In the morning, both of my parents were waiting for me at the kitchen table when I emerged from the bathroom, ready to face them for their verdict before school. My dad, the man least interested in nutrition in the United States of America (much to my mom’s chagrin), was polishing off his second toaster strudel and pressing a paper towel to his lips to clear away crumbs.
“Good morning,” I said in my most chipper voice, opening up the fridge. I couldn’t help but noticing the forms I had left on the counter after dinner the night before were on the table between them. From my vantage point near the fridge, I couldn’t tell if my parents had signed them yet or not.
“Did you sleep well?” Mom asked, calmly stirring artificial sweetener into her coffee.
“Yes,” I lied. There were bags under my eyes; I hadn’t fallen asleep until almost three in the morning and had awakened at dawn’s first light when the birds outside our house began chirping. I was so simultaneously happy, nervous, and full of dread that I thought I might sustain irreparable damage to my internal organs from having so many emotions crammed inside of me.
“I left the check for the landscapers on the credenza,” Dad told Mom, surely in an attempt to drive me completely insane by avoiding the topic he knew I wanted to discuss. “Don’t forget to ask Gary about that limb on the tree in the yard.”
I set the carton of almond milk down on the counter and sighed. “Oh, come on.” It was just like them to pretend as if there was nothing important going on; like that day was just any old Thursday.
“Allison,” Mom began, “your father and I discussed the show last night. If you are serious about participating, we are setting some rules and limits that you’re not particularly going to like. So if you can’t commit to these terms, then I will call the producers of the show and tell them that you’ll be auditioning again in two years after you’ve graduated from high school.”
My lungs swelled with an almost unbearable amount of air. They were going to let me do it. I knew already that their terms would be ridiculous and unrealistic, but that didn’t matter. They were going to sign the forms and send them back to En Fuego Productions. I’d step onto that stage and into the spotlight again. Nelly Fulsom would give me private singing lessons. People in America were going to know my name.
My mom kept talking, and her words melted down into an indecipherable sauce of noise. All I heard her say clearly was that she’d send the paperwork back to the production company. There were other things about keeping grades up, tidying my room, emptying the dishwasher, and cleaning up after Buster, but I could barely hear them over the deafening beating of my heart. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, thank you, Mom!” I squealed. Unable to control myself, I jigged my way across the kitchen in my rainbow-colored sneakers to throw my arms appreciatively around my mom’s neck.
“I mean it, Allison. If you give us any reason at all to believe that this isn’t a good idea, we’ll pull you out of the show faster than you can even realize what’s happening.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dad!” I exclaimed, switching from my mom to my dad, whom I kissed on the cheek as he folded up the newspaper on the table in front of him.
“Listen to your mother,” he instructed me.
Concentration was impossible that day at school. Instead of focusing on lessons in my classes, my brain kept drifting into rehearsals for songs I might use on the show. I wondered if my potential had crossed Nelly Fulsom’s mind at all since yesterday. Would she have a ton of ideas for my competition strategy when we next met? When would we next meet? Where would we meet? What would I wear? Would my mom indulge me in a new pair of jeans? Would the production company buy me a new wardrobe? I realized I knew painfully little about how the show would operate and what I’d be required to do. I wondered if my mom had sent everything over to Danny Fuego’s production company yet. I hoped she would pay close attention if she spoke with any of the producers about next steps.
At lunchtime, Nicole barraged me with questions even though I hadn’t given her much of a reason to suspect anything was up.
“Where were you during Chemistry yesterday?” she asked when she joined me in line at the grill station where I was waiting for a veggie burger. During sophomore year, most of our classes had been together, but we were on very different schedules this year. Nicole was in Advanced Placement English, and was taking college preparation a lot more seriously than I was. I hadn’t felt particularly ambitious when I had chosen my junior year classes with Mrs. Gambaryan, my guidance counselor, despite her efforts to encourage me to challenge myself.
“Nurse’s office,” I lied. I wasn’t prepared to tell her about the show yet, at least not until I was positive that my mom had done as she’d said she would. I felt a buzzing in my handbag as we sat down at our table with the usual suspects—Michelle, Kaela, Colton, and Lee—and I withdrew my phone to see that I had a voicemail. Voicemail? No one ever left me voicemail. I rarely even spoke on my phone. Text messages were my primary method of communication. “Weird,” I muttered, and tapped the security code into my phone to unlock it so that I could listen to the message.
“Hi, Allison! This is Claire Robinson at En Fuego Productions. I just wanted to let you know that your mom e-mailed us your paperwork, and was hoping you could give me a call at your earliest convenience.” Claire’s voice was upbeat and musical.
I shuddered and replayed the message so that I could jot down the phone number on a napkin since it was different than the last phone number to appear in my recent calls list, suggesting that maybe Claire had called me from her direct extension at the office. “I have to make a phone call,” I announced to my friends. As I rose from the table, I heard Colton croon, “Oooh-oooh-oooh” behind me, insinuating that my need to make a call was romance-related. As if. Just outside the entrance to the cafeteria, I paused near the row of vending machines and stuck one finger in my ear to block out the roar of lunchtime noise while I tapped the CALL button.
