Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  #StarMaterial

  About the Author

  More Books by Caitlyn Duffy

  Center Stage!

  by Caitlyn Duffy

  Published by Lovestruck Literary

  For information about permissions to reproduce selections from this book, visit www.lovestruckliterary.com and contact the publisher.

  Copyright © 2015 Caitlyn Duffy

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9960356-5-1

  Dedication

  For Olivia G.

  She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s totally

  #StarMaterial

  Prologue

  “Did you know your dad’s in Paris?”

  It was the second week of summer vacation, and Taylor and I were chilling poolside in my yard after our morning shift making juice smoothies at Robek’s. Taylor had only been back in Los Angeles from her private boarding school in Massachusetts for a week. We had been best friends since pre-school, and my mother liked to joke that we were attached at the hip. Every summer we hung out as if we were addicted to each other after being separated during the school year, and I was psyched that we had both landed part-time jobs where we could share shifts.

  “Hmm,” Taylor replied, disinterested in the celebrity gossip magazine that I held up for her reaction. I’d turned to a page featuring a glossy photo collage of her biological father, rock star Chase Atwood, shopping up a storm with his beautiful young wife in the City of Light. They smiled for the paparazzi on ritzy Ave. Montaigne, carrying bags from Chanel and Dior. Chase’s band, Pound, had just kicked off a world tour. There was a good chance I knew more details about it than Taylor did because I voraciously read music blogs, and she was completely ambivalent about her dad’s fame.

  “They’re touring with Sigma, you know,” I informed her, trying to bait a response from her by mentioning the hot new band that was opening for Pound. “If they do any shows in Los Angeles before the end of the summer, you should totally bug your dad to introduce you to Brice Norris.” Brice Norris was Sigma’s bad boy lead singer, already famous at the age of twenty-two for bar brawls along the Sunset Strip. It was pretty smart of Pound, in my opinion, to have a younger, edgier band open for them on their summer tour to get kids my age to buy tickets. I didn’t think Sigma’s music was anything groundbreaking, but Brice Norris was smoking hot.

  “If you can get his number from my mother, you’re welcome to ask him yourself,” Taylor told me in a bored voice. She turned a page in the copy of Jane Eyre she’d brought over. Even though Taylor’s father paid for her expensive school, she’d only visited him a handful of times in her life. She considered her blood relationship to him to be such a burden that she didn’t even go by his last name.

  I couldn’t imagine being lucky enough to have a music legend for a father and not exploiting that as much as possible. My eyes lingered on a picture in the magazine of Chase Atwood signing autographs near the Eiffel Tower, smiling with his Ray-Bans propped up on his head. Women would never have gathered around my father for his autograph; he was a nerdy aviation engineer who liked to listen to talk radio. It was my secret fantasy to become a singer as famous as Taylor’s father one day. Taylor didn’t want anything to do with her dad, but if one of my parents had been that influential in the music industry, I would have already demanded a record contract. That summer, it had been my most desperate wish that my brother would share Mom’s car with me so that I could join a band. But then he’d gotten an internship downtown, which rendered me carless.

  On the next page of the magazine, a full-page ad for the reality television musical competition show Center Stage! caught my eye. Last season’s winner, Curtis Wallace, was pictured crooning into a microphone beneath a headline encouraging prospective contestants to submit video auditions through the show’s website for their chance at stardom. A glimmer of hopeful curiosity stirred in my chest. I sang all the time—in the car, alone in my room, in the shower—and I happened to think I was pretty good. My opinion had never been verified by anyone else, but I wondered just for a fraction of a second what might happen if I sent in an audition.

  “Maybe I will ask. You might not want to meet Brice Norris, but I do,” I teased, even though I’d never work up the nerve to ask Taylor’s mom for anything.

  “Go right ahead. She probably doesn’t even have my father’s direct phone number anymore. I think she always calls the band’s press manager when she wants something. He must have finally gotten sick of her contacting him all the time for more money,” Taylor grumbled.

