Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  “Well, I think my mom saw those pictures of you over the summer in Expose Magazine out on a beach with some weird guys acting all drunk. I don’t think she wants Todd dating someone who she thinks is… you know. Wild.”

  Taylor turned beet red, and her mouth formed a firm line. She stopped spreading out sheets on the small day bed under my window as if she’d suddenly completely forgotten what she was doing. She inhaled with a feathery noise.

  I regretted telling her about my mom’s reaction to the magazine. “It doesn’t matter what my mom thinks,” I tried to assure her, pulling back my blankets. “If Todd likes you, he likes you. I don’t think my parents would ever try to stop one of us from dating someone unless they were, like, a murderer or a drug addict or something.”

  Taylor slipped into the day bed and pulled up the blankets under her chin. I flipped the light off, and the two of us lay in the dark for a few minutes without saying anything. “It’s totally weird, being back here,” Taylor finally said. “This is the first time I’ve gone to bed in a familiar place since my mom died.”

  The admission was so sorrowful that I answered with awkward speed in an attempt to suppress my pity for her. “What about your school? Wasn’t it nice to go back there after jumping around all summer?”

  “Yeah, but everyone knows about my mom and just… I’m sick of platitudes.”

  Taylor’s school was a mystery to me. I imagined it as a sprawling campus with ivy-covered buildings, sprinkled with girls who earned better grades than me in plaid skirts and blazers having cordial conversations in between classes. The fantasy made me miss my own school fiercely. I never thought I’d miss the tedium of sitting in classrooms and shuffling around the gymnasium, but I wished I had school the next day instead of a return to the studio.

  “You left your blue hoodie here the last time you slept over,” I found myself saying.

  Taylor rolled over on her side and propped up her head on one hand to look at me. “My dad says he thinks you might really win Center Stage!. I don’t think he’d lie about that. He takes everything related to music pretty seriously.” She said the word music as if it tasted badly.

  “There’s this guy on the team your dad’s coaching who might win,” I said carefully. “I mean—I want to win—but I think he has a real shot.”

  “Elliott,” Taylor stated. “Aren’t you guys sort of… together?”

  Thoughts of turquoise eyes were going to keep me up all night if I attempted to explain the whole history. “We were, but it’s complicated. Only one of us can win, and he figured out how the producers operate before I did.”

  In the dark, I saw the outline of Taylor in the moonlight as she rested her head on her pillow again, and a long while passed before she replied, “Yeah, boys are complicated.”

  As much as I wanted to resist inquiring about a comment that surely had something to do with my brother, I couldn’t resist. “Todd’s not complicated. He’s just an idiot. I can’t believe you actually like him.”

  “Well, I do,” she admitted. “He knows me. That’s been really important to me these last few months, just that—he knows who I am. But there’s this girl he goes to college with named Sidley,” Taylor hesitated. I immediately sensed myself getting angry at Todd for whatever reason he’d given her to believe that this other girl was a threat. “I only met her once when I was up there visiting for Halloween, but he talks about her constantly like she’s some kind of genius. Sidley says processed sugar is worse for you than saturated fat. Sidley thinks the president made a mistake in not taking a stronger role in the elections in Nigeria. I’m pretty sure she’s trying to get with him.”

  My brother had always been shy around girls. When he suddenly went from being a nerd to semi-attractive in high school, he would beg my mom to tell girls who called the house that he wasn’t home. Part of that probably had to do with how mercilessly he was teased as a little boy for having a cleft palate scar on his upper lip before he had another surgery when he was ten to reduce it. Nicole was the first girl he’d actually gone out with, to the best of my knowledge. “I don’t know about that. I’ve never seen him even be nice to a girl before, and he’s being super nice to you,” I said, wanting to put her fears at ease.

  She sighed, and said, “Yeah, but so far in my dealings with guys it seems like they’re all kind of jerks. They don’t even mean to be; they just want to take all they can get. From just… everyone.”