“En Fuego Productions. This is Claire.” A perky voice answered after one ring.
“Hi, Claire. It’s Allison Burch, from the auditions yesterday,” I said nervously.
“Allison! Yes, how are you?” Claire asked.
“I’m okay.”
“That’s great. Everyone’s still buzzing with excitement around here about your audition,” Claire said, making my heart soar with hope. “We think you’re going to be a big star! But first, there are few things that I need to discuss with you that we hadn’t foreseen when we taped your spot yesterday.”
I knew what was coming. They knew about my real age, obviously, since my mom had no doubt filled in the correct information on my paperwork. When I had skimmed the documentation that Claire had given me, there were warnings about parental guardians of people under the age of eighteen all over them. But surely with my mom’s permission, I’d be allowed to compete.
“Typically we require contestants under the age of eighteen to gain their parents’ permission to participate on the show for a variety of legal reasons,” Claire said, sounding like she was scolding me a little. “It looks like on your initial application, your year of birth was misinterpreted, and our casting team thought you had already had your eighteenth birthday.”
I blushed, remembering how I had intentionally smudged the year of my birth date on my application to make it more difficult to read. I hadn’t technically lied, but had simply obscured the truth a little with my fingertip.
“Oh,” I said dully. “I don’t think I knew that when I sent in my audition. But... the application said between sixteen and twenty-four. I already tried out. Nelly chose me for her team.”
“Yes, yes,” Claire agreed. “The producers are thrilled with you, and as it turns out, another one of our contestants who’s made the cut this season is also under the age of eighteen, but he’ll be having his eighteenth birthday before the end of the season. And now that your parents have consented, we just have to work through the details of how you’ll be abl
e to accommodate the taping schedule.”
Relief. I was so overjoyed by this news that I leaned against the cool cement wall of the hallway to keep myself from falling over. “That’s awesome.”
“So, here’s the issue. Your mom tells me that you’re a junior in high school.”
I couldn’t exactly lie about that since I was standing inside of my high school at that very moment. “Uh, yeah,” I admitted.
“We have very strict confidentiality rules for any contestant participating on the show. All forty of the contestants selected each season are brought to Los Angeles, and any contestants who remain on the show after the first four weeks—our twenty-four finalists—are required to live in accommodations provided by the production company. This is entirely for ratings, you see. We can’t have any contestants talking to the media or leaking show secrets before the season finale.”
I tried to put all the pieces together. I’d have to live in a hotel? Would my parents be permitted to come with me? That didn’t make sense—the show aired live every week. Who’d have time to talk to the media? I responded with a dull, “Oh.”
“What I’m getting at, here, is that you’d inevitably have to miss a fair amount of school if you were to become one of our finalists. Now, of course, even though you had a strong audition, there are no guarantees, but let’s just say you made it past the first four rounds of expulsion. You’d probably have to miss about two months of classes,” Claire explained. “Even if the paparazzi were to see you entering and leaving your school every day after you were voted off, you’d still be under contract not to provide them with any information about the show, and they can be very pushy. It’s a risk we couldn’t take.”
“Oh,” I repeated. Say something other than ‘oh,’ I commanded myself. “Did you… already talk to my mom about this?”
“No,” Claire confessed. “I wanted to talk to you first because our other contestant under the age of eighteen is a senior and has worked out details with his school so that missing classes won’t be an issue. I wanted to float that idea past you to see if it might be a possibility. If not, you could probably also be home-schooled, or perhaps take a formal leave of absence.”
Nausea overwhelmed me. Missing school for two months? Asking my parents to home-school me? Even if I missed school for two weeks I’d probably never catch up again. My parents would never allow me to drop out of high school almost two years early just to be on a television show. Even I could admit that was a terrible idea. They’d also be opposed to the idea of my trying to keep up with school work without actually attending school, primarily because I hadn’t done such a great job of keeping up with school work while going to class every day for the last eleven years. But still, I couldn’t back out of the show just because of this wrinkle. Like Claire said, she hadn’t told my mom yet, so I still had a chance of figuring out how to rectify the school situation.
After all, I was willing to bet that the other contestant still in high school was Elliott Mercer. The mere thought of seeing him again made my temperature rise.
“I’ll talk to my parents. We’ll find a solution.”
As I walked back to where my friends were sitting, a prickly anxiety swept over me. There was a chance I was going to leave high school early! It made me sad to think about my friends graduating without me, but the idea of never having to endure another mid-term or state-mandated physical fitness test was just about the most magnificent thing I could imagine.
During freshman and sophomore years, I had kept waiting for high school to feel like high school, the way high school seemed on television. I thought one morning I’d wake up and everything would just fall into place; I’d drive to school in a shiny red Mini Cooper convertible; my cute boyfriend (preferably Oliver Teague) would be waiting for me at my locker; I’d be dressed in perfect-fitting skinny jeans, and I’d star in the high school musical.
