Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  On the long walk around the back of the stage to the florescent-flooded, carpeted hallway, I tried to piece together a complete picture of Elliott’s life from the fragments I’d just seen. His mom’s house and appearance certainly gave the impression that he was living in conditions close to poverty. Where was the father who had taught him how to play guitar? Had he not been included in the final edit, not been able to stay home the day the video crew arrived to shoot footage, or was he just… gone? I was way more than just inquisitive about Elliott’s life. I was practically obsessed.

  Marlene was waiting for me in the hallway just outside the closed door to the Group 2 prep room along with Mom and Dad, which surprised me. No one had told me that parents would be permitted backstage at any point during the show. Marlene crushed me in a giant bear hug and said, “You did it, girl. You sure showed them.”

  “But—Nelly,” I objected, my wounds from my own coach’s criticism still fresh. “What happened with my song? Who gave the band direction to play it the way I rewrote it?”

  “Never mind Nelly. Mix-ups happen every once in a while, and luckily for you, this one worked in your favor. You’ll get your votes,” Marlene assured me. She turned to my parents and told them, “Mr. and Mrs. Burch? You’ve got a real talent on your hands, here.”

  Mom had tears in her eyes. “We didn’t know,” she managed to say before the single tears multiplied and turned into rivers rolling down her face.

  “Well, now you do.” Marlene carried her handbag over one arm and appeared to be leaving. I suspected that she had everything to do with slipping the rewritten sheet music for my song to the band. I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or angry, considering that Nelly perceived my performance as an act of defiance, and I could easily have messed up since I hadn’t been prepared for a slower tempo.

  “Aren’t you staying for the end?” I asked.

  “Nah. Jarrett’s going to be just fine, and I don’t like being here for the expulsion part. It’s barbaric. I’d rather go home and watch it later tonight after I’ve had dinner and a glass of wine,” Marlene confessed. “I’ll see you Monday afternoon.”

  Marlene disappeared down the busy hallway, and Mom crouched down a little to stand eye to eye with me. “Really, Allison,” she began, “Rich and I had no idea you had a voice like that bottled up inside you.”

  “You were fantastico,” Dad told me.

  “Although, that song was a little inappropriate for you,” my mom added. “Whose idea was that?”

  The mood in the prep room had grown tense by the time I was corralled back inside with my parents by Rob when he arrived to summon Jarrett. Christa had never returned, and no one seemed to know if she was even still at the studio or had gone to the hospital to have her allergies treated. While none of us had paid close attention for the last two hours, everyone’s eyes were glued to the television screen. Jarrett sang well, but even as he moved through his performance, I could see that he forgot all of the direction Marlene had provided to him throughout the week. He wasn’t singing from the diaphragm instead of from the throat as she had instructed all of us. He wasn’t holding his notes long enough.

  Danny reminded everyone watching the show to get those votes in and that was it for the broadcast. We were all stuck at the theater for hours waiting for the show to air on the West Coast, and for all of those votes to be counted. My breath was shallow. My lower jaw trembled even though I knew I didn’t have too much to worry about… but still, it occurred to me that every kid at Pacific Valley might have texted in their vote mistakenly for Christa instead of me. That would be almost eight hundred lost votes. Eight hundred was a lot in my mind, even though I already knew from past seasons that the votes pouring in for each contestant from around the country usually amounted to hundreds of thousands.

  “Mom and I will come back at eleven to pick you up, tiger,” Dad announced. He and Mom stood up when caterers wheeled a long buffet table into our room.

  “No, don’t leave!” I begged. I did not want to be left alone with my competitors. After the jacket incident and the perfume attack on Christa, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ian or Brian had laced the fettuccini, grilled salmon, and teriyaki chicken we were being served with poison.

  “We’ll be right outside the theater at Hollywood and Highland,” Dad insisted. “We’ll get you some fudge at Kelly’s,” he added, mentioning one of my favorite confectionaries in the whole world.

