Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1)

by Caitlyn Duffy

  With uncertainty, I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m not sure,” I admitted.

  He shuffled his feet and shoved his hands into the deep pockets of his jeans. “Allison, come on. Have I ever lied to you?”

  My headache was raging. It took a lot of effort to review my past interactions with Elliott and arrive at the conclusion that he had not, in fact, ever lied to me. I sighed. “No.”

  “Then I need you to trust me right now. Please.”

  Even if it weren’t for those turquoise eyes, that unkempt hair, and his gravelly voice, the sincerity with which he looked at me as he stood in my doorway was enough to soften my heart. No one had looked at me—really looked at me and seen me—in longer than I could remember. “Okay,” I agreed.

  “Come on,” he urged me to follow him and I scanned the hall as if there were armed guards stationed at each end of it, which, of course, there weren’t.

  “Where?” I wasn’t even wearing shoes and didn’t have the key card to my room in my pocket.

  He lowered his voice and said, “Away from the hotel. I want to show you something.”

  Leaving the hotel seemed like an outrageously bad idea considering the trouble I was already in with the producers, but I was too curious to decline his invitation. He stepped inside my room while I slipped on shoes, grabbed my key and wallet, and ran a brush through my snarly hair.

  In the stairwell, we scampered down to the door that opened directly into the desolate parking lot, the noisy footsteps from our rubber-soled shoes on the cement stairs filling the corridor with flat echoes. I was surprised to see Elliott’s Ford Fiesta patiently waiting there in the dark, parked in a shadow that fell right in between the pools of light created by two street lamps.

  He backed out of the spot before I even had a chance to buckle my seatbelt. I lurched forward when he hit the gas. “Whoa. I didn’t realize we were in a race,” I said as he floored it toward the opening in the fence around the lot that led to the street.

  “We are, sort of,” he muttered, furtively checking his rearview mirror as he peeled out of the lot. He turned left onto Ventura Boulevard. Out of curiosity, I looked over my left shoulder through the gap between our seats and saw two uniformed valets half-heartedly chase us into the street for a few feet before giving up. “The hotel has valet service. They’re not supposed to let any of us leave.”

  I fidgeted nervously with my fingers. “Are they, like, going to call the police or something on you?”

  Elliott took his eyes off the road to look over at me with an amused expression. “For stealing my own car? Probably not.”

  I had been bemoaning my headache in my hotel suite for so long that I didn’t know what time it was, but my phone gave the time as after eleven. It felt later at night than it actually was. Traffic on the freeway was uncommonly sparse at eleven o’clock on a Monday night. “So, where are we going?”

  A long moment passed before he replied. “You never said anything about the note I left for you.”

  “What note?”

  “The note that I left in your trailer last Monday. I put it right on the couch. You couldn’t have missed it.”

  Through the fog of my headache, I tried to recall what had been going on a week earlier, and the image of Robin sneaking out of my trailer returned to me in a bright flash. “I never got a note from you. I caught Robin snooping around in my trailer that day. She probably saw you go in there and took the note before I got back from my pointless trip to the hospital.”

  Elliott lifted an eyebrow as he considered the possibility and did not look too pleased about it. Through his window, I saw that we were passing Universal Studios. We were heading south, toward Hollywood. “I saw her hanging out with a bunch of production assistants last week, laughing and joking about something. I think she talked them into messing up that train track during Tia’s song on purpose.”

  “No kidding,” I said flatly. My headache had subsided just enough for me to marvel at the fact that I was buckled into the passenger seat of Elliott’s car, and he was only a foot away from me. I had to remind myself that he’d been sneaking around with a girl to prevent myself from wishing that he’d kiss me at some point during our adventure away from the hotel. “How long did that take you to figure out? She’s been playing pranks to get people kicked off since the very first week of the show.”

  His brow furrowed as he decided whether or not to say what was on his mind, and then he said, “She’s the one who showed me those pictures of you and your friend after Thanksgiving. She even stopped by my hotel room because she wanted me to know that you were hanging out with him behind my back.”

  I rolled my eyes dramatically. “And you didn’t think that was the least bit suspicious? I already told you; Lee is just my friend. We weren’t doing anything in my driveway. He and a bunch of my other friends from school came over for dessert, and we were just saying goodbye.” There was only one reason why I was even bothering to plead my case with Elliott since I’d given up hope on restoring whatever had once been between us: having him know that I wouldn’t have ever intentionally hurt him. Even if he’d broken my heart, was more important to me than anything.

  He kept his eyes focused firmly on the road ahead. “That’s not what the caption on those pictures said. It said you were warmly embracing a love interest.”

  “Yeah, well, who wrote that caption? Me? No, some idiotic gossip blogger.”

  Another moment of silence passed. He twisted the volume knob on the radio in his dashboard and the car filled with a hazy, romantic old song by The Verve. A blue Mustang doing about a hundred miles an hour passed us. “I guess they got me then. They wanted to make me jealous, and I was.” He withdrew his fancy new mobile phone from the back pocket of his jeans and tossed it into my lap. “Tommy and Susan left this for me at the concierge’s desk in the lobby. They’d been bugging me to start Tweeting since the beginning of the season, so this was waiting for me when I got back from visiting my mom the day after Thanksgiving. Even if Robin hadn’t shown me the pictures, the producers sure did seem to want me to go online that weekend and see them.”