  I didn’t want to lump Todd in with a generalization about the entire male species, but when I considered Chase Atwood and Nelly, and Elliott and that trickle of female laughter I heard spilling out of his hotel room, Taylor had a grim point. There was one boy, however, who’d never be so greedy or deceitful. Lee Yoon had always been generous and considerate to me. Maddeningly, I was a tiny bit jealous of Courtney Von Haas if she was dating him.

  “Anyway, you’re so lucky.” I could tell by how Taylor’s words were thickening that she was starting to fall asleep. She’d always been a heavier sleeper than me, prone to conking out during the boring parts of movies, sometimes even nodding off during long phone calls. “Your parents are so normal.”

  A year ago, I would have taken that as an insult coming from a girl whose mother was a glamorous wreck of a failed television star, and whose father sold out concert arenas internationally. But that night, on Thanksgiving, my heart ballooned with gratitude for my parents because Taylor was right. I was so lucky.

  “Is it okay if I just leave my hoodie at your house? I like knowing that something of mine is still here,” she said before drifting off to sleep.

  “What time do you have to go back to the studio?” Taylor asked. I could see through my window that the sun was rising, but it was barely dawn.

  “Nine,” I grumbled. I wished more than anything that there wasn’t a show that night. Usually on the day after Thanksgiving, I helped Mom pull our boxes of Christmas decorations in from the garage, and we decorated the house.

  Taylor sat up and pushed her hair back from her face. “I wish we could do something, like old times. Like take the bus to Larchmont and get iced coffee.”

  “We could walk to your house,” I offered, wondering if she’d been back at all since leaving Los Angeles in September.

  “Not into that. I don’t think I can handle seeing other people living there.”

  “Well,” I said, “We could probably convince Todd to drive us for coffee. Or, rather, you could. I can’t get him to do anything.”

  Forty-five minutes later, we piled into Mom’s Sentra. The block was still silent except for the tweeting of birds until Todd started the car. As we backed out of the driveway, and my sense of dread about returning to the studio surged, Taylor suddenly said, “You know? Maybe we should stop by my old house. It would be good for me.”

  We drove the four blocks east toward Taylor’s old street. I still thought of it as her street in the present tense because I’d not been back to her house since she’d left town, either. Sitting in the back seat behind Taylor, I noticed her tense up as we crossed Melrose and slowed down on her block. Her old house looked just as it always had, with a little stone path wrapping its way through the front lawn toward the stairs leading to the front door. The camellia bushes lining the driveway blazed hot pink. It would have been easy to believe—if the name Beauforte hadn’t been replaced on the mailbox by Stuart, and if there hadn’t been an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway—that nothing at all had changed since the summer. That if we stepped inside, her mom would be stretched out on the couch, flipping through the pages of Expose while her toenail polish dried.

  Todd slowed to a stop, and we were both surprised when Taylor unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of the car. “Should we go with her?” my brother asked me.

  Without answering, I climbed out of the back seat and heard him shut off the car’s engine behind me. Taylor took a few steps right into the center of the front yard, and then she sank to her knees in the grass. I managed to say, “Taylor, are yo
u—” and then she crumpled forward. A bark came out of her that sounded a little bit like a noise an injured wild animal might make. She sobbed so uncontrollably that she couldn’t stifle the volume.

  I put my hand on her shoulder, and Todd put his hand on her other shoulder, and we just stood there like that. Neither of us could bring ourselves to tell Taylor not to cry, or that everything would be alright because there wasn’t any need. She already knew that her life would never go back to normal. The moment was solemn for me, too, because it felt like something precious and irreplaceable from my past had been robbed from me. I’d spent many afternoons at that house. One afternoon, Taylor and I had decided to give each other haircuts. My mother had just about had a stroke when she arrived to pick me up that evening and saw the crooked bangs that Taylor had given me, on the very same stoop I was staring at now.