  Unlike my mom, who was unconcerned with the increasing number of silver strands in her hair, Taylor’s mom spent a lot of time trying to look and act as young as us. On rare nights when she didn’t have a date with a guy at least ten years younger than her, she would take us to see horror movies. Sometimes she’d even score free popcorn by smiling and licking her lips at the guy working behind the snack counter. Her flirting was a source of deep embarrassment for Taylor, and her preoccupation with beauty was a catalyst for many of their arguments. Chase Atwood had sent Taylor a Hermès bag for her fifteenth birthday, which her mom promptly resold because she thought it was a ludicrously extravagant gift for a teenage girl. Taylor had no proof, but she was pretty sure her mom had spent the cash on Juvederm to make her lips look sexier.

  “Hey, guys.”

  Both of us turned when my brother, Todd, stepped through the sliding doors onto the patio, home early from his internship. In the short period since Taylor had arrived back in town, I’d started wondering if she were developing some kind of gross fascination with him. She was actually working on a tan for the first time in history. A few days earlier, she’d asked Todd all kinds of questions about international dispute resolution, the subject he was planning to study at the University of Connecticut in the fall. Her preparedness for that random conversation had struck me as suspicious; Taylor had no reason to know so much about the Falkland Islands. When she nearly dropped her bottle of organic ginger ale at the sound of my brother’s greeting, my hunch was confirmed.

  “Hi, Todd,” Taylor said. “Anything new and dangerous going on in the world?”

  Todd leaned against the doorframe, letting all of the air-conditioned coolness of our living room spill out into the blazing summer heat. “Not much. This week I’m helping to file a report on Bulgaria’s compliancy with the Schengen rules. Boring stuff.”

  “Sounds like it,” I said dully in a tone suggesting that he should get lost.

  Taylor ignored me. “That’s really interesting.”

  “There’s a cool article about it in this month’s European Journal of International Relations. It has a quote in it from my manager. I can e-mail you a link if you want,” Todd offered.

  Taylor lifted her sunglasses to take a better look at my brother with her sea green eyes. “Yeah, that would be awesome. Thanks.” At my house, it was presumed that people were interested in requirements for countries trying to join the European Union. Our fridge was stocked with kale, bricks of silk tofu, and cloudy jars of coconut oil. At Tay
lor’s house, conversation topics rarely strayed from cute dresses and cute boys, and the kitchen was a disarray of empty wine bottles and grease-stained pizza boxes. It crossed my mind—and not for the first time—that perhaps my best friend and I had been switched at birth.

  Todd vanished back inside the house after he muttered something about taking a shower. “Dude,” I said in a cautionary tone, “Could you stop crushing on my brother? It’s sick.”

  Taylor nonchalantly twirled a long strand of her wavy hair. “I’m so not crushing on Todd. I just find international politics fascinating. Sorry if I’m more intrigued by current events than your friends at Pacific Valley, like Nicole.”

  Taylor knew most of my friends at the private high school I attended in West Hollywood because she’d gone to elementary and junior high school with us. Even if Chase Atwood hadn’t ponied up the cash to send her to the prestigious Treadwell Academy, chances were good we’d have attended different high schools, anyway. She and her mom lived in the section of West Hollywood zoned for Fairfax High. While Pacific Valley School was nowhere near as expensive as Taylor’s school in Massachusetts, my tuition was probably more than Taylor’s mom—a mostly out-of-work actress—would have been able to afford without Chase’s help. Our houses were only a few blocks away from each other, but that small distance made all the difference in our high school education options.

  “Taylor, I’m willing to bet you an iced coffee at Peet’s that you can’t even find Bulgaria on a map,” I teased her.

  “Whatever. I know where Bulgaria is.”

  I spent several minutes tapping my cell phone in pursuit of an online map of Europe without country labels so that I could test her. “There,” she said, touching the screen of my phone with her fingertip on a puzzle-piece shape of a country.

