Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Then just Elliott and I remained. Mark fixed his gaze on Elliott. Our director was in full Hollywood mode, presenting his ideas with jazz hands and a television announcer’s voice. “Elliott, we’d like to fly you to El Paso for a reunion with your father. He and his wife are very excited to reconnect with you—”

  “No,” Elliott abruptly interrupted him. “No way.”

  The temperature in the room dropped. I shifted in my seat, wishing I was anywhere but there. The expressions worn by Tommy and Susan revealed that they had not been expecting Elliott to decline Mark’s suggestion.

  “Now, you have to understand, Elliott, the audience wants to know more about you. They want to see something they haven’t seen before,” Mark tried to justify his outrageous request.

  “Never gonna happen.” Elliott shook his head. For once, he looked Mark right in the eye.

  Tommy cleared his throat, erroneously thinking that he’d be able to change Elliott’s mind with a sugar-coated plea. “Elliott. Come on. This is a huge night of television in America. We’re down to the last two episodes. Your fans are dying to know more about you. You owe it to them to let them see a little more of your story.”

  Elliott sat up straight in his seat as if he was getting ready to make a run for it.

  Susan chimed in, “Whatever history lies between you and your father, this is a chance to bury the hatchet and spend a few nights at a fancy hotel. Whadya say, champ?”

  Elliott’s chest rose and fell, and he said in a flat, serious voice, “Let me make this perfectly clear. I’m not getting on any planes, and I’m not dealing with that guy.” He stood up from his chair and paced around the office as if he were trying to shake off the urge to punch someone. “You’re gonna have to think of something else.” He threw the door open with such force that the knob hit the wall on the outside of Tommy’s office. The framed posters from past seasons hanging on the wall shook upon impact. But Elliott didn’t stick around to be reprimanded for his outburst. He stormed off.

  “Did that leave a dent?” Tommy called out through the open doorway to the administrative assistant sitting at the desk outside.

  I squirmed in my chair with the metallic taste of hatred in my mouth. I hated all of them right then… Tommy with his cheesy pinky ring and sport coat with its elbow patches, his smooth-voiced bullying tactics. Mark and his transparent big-brotherly enthusiasm intended to motivate us when all he really cared about was raking in the ratings for Tommy. Susan and her spinelessness, always eagerly agreeing with everything Tommy said. She sighed deeply and tilted her head at Tommy to suggest that their jobs were just so difficult.

  “Okay, maybe not,” Mark said in an irritated voice. “What’s with that guy, anyway?”

  “I’ll have Chase work on him,” Tommy said, waving off Elliott’s reaction. His lips formed a smile as his eyes fell on me. “Allison. It is such a pleasure to have the cooperation of you girls at this point in the season.”

  The muscles in my face attempted to pull my mouth into a weak smile but didn’t quite succeed. I resented being lumped into a category of girls as if I had anything at all in common with Robin. My mind was elsewhere; it was traveling down the hall behind Elliott, crossing the sunny parking lot, collapsing inside his trailer. So many weeks had passed since the night of the fire alarm that I doubted he’d even want my concern if I offered it.

  Before Mark proposed his idea for my video segment, my shoulders tensed up as if I were bracing for a punch. “So, for Allison,” Mark began cheerfully, “We have all this great footage from one of her friends who’s an aspiring filmmaker.”

  The memory stick from Lee. I had a vague memory of Lee passing the video biography he’d edited to Ralph in my living room back in September. It had never occurred to me that Ralph might have shared it with the show’s producers. Mark’s eyes were lively with excitement about whatever he’d cooked up for me. “And you guys know about the secret show at the Fonda Theater?”

  I didn’t know anything about a secret show, but Tommy and Susan acknowledged Mark with nods. For my benefit, Mark explained, “All or Nothing is doing a secret show Wednesday night in Hollywood under the name For the Kids. We thought we’d open the show with a video sequence of the bio your friend edited. Then have you come out on stage as the opening act since this is your hometown and that kid in the band thinks you’re cute. Your fan base in Los Angeles is huge. The kids at the show are gonna go nuts.”

