Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  I lingered, wondering if there was any possible way I could convince Claire to help me out. Suggesting that the stress of the show was taking a toll on my body positioned me as a victim to the audience. Even if that might have increased viewers’ sympathy for me, it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be presented as weak if another contestant’s story was going to depict them as strong. Trying to sound upbeat, I said, “I think it would be cooler to do a story about how I grew up practicing yoga. That’s super trendy. And besides, I feel fine.”

  “Of course you feel fine. And Robin’s not really breaking up with her boyfriend this week; she’s just staging a heated phone conversation with him for her own segment. It’s the tenth week of the season, Allison. We have to keep people tuning in every Friday.”

  In an immaculately clean examination room at the hospital, I played along against my better judgment by changing into a patterned hospital gown. Adding to the absurdity of the charade, Geoffrey had accompanied us to pat my face with pale powder and gently apply a glimmer of lip gloss. This was to make me look—as he described—like a “consumptive beauty.”

  A physician with a mysterious European accent took my blood pressure for the camera. When the doctor questioned me about how I’d been feeling lately, I referred to Ralph for encouragement and answered in a weak voice, “Kind of tired and lethargic.” The doctor advised me to make more of an effort to eat dark, leafy greens and legumes every day. I thanked him as if he’d just saved me from a horrific snakebite death by administering a rare anti-venom in the nick of time. The entire affair reminded me of the melodramatic crime reenactments that my father enjoyed watching on television.

  “Nice, nice,” Ralph complimented me on my performance. “I didn’t know you had decent acting skills.” I despised myself for being flattered by his words.

  On the drive back to the studio, I thought about how odd it was that Center Stage! was considered a “reality” television show when there was nothing real about it. I felt guilty about cooperating in something that was deceitful, even if it was harmlessly deceitful, and even though all of the other contestants were probably going along with it, too. However, if Elliott had flat-out refused to participate in a staged dramatic scene to “increase tension,” I was going to be plenty ashamed of myself on Friday for having complied with the producers’ ruse. Focus on winning, I commanded myself. A winner would do whatever it took to cross the finish line. But even my mental pep talks couldn’t shake the feeling that I was sinking.

  We arrived back at the studio early enough in the afternoon for me to squeeze in an hour of rehearsal time with Harvey before the shuttle bus would arrive to transport us to the hotel. I intended to swing by my trailer to wash off my ghostly pallor, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw Robin stepping out from inside it. She didn’t see me approaching and gently closed the screen door behind her so as not to let it slam.

  With my hands on my hips, I snapped, “What were you doing in there?”

  Cool as ice even despite having just been busted, Robin smiled sweetly and said, “Just looking for you. Nelly told me to come and find you for rehearsal.”

  My eyes narrowed. It wasn’t entirely out of the question that Nelly and sent her to fetch me, but it was highly suspicious that she’d dared to enter my unlocked trailer when I wasn’t in it. I mentally ran through an inventory of stuff that I might have left in there that could potentially have been of interest to Robin. Dirty dance clothes, a stack of high school textbooks. Nothing scandalous at all.

  She stared me down with a patronizing expression and didn’t appear to be carrying anything she’d pilfered. “I better not find anything missing in there,” I warned her.

  “Or what?” she asked as if it was hilarious to her that I’d threaten her. She blinked her eyes rapidly to flutter her eyelashes at me.

  I bristled. She had me—I had no means of recourse. She could have stepped out of my trailer wearing all of my clothes and thrown ten weeks’ worth of shredded homework into the air, and there was nothing I could have done about it. There was no one I could have gone to for justice.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t notice anything’s missing.” She smiled viciously at me over her shoulder as she strutted down the path that disappeared in between trailers. Her cool tone reminded me of her demeanor the night she’d intentionally brought on Christa’s savage allergy attack backstage at the Dolby Theater. I stood up a little straighter, and my shoulders tensed. Robin hadn’t necessarily entered my trailer with the intention of stealing anything. She was probably hunting, hunting for any kind of personal information she could use against me.