  “Is that your final answer?”

  “It’s totally Bulgaria, Allison. Am I right?”

  With an evil cackle, I swiped the screen to reveal the names of the countries. “It’s Macedonia. Bulgaria is, like, three times as big. Pay up!”

  Taylor groaned and slapped her book shut. “It’s a thousand degrees out here. You cannot seriously think we’re gonna walk to Larchmont Village in this heat.”

  I sat upright on my pool chair and lifted one of my bathing suit straps to see if I’d gotten any more tan during the time we’d been frying ourselves out there. “We’re not gonna walk. You’re gonna bat your eyelashes at my brother and get him to drive us.”

  She didn’t object to that, and we went inside, leaving all of the junk we’d carried home with us from Robek’s out by the pool. The light blue hoodie Taylor had worn to work in the morning when it was still cool outside was abandoned on a pool chair. Todd drove us across West Hollywood with the windows down and the radio blasting the Black Keys on ALT 98.7 as the golden sun sat low in the hazy afternoon sky. I thought our whole summer would be just like that afternoon, a carefree waste of time before junior year.

  But two weeks later, I zipped myself into an itchy black dress to attend the wake for Taylor’s mother after she overdosed at a party. At the funeral home, my mother nervously tried to make cordial small talk with Chase Atwood, who had abandoned his band’s tour to fly back to Los Angeles and assume guardianship of Taylor. Todd and I struggled to find the right words to say to Taylor; she seemed oddly serene despite the fact that her entire life had just spiraled into chaos. When we left, Mom reached for my hand as we crossed the parking lot of the funeral home, and I didn’t object. The last time I could remember holding her hand had been my first day of kindergarten.

  A few days after the wake, Taylor joined Chase and his second wife on a hastily rescheduled tour of the United States. My friend Nicole from school picked up Taylor’s shifts at Robek’s, and I didn’t mention in my e-mails to Taylor that my brother took Nicole to the movies a few times. Even though Taylor sounded like her heart couldn’t possibly break into more pieces whenever she called me from the road, it didn’t seem fair to burden her with jealousy over their potential romance. She was staying in five-star hotels, rubbing elbows with celebrities. There was no reason, in my opinion, for her to be pining away for my epically geeky brother.

  Every night, I flipped open the greasy magazine that I’d been reading out by the pool and studied the advertisement calling for Center Stage! auditions. One night, when Todd was at the Beverly Center with Nicole seeing a movie and my parents were watching a television show about true crime in the living room, I made a video recording of myself singing on my phone. When I played it back and listened to myself in my earbuds, I was mortified by how earnestly I was trying to deliver a knock-out performance. I tapped delete. But I opened my laptop and clicked around on the Center Stage! website for a few minutes, feeling an urgent compulsion just to submit something.

  “Allison! Go outside and see if you can find Buster!”

  Our cat was trying to defect to the neighbors’ house because he preferred the cans of salty name-brand cat food they left outside for him to the organic brand that Mom fed him. On a nightly basis, either Todd or I was tasked with venturing out into the yard to summon him home. I sighed, reluctantly closed my laptop, and went out back. Some nights, it was easy to spot Buster’s eyes reflecting from where he hid beneath the Christmas Berry bushes along the back of our yard. Other nights, he made himself scarce, and this was one of those nights. I looked up at the starry night sky, wondering if Taylor was looking up at the sky in Virginia Beach, where Pound was playing that weekend. I found myself wishing that my life was as exciting as hers and that someday I’d sell out concert arenas all across the country just like her dad.

  It occurred to me that I was going to have to do a lot more than wish on stars if I wanted to make my dream come true.

  Chapter 1

  The Audition

  “You’re up in forty-five seconds, Allison.”