  “We will not,” my mother corrected him. My mother was not a believer in rewarding children with sugar.

  I realized that they were probably just serving me up some tough love so that the other people in my group didn’t think I was babyish to have my mom and dad wait with me until the Expulsion Series. But I’d been genuinely rattled by everything that had happened that day. I didn’t want to be alone with those people in a room without someone in a position of authority to keep an eye on things.

  NICOLE 9:38 P.M.

  OMG dude you were so good!

  I knew my segmented had aired on the West Coast when I received a barrage of text messages from my friends who’d been watching. After I texted back a few replies, I put my phone away. Communication was making me anxious, as if too many reassurances from my friends about my greatness would jinx my chances of earning high votes that night.

  At almost eleven, after I’d snoozed through two hours with my arms wrapped around my tote bag (in a state of serious paranoia) while the others in my group played cards, a production assistant arrived to request that we form our single-file line again. Bleary-eyed from my extended nap, I fell into line behind Suzanne, and Christa rejoined us from wherever she’d been hiding herself all evening. Stepping back out onto the stage beneath the hot lights felt like a nightmare. “You’ve cast your votes, America, and now it’s time to find out which of our contestants leave us this week, and which will continue on to compete in week two of Center Stage!” Danny Fuego bellowed.

  The studio audience had been gone for hours. This segment was being taped for the internet (and would be rebroadcast during the following Friday night’s episode). No one knew what to expect; this hadn’t been covered in any of our rehearsals.

  “To remind everyone of the process, we’ll announce the contestant from each team who received the fewest number of votes. The coaches for each team will draw for the Wild Card, and if the lucky coach who finds it wishes to overrule America’s choice for expulsion, they can send another contestant from their team home.”

  I found it interesting that Danny kept referring to our organization as teams when behind the scenes, we were called groups. By definition, teams worked together to accomplish goals. In actuality, we were working against each other.

  He began with Group 1, Chase’s group. The giant video screen hanging over the stage ran through a list of all of Chase’s contestants, starting with the contestant who’d received the most votes (Elliott, by a landslide, with over eight hundred thousand). No one in Elliott’s group seemed surprised or enthusiastic about his first big victory. The video sequence ended with Jordan, an attractive young woman who had apparently performed pretty poorly. Danny asked Jordan to step forward to await her fate.

  Then the video screen ran through the rankings in our group. I breathed a sigh of relief because I’d landed in first place with almost eight hundred thousand votes, but had only secured my top spot by about ten thousand votes more than Robin. Still, I cajoled myself, not bad for a girl no one in America’s ever heard sing before. Robin flashed me a warm, happy smile, and I smiled back before remembering that she was putting on a show for the cameras. She was most certainly not pleased that I’d ranked higher than her, which meant clearly I’d risen to the top of her sabotage hit list.

  Christa was the contestant in our group with the fewest votes, and when her tally was announced, a terrible feeling of guilt came over me. I hadn’t done anything wrong by coming in with the most votes. If anyone was to blame for Christa’s paltry tally of votes, it was Robin
for practically fumigating her with toxins just moments before her turn to sing. But it didn’t matter whether or not I’d personally brought about Christa’s failure; Nelly wouldn’t care.

  “Christa VandeKamp, step on forward,” Danny told her in his maddeningly happy voice.

  Christa swallowed hard and stepped forward to face her fate. Never before in my life had I felt more conflicted. I genuinely didn’t like Christa, but if she were to be voted off the show that night, it wouldn’t have been fair. Robin had cheated, whether anyone could prove that she sprayed her perfume around our prep room intentionally to make Christa sick, or not. It could just as easily have been me who’d had an allergic reaction to the sweet scent.

  When the contestants with the fewest votes from Groups 3 and 4 had been called forward, Danny addressed the table of coaches. The shrill music played overhead on the theater’s deafening audio system to increase tension around the Wild Card drawing seemed kind of pointless since the studio audience had gone home. It certainly wasn’t for our benefit; music couldn’t have made us more anxious than we already were.