  It felt like there was a brick in my stomach, slowly pulling me down to the bottom of an imaginary pool. Mark’s words were fuzzy. He was offering me a chance to meet and open for All or Nothing. It was the element of the grand prize that I wanted more than anything, and I could have been doing it in fewer than seventy-two hours. As if that wasn’t tempting enough, it was an opportunity for Lee’s work to be projected in public and on national television, which he could put on his application to USC. It was simply perfect. It was the singular opportunity that the show had offered me all season to do something that I honestly wanted to do—but my chest felt so heavy I could barely say the word…

  “No.”

  Once the word came out of me, hanging in the air over Tommy’s desk, time seemed to stop. Mark, Tommy, and Susan all stared at me for a moment of uncomfortable silence. Someone’s mobile phone buzzed. I heard the distant sound of a car engine starting in the parking lot. Then, Tommy chuckled and said, “What do you mean, no?”

  My mouth twisted as it occurred to me that whatever I said next would ultimately determine whether or not I had a shot at winning the following Friday night. Depending on what I said, I might be sent home that Friday, even before the season finale. But I didn’t care. Even if I won the record contract and chance to tour with the band, I would have hated myself if I went along with their plan and didn’t stand up for Elliott.

  “I mean… no. I’m not doing it. If you don’t come up with a different idea for Elliott, then I won’t cooperate either,” I stated. I stood on wobbly legs.

  “Allison,” Susan began, sounding like she was about to reprimand me for being completely unreasonable. “Think about this for a second. Elliott’s a big boy! You’re under no obligation to negotiate on his behalf.”

  I gathered all of my courage and said, “It’s not cool that you want to make him see his father. If you give him a better option, I’ll do whatever you want.”

  It was quiet in my trailer, as it always was. I stretched out on my couch and watched gold flecks of dust dance in the rays of sunlight that slipped in through the blinds on the trailer’s windows. My heart hurt. I wished I could have been home in my bedroom instead of on the lot. I was sure that at any second, there would be a knock on my door and Tommy and Susan would be there, wanting to talk some sense into me. The scene in Tommy’s office replayed in my head about fifty thousand times. Maybe I’d just made the stupidest mistake of my whole life.

  I’d just blown my chances of having the romance of the century with Nigel O’Hallihan and spending the rest of my life touring the world. Nicole, Kaela, and Michelle would have freaked if I’d been able to get them tickets to a secret All or Nothing show. I’d compromised a huge favor to Lee in exchange for—what? Wanting to impress a guy who didn’t care about me at all. For the last week I’d worried myself sick that Robin’s pranks would foil me, but in the end, my own silly, unrequited crush on Elliott was what was going to get me kicked off the show.

  I longed to be a stoic rebel and remain locked in my trailer until the producers of the show realized that I was on strike, but by lunchtime my hunger got the better of me. The atmosphere at Da Giorgio had changed a lot since the start of the season. Of the Center Stage! contestants and crew, I only saw a handful of stylists eating together, and Tia sat alone in a corner next to a giant potted tree. Several other shows had started production since the beginning of the season, and bright-eyed hopeful contestants of a dance competition show all sat together. It was still early enough in their production cycle for them to all be friendly. I ho
ped they enjoyed the camaraderie while it lasted. After the holidays when their show began to air, they’d probably be at each other’s throats just like we were.

  I walked to my afternoon lesson with Harvey, wondering if he’d even be waiting for me in the rehearsal room since Robin was all the way in Westwood meeting with a ballet company. Presumably I, too, would have been elsewhere at that hour if I’d agreed to Mark’s proposal. Not surprisingly, the rehearsal room door was locked and through the glass pane I could see that the room was dark; no one had ever raised the window shades that day. I imagined Harvey and Bobby driving down the Pacific Coast Highway together in a top-down convertible, laughing gleefully to have an afternoon off from their Center Stage! responsibilities.