  Inside, I looked around wildly, trying to determine if anything was out of place. Maybe she had planted a tiny video camera in my trailer to catch me in the act of doing… what? Napping? The only things I ever did in my trailer were shower, sleep, and Calculus. A quick scan of the trailer’s cramped bathroom made me a little more certain that Robin hadn’t tampered with anything in there, unless she was some kind of undercover Mi6 agent, like James Bond, adept at rigging up surveillance cameras behind light fixtures.

  I sank into the sofa, and I tried to think of any secret weaknesses that I wouldn’t want her to discover. I didn’t have any severe allergies that I knew of other than penicillin. It was probably safe to assume that Robin couldn’t easily get her hands on that to punk me since she’d need a prescription (although she was certainly capable of charming a pharmacist into doing her bidding). There weren’t any nude photos of me on the internet, or anywhere, other than the dumb pictures of me as a baby that my parents kept in their photo albums at home, and who cared about those, anyway? A grand total of zero boys had dirt to share on me, except for Elliott, and well… if Elliott was Robin’s key to upsetting me enough to ruin a performance, there was no way I could adequately prepare for that.

  My heart palpitated with panic. I should have been expecting my share of sabotage from her all along. Now that I was keenly aware that she was plotting against me, I felt foolish; like I’d been dangerously exposed during the weeks when I hadn’t had my guard up. Maybe the switch-a-roo with my songs the week of the roulette game hadn’t been Nelly at all but had been Robin’s doing.

  Friday’s theme was holiday songs, which was the network’s politically correct term for “Christmas carols,” since none of the tunes our coaches assigned to us on Monday had anything to do with Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. When I entered Harvey’s classroom, still piping mad at Robin, Ian was practicing, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Upon finishing, he informed Harvey that he’d never celebrated Christmas in his whole life. His grandfather was a rabbi in Brooklyn.

  Robin was psyched about her assignment: “Silent Night.” Fortunately, I’d missed her rehearsal, but even without having heard it I knew getting more votes than her on Friday night was going to be a challenge. “And we’re just about out of time for Allison,” Nelly announced with unconvincing regret. Harvey grimaced at me apologetically. Bobby closed the lid over the piano keys, signifying the end of our rehearsal time. “Your song for Friday is ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ Give it a few run-through’s tonight.”

  I boarded the shuttle bus with slumped shoulders, exhausted from the long, weird day. There would only be six contestants performing on Friday, and two of us would be voted off. Of the six hopefuls still competing, three were in Nelly’s group, despite the fact that she was unquestionably the worst coach—possibly in the entire eight seasons of the show’s history.

  Nelly hadn’t done me any favors with my assignment. The song played in my head as the bus left the parking lot, and I stared out at the arid mountains through my window thinking that the lyrics of the song were awfully melancholy for a Christmas carol. Robin was singing scales in the back of the bus, and I wished I had earplugs to block her out. She was planning something, I was sure of it, and I was a defenseless target. Even her scales sounded diabolical.

  When the bus came to rest at a stoplight, I felt the ma
gnetic draw of Elliott’s gaze upon me and turned to see him eyeing me from across the aisle. He simultaneously lifted his eyebrows and shrugged as if to pantomime, “So? What do you think?”

  I exhaled with disgust. The whole day—from having to pretend I was feeling sickly at the hospital, to discovering that Robin was focusing her powers of manipulation on me—made me really wish that the bus was headed toward my house in West Hollywood instead of the hotel. Since Saturday, I’d gotten so many nasty comments on Friendbook from girls across the country about the picture of me with Lee in my driveway that I’d disabled the app on my phone. Being the recipient of so much sudden hatred was a bewildering experience.

  It should have come as no surprise that Nelly Fulsom was an absolute Christmas maniac. Her love of the holiday combined with the fact that she was secretly head-over-heels in love with Chase Atwood turned her into a tornado of cloying seasonal sentiment. She began wearing cloisonné pins of wreaths and snowmen on her jackets and blazers, just like my mom did around the holiday season. On Tuesday afternoon, I witnessed her cornering Rob the production assistant in the hallway beneath a sprig of mistletoe and forcibly smooching him on the cheek. His entire body went rigid in fear as she moved in for the gratuitous kiss.

