny’s mom doesn’t like smokers? Who would have thought?”

He shook his head in amusement at my reference to our afternoon dates. “Oh, man. There was one point this afternoon when I really and truly wished a shark would attack me so that I wouldn’t have to listen to that woman talk about herself anymore. She refers to herself in the third person. Did you know that?
Tawny adores Italian food. Tawny will have the fried ravioli.”