  Right then, at that moment on North Laurel Avenue, I felt more like myself than I had since Center Stage! had started. I was just a teenager from West Hollywood. I was a best friend; I was a little sister. And that made my return to the studio later that morning all the more bitter because I had finally admitted to myself that I was tired of pretending to be someone else.

  Later that morning at the studio, I managed to avoid Chase Atwood until it was time for us to depart for the Dolby Theater. As the contestants corralled around the mini-bus bound for Hollywood in the parking lot, Chase bounced toward us dangling the keys to his Hummer from his fingers. I cringed, not wanting to acknowledge that I knew about what had unfolded in his personal life over the last two days. Instead of conspiratorially winking at me or mentioning anything about Taylor, he told me, “Tell this character that he missed some killer elotes on Wednesday, Allison.” He playfully punched Elliott on the upper arm as he passed us.

  Elliott rubbed his arm as if Chase had unintentionally hurt him a little. “What are elotes?” Elliott asked me gruffly as the line to board the bus advanced.

  “Mexican corn on the cob with, like, spices and cheese on top,” I explained. I followed him onto the mini-bus and sat in the seat in front of his. While the bus navigated down Franklin Avenue, a street lined with classic Hollywood mansions (many of which were on the brink of dilapidation), my mind raced with potential ways to ask Elliott about how his Thanksgiving had been. Since he’d dared to reopen the lines of communication with me, I feared that if I didn’t continue our conversation before we arrived at the Dolby Theater, a perfect opportunity to reconcile would be lost. I even worked up the nerve to look over my shoulder once, but he was busy doing something on a fancy new iPhone I’d never seen before. I chickened out.

  That night, because Nelly drew the final Wild Card of the season, she was able to spare me, Robin, and Ian from expulsion. Tia was the only contestant remaining on Lenore’s team. Derrick, the last contestant on Jay Walk’s team, was voted off by default because he had the lowest score. “Y’all are killing me!” Jay Walk exclaimed into his microphone. Jay’s team had suffered because of the Wild Card policy since the fifth week.

  And of course… there was Elliott. Elliott had knocked me out of first place by several thousand votes. He and Laura were last contestants standing on Chase’s team; Jermaine had been voted off.

  The weekly Expulsion Series had become torturous. Since we were inching closer to the season finale, the producers had started adding all kinds of dramatic music and anxiety-packed pauses to Danny’s weekly reveal of who would be sent home. My nerves were still raw from the experience even forty-five minutes later on the bus. During the hours that had passed since Elliott and I had traded words on our way to the theater earlier that afternoon, my urge to reestablish a connection with him hadn’t faded at all. He was sitting in the seat across from mine staring vacantly out his window. “Sorry about Jermaine,” I offered as a conversation starter. Jermaine didn’t appear too upset about the end of his run on the show. A few rows of seats behind us, he animatedly talked on his cell phone to his family back at home.

  Elliott glanced over his shoulder at Jermaine. “He’ll be fine. He’s already gotten an offer to star on Broadway in some revival. That’s better for him than winning because now he doesn’t have to stay in Los Angeles until the end of the season.”

  “Yeah, but still,” I continued. “You guys seem pretty friendly. I’m sorry you won’t have him on your team anymore.”

  Elliott shrugged but with only one shoulder and muttered, “None of these people are my friends.”

  His bitterness hit me hard. Elliott had always had a grim outlook on the show, but now he seemed downright hateful. Sensing that it was probably not the best time to try to make amends with him, I turned back toward my window. It was late on a Friday night in Hollywood, and the city was bustling. Kids not much older than me were on their way to nightclubs behind the wheels of fancy sports cars with bass pumping loudly enough to make the windows on the mini-bus vibrate. I wondered if my life would be like that in a few years, cruising around in a hot car on my way to parties where paparazzi would assemble to snap my picture. Oddly, that night watching television with my parents at home seemed like a better option.

  “I thought you said you and that guy Lee didn’t have any history.”