  Well, this was unexpected. I was stuck on the lot and all on my own. For the first time all season I didn’t have a song to practice, and the producers might have considered it a declaration of war if I asked the receptionist at the front desk to call a car service to take me back to the hotel. It was as good an option as any to return to my trailer and get started on the final exams my teachers had already e-mailed to me. That way, at least the producers couldn’t accuse me of mutiny.

  As I wove through the cluster of trailers, I almost tripped over my own feet when I saw Chase Atwood leaning against the trailer that Christa and Liandra had shared back in September. He was casually lighting up a cigarette, and before I could duck behind another trailer to avoid having an extremely uncomfortable conversation with him, he saw me. “Hey there, Allison,” he said with a wave. “Dynamite job you did on Friday night. I was proud of you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, really not wanting to discuss the events of the previous week with him. I’d never seen him smoke before, but it was hardly shocking since Chase Atwood seemed to excel at keeping secrets.

  He studied me for a moment, and I could tell that there was a storm of thought brewing in his head. “Tell your parents that I appreciate them welcoming Taylor on Thanksgiving the way they did. That was mighty kind of them. This year has just been constant upheaval for her, and I’m sure it meant a lot to her to spend the holiday in a place she considers her second home.”

  I forced a smile and replied nervously, “Sure, I’ll tell them. But it’s not a big deal. Taylor is welcome at our house, whenever.” My brain sent a message to my feet to keep on walking, but I got the sense that Chase had more to say to me. My feet refused to move.

  “Sometimes, Allison,” Chase began, and he paused to select his words carefully as he took a long, deep drag on his cigarette, “you find yourself right at the heart of a mess of your own making. You think you know what you want. You push yourself harder than you even thought possible to manifest that dream and make it happen. And then you find yourself in the middle of livin’ it, realizing that it’s all wrong. You just can’t keep it going. Sometimes our wildest dreams are worse than any nightmare when they come true.”

  I wasn’t sure if Chase was talking about my situation on the show or his marriage to Jill and entanglement with Nelly. It was a mystery why he’d chosen me, of all people, in whom to confide. I’d been thinking very similar thoughts that morning when I woke up in a hotel suite crammed with bouquets of flowers and Get Well Soon helium balloons from well-wishers. Only, Chase was doing a better job of putting my feelings into words than I could have done.

  “You know that no matter what, you’re going to hurt someone and let people down, people who’ve given very generously of themselves, but you see what’s coming ahead and you can’t hit the brakes.”

  He looked up and over at me with his green eyes, eyes that were the same familiar hue as Taylor’s. It sucked to admit, but he was right. His words were as true for his situation as they were for mine. I’d wanted to win Center Stage! more than anything. I’d intentionally lied to the producers about my audition, inconvenienced my parents, jeopardized my education, and taken my friendships for granted. I’d even put Marlene’s professional reputation at risk in a roundabout way by accepting her help. And now I wasn’t even sure I wanted to win anymore. I mean, I wanted the prize, but what would winning really entail? Would the next few years of my life be a continuation of “creating tension” and being pressured by executives into doing things I didn’t want to do?

  “Sure, it sounds good to do the right thing,” Chase said, taking another drag off his cigarette. “But the older I get, the more I’m convinced that there are no such things as right and wrong. There are just decisions and outcomes.”

  “I know,” I said simply to express that I understood everything he was trying to get across.

  He mashed out his cigarette under one of his motorcycle boots. “I heard about what you did for Mercer this morning. That took some real guts. I would have liked to have seen old Tommy Harper’s face when you told him no.”

  I remembered that Tommy had said he’d put Chase to task on making Elliott go along with the documentary plan. “Are you going to make Elliott go to El Paso?”

  “Make Elliott go to… what? No, Allison,” Chase chuckled. “Talking people into doing stuff they don’t want to do isn’t my game. The executive producers are locked away in Tommy’s office trying to move mountains since from what I heard you scoffed at their big plan to have you open for All or Nothing tomorrow night. You’ve got them in a real tizzy, girl.”