  When Susan and Tommy dropped in on our voice lessons Tuesday afternoon, it was to deliver a surprise trumped up as a big deal. “To kick off the holiday season, we’re going to be integrating an element of stage design into this week’s show,” Tommy announced, wearing his false, plastic game show host smile. “You’ll each have an opportunity to bounce some ideas around with Mark and the stage team for your performances.”

  Nelly hopped out of her seat and clapped like a toddler. “Isn’t that exciting?” she squealed.

  Elaborate stage design seemed just like another way Robin might wreak havoc on my performance. When I drifted into my meeting with Mark, the director, and a goateed guy who was introduced as the lead stage designer, I was reserved and unenthusiastic. I told them which song I’d been assigned, and when they asked me for my thoughts on what would be cool to have on stage while I sang, I was at a loss. “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Maybe a Christmas tree or something?”

  “A Christmas tree,” the goateed guy chuckled and waved his thumb at me as if to say, Can you believe this kid? “What a joker.”

  “Um, I really don’t know,” I insisted. What was so funny about just sticking with a Christmas tree, I wasn’t sure.

  “Ian’s requested a snow machine so that it will look like flakes are gently drifting down on him as he sings,” Mark informed me to give me some inspiration. “We’re going to put together a big toy train to travel around the stage for Tia.”

  Okay, so maybe a Christmas tree might have been aiming a little low. I mashed my lips together as I tried to think of something I could do on stage that would be impossible for Robin to thwart. A fake snowstorm on stage seemed to carry a high potential for disaster since even fake snow was wet, and there would be a lot of electrical equipment on stage. Anything involving fire was totally out of the question. The song I’d been assigned didn’t seem to lend itself to any kind of decorative theme, either. Its lyrics about “troubles being far away” didn’t have anything to do with Santa or reindeer. “All I can think of is maybe to ask people online for pictures of their families together during the holidays, and then project them really big on stage?” I offered with a shrug, convinced that my suggestion was pathetic. I braced myself for their frustrated sighs.

  But instead, Mark and the lead stage designer both turned toward each other with sparks in their eyes. “It’s genius!” Mark exclaimed. “We’ll work with network marketing to create a flash social media campaign to get people to submit photos.”

  “It’s always the simplest ideas that are the most powerful,” Goatee said, smiling at me with appreciation.

  My dour mood continued throughout the week as dreadful paranoia about whether or not Robin was going to spring an attack on me haunted me from moment to moment. I religiously locked the flimsy little push-button lock on the screen door of my trailer whenever I was inside, terrified that Robin would enter and try to initiate a confrontation. It never occurred to me to launch an offensive against her; I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea how to go about attacking her performance. Insomnia gripped me.

  On Thursday, the question that awaited me in the Secret Suite had been e-mailed in from a viewer in New Mexico.

  What are you asking Santa for this year?

  Last year, all I’d wanted for Christmas was a new iPod and a pair of clogs like Nicole’s. This year, I couldn’t think of a single thing that could be bought at a store and wrapped in paper that I truly wanted. Instead, I wanted to erase the fight I’d had with Elliott and have him like me again. I wanted Taylor to have an easier time dealing with her mom’s death and for my brother to avoid giving her another reason to suffer. I wanted my parents to remain happily and geekily married forever, and for Lee to find a girlfriend who’d love him for being the awesome guy that he was. My Christmas wish list had grown in length, but everything on it was out of my control.

  Just as I was about to hit the record button, I realized that I’d forgotten to include winning Center Stage! on my list. What was supposed to be the thing I wanted most in life had slipped my mind.

  “This year,” I told the camera in my most chipper voice as its green light blinked, “nothing on my Christmas list could be made in Santa’s workshop, but thanks for asking. I hope everyone watching has a healthy and happy holiday season.”