  When Elliott spoke up again, I wasn’t sure if he was even talking to me because a few minutes had passed since his last remark, long enough that I’d thought our uncomfortable conversation was over. His comment made me wonder for a second what on earth Lee Yoon had to do with anything. Weeks had gone by since Lee’s birthday party. I was surprised that Elliott even remembered his name. “Maybe you should just tell me what your problem is instead of speaking in riddles,” I replied.

  Elliott just shook his head.

  The next morning when I checked my e-mail, I found out what had put Elliott in such a bad mood. I had an e-mail from Nicole containing a link to a blog post, and the subject of her message was: OMG too funny. Before the blog even loaded on the screen of my laptop, I felt like I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs, already suspecting what I was about to see. There, beneath a headline of, “Look Away, Elliott! Allison’s New Guy!” was a picture of me standing in my driveway, embracing Lee on Thanksgiving. I’d been so worried about the paparazzi outside my house snapping a picture of Taylor; it hadn’t occurred to me that a picture of me hugging Lee might be easily misconstrued.

  Elliott was jealous. Good, I thought smugly. He deserves to be. If Elliott was going to welcome giggling girls into his hotel room, I didn’t see the harm in letting television audiences think that Lee Yoon had edged him out as the man in my life. That, at least, was the first falsehood presented by the show about me that worked in my favor.

  Or, so I thought.

  Chapter 18

  Tension

  “Allison,” Tommy Harper purred in his office on Monday morning during the tenth week of the season. Ralph, the unit director who had interviewed me and my parents at our house back in September, leaned against Tommy’s desk sipping thoughtfully from an enormous thermos of coffee. “Since we’re getting very close to the end of this journey, we’d like to start digging a little deeper into who you are, as a person. Ralph, here, has some ideas for video segments we could shoot this week for Friday’s broadcast to share a little more about your life with the viewing audience.”

  As if he was startled by Tommy’s cue to speak up, Ralph cleared his throat and uncrossed his legs to stand up a little straighter. “Ah. Yes. We were thinking that it might be kind of cool to explore your family’s dedication to health and fitness. You know, since you were raised vegetarian, and your mom teaches yoga.”

  It seemed a little too good to be true that after nine weeks of Nelly’s ceaseless efforts to make me act like someone else, the producers would want to focus on the real me. However, I was cautiously optimistic. I agreed to meet with Ralph and his segment producer that afternoon, envisioning a light-hearted shoot at Levity with Mom. I was tempted to call her about it, knowing that she’d make a big fuss but secretly be thrilled. />
  However, Ralph’s team had already worked out all of the details for what they wanted to shoot, and it was far different from what I’d spent the day imagining. “We’re going to Cedars Sinai to have you meet with one of their leading experts in nutrition. He’s going to provide you with some tips on staying healthy.”

  An impromptu trip to the hospital seemed a little fishy to me. Pictures of me and Lee were still burning up the blogosphere. There had to be some kind of connection between that and the producers’ desire to suggest that I needed attention from a doctor. It infuriated me to think that Elliott probably would have been smart enough to deduce what they were up to, but my best shot at figuring it out on my own was to nag Claire.

  I found Claire in her office, reviewing video submissions from hopeful contestants in the UK on her laptop. She was squinting her eyes behind her glasses, and when she noticed me approaching her, she stacked up a bunch of askew file folders on her desktop. “Why are they making me go to the hospital?” I asked. “I already know all about alternate sources of protein.”

  Claire exhaled loudly to express her annoyance with me and general exasperation with her job. “They’re just building momentum for the season finale. They’re developing stories to create tension for all of you guys. Yours happens to be about the stress of the show impacting your health. Just go with it.”

  “How are they building tension for Elliott?” I dared to ask with one eyebrow arched.

  Claire took her glasses off and set them down on her desk. “I guess you’ll have to wait until Friday to find out if you’re not comfortable asking him yourself.” So, she’d seen the blog posts suggesting that Lee was my boyfriend, too. It was becoming abundantly clear that this proposed trip to the hospital was a mildly malicious punishment that the producers had concocted for me for not making their lives easier.