  “Coaches,” Danny Fuego said with fake remorse. “America has spoken. If you disagree with the votes cast by our viewers, you have one chance to overrule them… if luck is on your side.” All of us noticed Nelly locking eyes with Christa and nodding her head reassuringly. I couldn’t see Christa’s face because her back was turned, so whether she was crying or smiling smugly, I didn’t know.

  “Each of you will pick a color from the cards shown on the video screen above. One of those cards will be revealed as the Center Stage! Wild Card. Chase, you have the honor of selecting the first card.”

  “Danny, I’d like to choose the red card,” Chase Atwood said firmly into the microphone on the table in front of him.

  “Miss Fulsom,” Danny said, giving Nelly her turn to choose.

  “I’ll… take the yellow card, Danny,” Nelly said.

  “Ms. James,” Danny urged Lenore to select.

  “I’ll go with blue,” Lenore said.

  “And that leaves you, Jay, with green for this evening,” Danny said.

  By some absolute miracle, Nelly’s yellow card turned out to be the Wild Card. She shot out of her seat like a firework and threw her hands in the air. She even roared an impromptu “Yeehaw!”

  “Wow,” Danny Fuego said, genuinely humored by Nelly’s joy. “Now, since Nelly’s won the Wild Card, that means we’re saying goodbye to our friends from Teams one, three, and four. Jordan, Eddie, and Carissa, it’s been wonderful having you here with us on Center Stage! and I wish you the best.”

  The first three contestants expelled from the show hung their heads and walked off stage. They disappeared into the darkness on the side of the stage. I solemnly hoped I never had to hear the words of consolation that the production assistants offered to contestants who’d been freshly voted off.

  “Nelly, you have the opportunity of keeping Christa on your team for another week, but if you choose to do so, you’ll have to send someone else home tonight.”

  Within a blazing second, I realized that none of us were safe. I held my breath—Nelly was looking right at me! But she couldn’t very well send home the girl who’d gotten the most votes, could she? Even after what I would have considered to be a horrible day, from the nerves to the mean-spirited pranks, I didn’t want it to end just yet. My fantasy of boarding a private jet with All or Nothing was still vivid in my mind; I wasn’t ready to give up on that just yet.

  “Well, Danny, I know from working so closely with my team that Christa had an off night. It happens to even the most seasoned performers. You may have noticed that her eyes were puffy during her performance, and that’s because she had a severe allergy attack right before taking the stage.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Danny told Christa.

  “So, I’d like to keep Christa with the team a little longer and give her another shot,” Nelly said. I assumed that the producers would probably layer in a track of fake applause in support of Nelly’s decision before the Expulsion Series was posted to the internet.

  “Now, Nelly, you know that to keep Christa on your team, you’ll have to expel someone else,” Danny restated the obvious.

  “I know, I know.” Nelly bit her lower lip as if she had a very tough decision to make. “Liandra,” she said. A sound escaped Liandra from that was so sharp and painful it was as if she’d just been shot by a sniper. She stood a few inches in front of me, and I saw her hands fly up to her chest as if to reiterate the thought in her mind: me?

  “Liandra, you just about blew me away in your audition back in New Orleans. But I’m sorry to say, I think you have a lot of work to do on your own before you’re ready for the big leagues, honey,” Nelly said. “You have a fantastic voice, and I am sure that with more training back at home, we’re gonna see you back on this stage again real soon.”

  I wanted to gag on Nelly’s fake sweetness. After an excruciating moment of hesitation, when perhaps Liandra was hoping that Nelly would change her mind, she bowed, and thanked Nelly and Danny for the opportunity. She marched off-stage to where Rob, looking menacing with his five o’clock shadow, motioned to her. The rest of the taping was a complete blur for me. Liandra had been so nurturing and protective toward Christa at the start of the week. In the end, she’d been forced to sacrifice her own dream to save Christa’s.