  I felt like my knees were going to buckle, and my interlocked fingers were as cold as popsicles. So cold that I assumed my fingernails were probably turning blue underneath my Orange-You-Glad-I-Didn’t-Say-Banana gel manicure. I stood in the conference room that had been designated as a waiting area with the other contestants who were auditioning, and averted my eyes to avoid watching a girl around my age on a monitor. She was receiving feedback from the same celebrity vocal coaches who would be deciding my fate—and everyone else’s—that hot day in September.

  One of the television show’s crew members had given me a laminated number on a lanyard to wear around my neck, and I nervously fidgeted with it. I was #67, the next in line to sing. My nerves were not exactly being soothed by the sound of #66 receiving cringe-worthy feedback on her performance. The poor girl had chosen to sing a popular ballad by pop star Tawny. That was her first mistake, in my opinion. No one could sing “You Don’t Know Me at All,” better than the superstar from Miami whose voice was as smooth as cocoa butter. The first coach, whose name I’d already overheard—Nelly Fulsom, a successful Country Western singer—was lambasting #66. She cruelly pointed out that the song showcased #66’s range but exposed her inability to hold a note with any measurable power for more than a few seconds. When I dared to steal a glance at the television monitor, #66 looked like she was on the brink of unleashing a tsunami of tears.

  I quaked with anxiety. Even though I had been trying not to pay much attention, I’d thought #66’s performance hadn’t been too bad.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I had crept out the back door of Pacific Valley School before the start of sixth period (Calculus—seriously, who can do advanced math right after lunch?) to catch the stinky public bus bound for Hollywood. The local Center Stage! auditions were being held that day. My parents had no idea that I would dare to cut classes. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d submitted an audition video of myself singing my favorite song from Phantom of the Opera into my mobile phone’s camera. It wasn’t as if I had anyone to tell, anyway. My parents were the most anti-show biz parents in all of Los Angeles, and Taylor and I had stopped spea
king after an argument over the summer. Nicole would have told everyone at school that I was trying to get onto Center Stage! and that would have been mortifying. No one at my high school knew that I sang; even my involvement in our musical theater program was minimal.

  So I had submitted my audition video in total secrecy, never expecting to receive an e-mail from the show’s producers inviting me to continue the audition process in person. It was such a shock to find that e-mail in my inbox; I hadn’t even decided to attend the audition until that very morning before school started. Sending in a video for consideration had been like dipping a toe in a cold pool, but showing up for the real audition with actual celebrity coaches judging the performances was like doing a nosedive. There would be no stepping back onto the diving board after I jumped, which was terrifying. It was possible that my audition would be viciously torn apart by the coaches in front of an entire television crew—not to mention the entire country—if the producers included it in the season premiere’s outtakes.

  That was how I came to be standing in a hotel conference room adjoined to the Dolby Theater, surrounded by other hopeful singers, most of them a few years older than me. I had banned myself from watching the monitor too closely in an attempt to not get psyched out by other contestants. I hadn’t even wanted to know who the coaches were because if any of them were personal idols of mine, that would have been simply too much pressure. With any luck at all, the stage lights would be too bright for me to distinguish the faces of those who sat at the table with microphones and score cards, listening. Judging. The mere fact that celebrities strode across that stage in the Dolby Theater every year for the Oscar ceremonies was enough to give me goosebumps.

  “Are you ready?” a crew member wearing a black t-shirt and a headset asked me gently. He motioned for me to follow him through a set of green double doors and down a long, carpeted hallway. At the end of the hallway, he held open another door, and all I could see through its frame was the darkness of the backstage area. The acoustics on the other side of that door were completely different than the muted quiet within the carpeted hallway. The Center Stage! theme music blasted over the sound system, and a series of middle-aged crew guys with big bellies poking through their t-shirts directed me toward the edge of the stage. Everyone was mumbling in low voices on their headsets about where cameras were moving and when lighting needed to shift. Nothing felt real. It seemed as if I was dreaming, and my teeth were chattering.