  The conundrum the producers faced because of me clearly amused him, but I couldn’t tell if I should be scared or not. “Are they really mad?” I asked timidly.

  “Of course they’re mad! In eight seasons of this show, they’ve never had a contestant put their foot down before, and now they’ve got two making trouble!” He saw my face twist and reached into the breast pocket of his snap-button plaid shirt. “Oh, before I forget. I’m supposed to give you this.”

  He handed me a piece of paper, and although I was expecting it to be a folded envelope with an En Fuego Productions logo on it, it was instead a page torn from a spiral notebook.

  “I feel a little high schoolish passing notes like this. But Elliott said this was important,” Chase said. As soon as I wondered if he’d read the note, he threw his hands up in the air in his defense. “I didn’t read it. I’m just the messenger, here.”

  In my trailer, I sank into my couch and held the folded note in my hands, a little afraid to open it. What Elliott could have possibly wanted to communicate to me badly enough to trust Chase Atwood with a note? If Chase had already heard that I’d refused to cooperate with the documentary plan, then it was reasonable to assume that Elliott had heard, too. I didn’t expect that Elliott would be grateful that I’d come to his defense; that wasn’t exactly his style. It was much more likely that he’d asked Chase to pass me a note because of something more dramatic, like his insistence that I back off. With trembling fingers, I unfolded the note.

  Hey

  I need to talk to you.

  - Elliott

  That was it. Just a summons, without any further explanation. A normal teenage boy would have texted, and I wasn’t sure why Elliott had resorted to paper. Impulsively I reached for my phone to text him and find out where he was, but then I stopped myself. I couldn’t be too sure that his intentions for wanting to talk to me were innocent. For all I knew, he was in cahoots with Robin. I’d promised myself not to be gullible enough to fall into any more traps, and here I was, practically jumping headfirst into what could have been a dangerous one.

  After a moment’s consideration, I texted him with a message as vague as the contents of his note.

  If you want to talk, you know where to find me.

  Even though I told myself not to expect an immediate reply, I stole glances at my phone all afternoon as I distractedly worked on the French Final that Madame Peterson had sent me, just in case my phone failed to make its little bleeping noise if a text came in. The shadows in my trailer shifted along with the position of the sun as the afternoon passed. Whatever it was that Elliott needed to tell me, it must not have been urgent.

  Hours
later, back at the hotel, a debilitating headache invaded my skull. It felt like a dagger was jabbing me in the temple right behind my eye. Noise made it worse. I sent telepathic threats to the guests staying in the room next to mine to turn down their pay-per-view movie. Light made the pain intolerable and lying down didn’t help, so I sat upright in my bed in the dark with my eyes gently closed, like a vampire. My head hurt too much for me to make an action plan for acquiring medication, since that would have involved creating noise or turning on lights.

  A knock at my door sent shockwaves reverberating through my brain. I willed whoever was disturbing me from out in the hallway to go away. But then there was a second knock and a third.

  “Allison?” a muffled voice called my name.

  Without turning on the lamp on my bedside table, I stumbled toward my door and fumbled with the double locks. Even the soft light from the hallway caused me to flinch when I swung the door open.

  “Whoa, are you alright? You look really weird.” Elliott’s first words to me since our rather awkward exchange about Mexican corn on the cob after Thanksgiving were not exactly romantic. Despite the miserable pain I was in, I felt my chest tighten at the sight of him standing there looking down at me.

  “I have a headache,” I grumbled.

  “Maybe I should come back later,” Elliott said, uncomfortable about standing in my doorway. I couldn’t really tell him that the probable reason for my headache was stress, and that most of the stress in my life had been caused by him.

  “No. Whatever you have to tell me, now’s good,” I insisted. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning and return to the studio without having resolution on what he wanted to discuss. If I had to endure another day of being ostracized and condemned to my trailer, unsure of what was going on, I would have preferred to call my dad at work to request that he take me home.

  Elliott looked down the hall suspiciously over his right shoulder and asked, “Do you trust me?”