  And I hated myself for it, but I was elated that it wasn’t me who was being sent home a loser that night.

  “Man. I sure don’t envy you right now.”

  I was having a hard time believing that I wasn’t dreaming, even as I felt the cool grass of our front lawn beneath my bare feet. I could smell the distant ocean on the wind in the night air, and hear the chatter of couples dining outside along nearby Melrose Avenue. Standing in my driveway with his hands shoved into the pockets of his skinny jeans an hour after the taping wrapped was none other than Elliott Mercer.

  He’d rung our front doorbell right in the middle of our late night dinner—a big take-out order at Mom’s insistence from Real Food Daily, one of the few restaurants she considered to be adequately healthy. Dad had answered the door assuming it was a reporter and had returned to the table with a goofball grin. “There’s someone here to see you, Allison,” he’d announced.

  “Who could it be at this hour?” my mother wondered aloud with concern.

  And there he was, leaning against the hood of a pretty beat-up looking Ford Fiesta, looking up at me just once as quickly as possible before returning his gaze to the toes of his Jack Purcells. In my limited interactions with Elliott, I’d come to notice that he never made eye contact for an extended period of time. Maybe his avoidance tactic was exclusive to me; I wasn’t sure.

  “Why’s that?” I asked, my thoughts scrambling to solve the simultaneous mysteries of how Elliott had found out where I lived and why he’d bothered to drive to our house after our first televised broadcast. Surely he must have had better things to do, more important places to be. It had sounded back at the Dolby like all of the other contestants were returning to the hotel in Studio City on the shuttle buses to party.

  “Because,” he said with a shrug. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Just as I was about to blow my cool and demand that he stop speaking in riddles, he continued, “You can’t trust your coach.”

  The truth, once it was out in the open, was as evident as if someone had painted it in bold red letters on our garage door. Of course I couldn’t trust Nelly. She’d been absent from our training the first half of the week, and then had been disruptive and unsupportive during the days when she’d half-heartedly bothered to show up. By insisting that I switch up my performance at the last minute without even offering a logical reason, she’d nearly cost me the competition my first time on stage. I’d sensed since Monday that Nelly was going to be a problem, but had still been in a state of mild denial because it didn’t seem possible that the producers would allow one of the coaches to slack
as much as Nelly seemed to be slacking.

  But how had Elliott known any of that?

  “Well, duh,” I said, not wanting to look completely ignorant. “She gave me pretty lousy direction on my song yesterday. I don’t even know how she got chosen to be a coach, because her coaching kind of sucks. If I’d performed my song tonight the way she wanted me to, I would have gotten voted off.”

  “Come on, Allison,” Elliott said. I melted just a tiny bit at hearing him say my name, as if I was kind of surprised that he knew it. His voice cracked slightly as he said it, which made my breath catch in my throat. “If you were Nelly and you had a girl like Christa on your team, and then a girl like Allison Burch wandered up onto the audition stage and blew the roof off the Dolby Theater, what would you do?”

  Elliott reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew a pack of cigarettes as I mulled over his words. Nelly had been the first coach to request that I join her team. Why would she have requested me if she didn’t want me to win?

  All at once the answer came to me like the sickening, achy feeling of a flu settling into the small of my back: if I were on Nelly’s team, she could knock me out of the running so that Christa could win, instead. If I’d ended up in one of the other coaches’ groups, Christa never would have stood a chance against me. It was so terrible and obvious that I was instantly ashamed that I hadn’t realized it on my own over the course of the week. Surely Christa knew. Maybe everyone in Group 2 knew. It was possible that they’d all been in on it—Brian, Ian, Liandra, everyone—and I’d been too naïve and hopeful all week to notice.

  “Please don’t smoke,” I said, furtively looking over my shoulder to make sure that my parents weren’t spying on us through the living room window like the least sneaky spies of all time. “My mom’s a health freak and she’ll get angry if there’s a cigarette butt in the driveway.”