  By Friday, I was so anxious about the possibility of Robin sabotaging my performance that I insisted on carrying the outfit Aubrey had chosen with me on the bus ride to the Dolby. Since it was a holiday show, I would be wearing a weird red velvet mini-dress with white fake fur trim that was probably supposed to make me look like an elf. All of the other contestants gave me skeptical side-eye glances as I clung to my garment bag on the mini-bus, but I didn’t care. Elliott sat as far away from me as he could, tapping away on that new iPhone. I wondered if maybe his crappy old flip phone had finally eaten dust since one of the running jokes on the show (and gripes from viewers) all season was that anti-technology Elliott was completely absent from social media.

  When the mini-bus pulled up around the back of the Dolby Theater, there was a strange trailer already parked along the curb with orange rubber street cones around it to prevent other vehicles from getting too close. It was the kind of trailer used to transport horses—which struck me as odd. I didn’t know what all of the contestants had planned for their performances, but it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if Robin had made arrangements with Mark to ride a magical unicorn through the aisles. I caught Elliott staring at the trailer, too. Although I was wondering, who in their right mind would have requested for live animals to be brought to Hollywood, I didn’t say a word. Those animals could have been requested by anyone—even Elliott.

  If there had been anywhere at the Dolby Theater where I could have hidden out during the taping instead of Group 2’s room, I would have gladly avoided Robin and Ian all night. The prep room felt more like a prison cell than it ever had before, in spite of the fat crimson and white-leafed poinsettias set in the room’s corners as the network’s attempt at festive decoration. Robin noticed an orange price sticker from Albertson’s supermarket on one of them and muttered, “Cheap.”

  All of the cordial sentiment between Robin and Ian had vanished and been replaced by hostility since we’d left Studio City. Ian sat in one corner of the room on the floor thrashing his head to power rock in his headphones and cracking his knuckles, clearly stressed out.

  Nelly and Chase took the stage to open the show with a playful duet of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” that rekindled my disgust for Chase’s selfish, careless behavior toward his family. During previous weeks, we’d all mostly ignored the monitor in the prep room, but with the competition this stiff, not even Robin could peel her eyes away. When the broadcast cut t
o commercial break, I conducted a furtive hashtag check on Twitter to see how #CenterStageHoliday was performing. All week I had been lazily checking in on the network’s efforts to aggregate holiday pictures from viewers on social media channels. Kaela had reassured me that the hashtag was performing well, which gave me some hope for my chances during the Expulsion Round.

  Ian was the first from our group to take the stage, and he changed into a khaki t-shirt and camouflage pants. His performance was preceded by his video segment about a painful rheumatoid arthritis flare-up. He’d never once mentioned his condition since I’d met him, which made me wonder he’d ever truly been diagnosed or if the arthritis was invented by the show’s producers, just like my nutritional problems. Following an introduction from Danny, Ian strode onto the stage. He informed the audience that he was dedicating his performance to one of his friends from home who was serving overseas in the United States Marine Corps, and to all of the men and women of our nation’s armed forces who wouldn’t be home for Christmas that year. Thunderous applause swallowed the first few lyrics of his song. The fake snow that began gently falling prompted another round of clapping.

  “That was really beautiful,” Geoffrey the hairdresser said, wiping a tear out of the corner of his eye.

  “Pft,” Robin mumbled, obviously considering Ian’s dedication as a gimmick to gain favor with the audience. It may very well have been, but I had to hand it to Ian: dedicating a song to a friend in the Marines was a smart move.

  Tia’s video segment focused on concern for her grandparents in the Philippines after a mild earthquake that had rocked Manila the previous week. When the stage lights were raised after the segment, all of the snow from Ian’s performance had been mopped away, and a train track had been laid around an assortment of fake pine trees on stage. As Tia began singing, “All I Want for Christmas is You,” a small train just about the right size for a small kid to ride chugged out from behind the cluster of pine trees. Its adorable little smokestack spat out puffs of white smoke.