It was already several weeks into junior year, and it was reasonable to think that if I remained at Pacific Valley until senior year, nothing would change. I’d never be asked to go to a dance by a boy; I’d never be as well-dressed as the other girls in the eleventh and twelfth grades. I’d never even get a major role in a school drama production, because it was widely accepted that the casting of our pithy plays had a great deal to do with the fame of kids’ parents. After trudging through two years of being a nobody at a private high school, I couldn’t allow myself to get nostalgic about leaving to be a contestant on Center Stage!
“What’s up?” Lee asked me back at the table when I sat down and observed that he’d eaten nearly half of my French fries. Lee was Korean and had a big crush on Nicole, who had an even bigger crush on my brother. Every once in a while I got a little jealous when I could tell Lee was saying or doing something specifically to impress her, and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t in love with Lee, and shouldn’t care if he was trying to win Nicole’s heart. He played clarinet and was a certifiable band geek. His dad was some kind of computer genius and worked at a big software company. Even though I didn’t like Lee that way, it sucked that every boy was always trying to capture Nicole’s attention, because she had shiny hair, big boobs, and a fake way of laughing that boys seemed to think was adorable.
“Nothing,” I quickly said, still not ready to tell my friends my big secret.
“Fine, be mysterious then,” Lee teased.
“A woman with a secret,” Colton taunted. Colton had a huge puff of curly rust-colored hair and we were all pretty certain he was gay, although he staunchly insisted that he was not. Kaela was madly in love with him, and I’d even seen them holding hands in the hallway before. But Colton had made a habit of calling all of us (including Lee) girl, and he had a suspicious interest in Coach Gannett, the boys’ blond, muscular baseball coach.
“Come on, Allison! It’s obvious that there’s something going on. You’ve never gotten a phone call at school before,” Nicole said.
“Yeah, fess up,” Michelle insisted. Michelle was pretty tough, and toward the end of sophomore year she had really started pushing it with Pacific Valley rules. She routinely dyed her hair wild colors and had even given herself (or so she claimed) a crude-looking tattoo in the approximate shape of a bat on the inside of her wrist. Unlike the rest of us, whose social lives revolved around the cafeteria, Michelle had other friends from elementary school who still went to public school. She played soccer in a community league with some of them, and from time to time silenced us with an announcement that she’d be attending a party with those other friends on a weekend. Sometimes, over the summer, Nicole, Kaela, and I would see her at the West Hollywood pool with girls we didn’t recognize, and we’d wave but not say hello.
All of my friends had paused eating and were waiting for my big announcement. Lee cautiously reached over and grabbed two more fries off my tray, but continued to stare at me even as he inserted them into his mouth. “There’s nothing to tell yet. I promise I’ll tell all of you my big news as soon as I know for sure that it’s real,” I vowed.
“Does it have to do with Todd?” Nicole asked coyly.
“It has absolutely nothing to do with Todd,” I snapped at her, annoyed that anyone would think that the only way something newsworthy might occur in my life was if it involved my brother.
“I bet it has to do with—Oliver Teague!” Lee exclaimed, looking across the cafeteria to where my long-time crush was roughhousing with the other hot guys from the soccer team. Oliver Teague looked as gorgeous as ever, showing off a new tan with a white polo shirt. His eyes looked even darker and shinier than usual, and his summer buzz haircut was growing in, which I happened to find extremely sexy. He looked over at our table most likely because everyone at our table was looking over at his table, and then he smiled at his girlfriend, Morgan Flossmoore. Morgan was a senior and had thick caramel-colored hair that fell to her waist. She also had huge, brown, equine eyes, framed by abundant lashes that she lengthened with clumpy blue mascara.
I turned around to
swat Lee on the shoulder.
“God! Shut up, Lee!”
“Ha ha,” Lee chortled. “You want him.”
As we cleared our trays at the end of the lunch hour, I felt my phone buzz in my handbag again, and this time it was a text message from my brother.
IDIOT 1:03 P.M.
congrats on the big news!
Todd’s text was an indication that my mom was excited enough about my shot at stardom to have mentioned it to my brother. My mom and Todd spoke at least once each day, which I thought was for sure some kind of Oedipal weirdness.
Claire’s words remained on my mind throughout Calculus and French. When only fifteen minutes remained of the school day as I sat in Madame Peterson’s classroom staring at the clock, I wanted to kick myself for scheduling my two most difficult classes at the end of the day. I was at my day-dreamiest after two o’clock. I had a feeling I needed to get back to Claire with an answer. At the very least, I wanted to have a solution secured in my head before I raised the topic at the dinner table that night with my parents. As soon as the bell rang, I walked slowly toward Mrs. Gambaryan’s office instead of my locker to collect my books for the bus ride home.
“Knock knock,” I said quietly in the doorway of my guidance counselor’s office. Mrs. Gambaryan looked up from the laptop on her desk and waved for me to enter.
“Allison Burch. Why, what brings your lovely self to my office?”
I sat down in the chair across from her desk and was momentarily distracted by the extremely cheesy framed poster hanging on the wall behind her. Top 5 Reasons to Visit your Guidance Counselor! #1 – Resolve conflicts! #2 – Discuss your future! #3 – Learn about financial aid! #4 – Search for scholarships! #5 – Ask for support!
Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) Page 4