  I examined the phone. It was a brand new iPhone, the latest release, with his name engraved on its case: Elliott Mercer. It was awfully strange that Tommy and Susan would want Elliott to start Tweeting badly enough to provide him with an expensive new phone. It wasn’t as if they’d also given him a crash course in building a fan base online, which I’d already learned from Kaela was no easy feat. I couldn’t imagine Elliott endearing himself to his abundant female fans by Tweeting his usual gloominess on a regular basis.

  When we exited the freeway and stopped at a light, he took the phone back. He bungled his attempt to tap in his security code and cursed. “Too bad for them I can’t even figure out how this piece of crap works.”

  My eyes narrowed as suddenly about fifty realizations unfolded in my head at once, like a chain of dominos toppling over, one after the other in rapid succession. “Elliott, who was the girl you had in your room around Halloween?”

  Blank-faced, Elliott stared at me. The light changed, and we continued along the dark tree-lined block of Franklin Avenue, headed east.

  “A girl,” I said sharply to remind him. “Right around Halloween. I went up to your room to apologize for the fight we had the night of the fire, and I heard a girl in there laughing.”

  “Cassie? My friend drove up here to visit that weekend. It’s not—she just got into an argument with her mom and needed to talk.”

  His was response was so nonchalant that I had no reason to suspect he was lying. I’d been avoiding him for weeks and all because I’d jumped to a conclusion—a conclusion seeded by Claire, who had evidently been the producers’ secret weapon against me all along. Claire had taken advantage of my trust in a way that had caused me weeks of pain. Flames of anger that had been building up inside me over the last few weeks torched every remaining bit of hope and positivity I had left about my involvement with the show. Everyone at E
n Fuego had taken advantage of my naiveté and blinding desire to win. They’d even presumably pulled my parents into their little game—and I’d eagerly fallen for every gag they’d pulled.

  Talking so quickly I could barely control the flow of words pouring out of my mouth, I set forth my entire theory for Elliott about what the producers had been doing since the beginning of the season. It all made perfect sense now that I was looking at it from this new perspective. We’d been allowed to go home for Thanksgiving specifically because the producers intended to tip off the paparazzi and photograph me doing something that they could use to pit Elliott against me. Lee had even said that it was my mom’s idea to invite my friends over for dinner since it would be the last time I’d be home for a while. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Claire had planted that idea in my mom’s head. It had been Claire who’d encouraged me to go up to Elliott’s room to make peace when she must have known that he had a female guest visiting.

  The recent little scheme to make me go to the hospital and act sick had been nothing compared to what the producers had been tricking me into doing since September. Elliott and I had both gotten ourselves involved with this vicious show because we’d mistakenly thought that the producers wanted to find musical stars. But all they really wanted to find were suckers dumb enough to get tangled up in drama that would convince viewers to tune in every week.

  We turned right on Hillhurst Avenue and Elliott drove up the hill into Griffith Park. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d been in this area of Los Angeles; as a younger kid I had gone on field trips to Griffith Park and its zoo all the time. “Oh, man,” he said with a slow smile forming on his lips. If I could trust my eyes in the low light inside the Fiesta, I was pretty sure I saw him blush as he flipped his left turn signal. “All these weeks, I thought you were just angry about the fire alarm. I didn’t know you thought I was keeping some chick in my room.”

  “Yeah, well, it turns out maybe you weren’t the only one who was jealous.”

  Elliott turned into the nearly empty parking lot for the Greek Theater. There wasn’t a concert that night, and when we stepped out of the car, the sound of nighttime crickets chirping was almost deafening. “Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?” I asked. He walked toward the path in the trees encircling the outdoor theater’s seating area and stage. “Elliott, there are like, rattlesnakes and coyotes out here.” It was true. Los Angeles seemed to be engaged in a constant losing battle against nature. My parents had made me promise to never, ever sneak around in Griffith Park after dark because a teenage girl from our neighborhood had been bitten by a coyote when I was in junior high.

  “It’s fine,” Elliott said. He was probably lying because he wasn’t from around there and hadn’t grown up with the same warnings about wildlife as I had, but I followed him along the path into the trees anyway. It was cold out, as cold as it gets in December in Los Angeles, and the star-speckled night sky overhead was crystal clear. Elliott seemed to know where he was going and walked confidently along a chain link fence until he veered off the cement path into the grass, headed for the trees. Within seconds, he disappeared into the darkness.

  I took a few timid steps forward onto the grass, certain that I was going to step on a rattlesnake. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw Elliott dangling from the lowest branch of a tree with a forked trunk. In his Jack Purcells with their threadbare soles, he deftly kicked off the trunk of the tree to swing his legs upward and hoisted his entire body onto the branch.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper-screamed at him, forgetting about rattlesnakes and trotting toward him. He shifted his weight around until he was comfortable sitting with his legs dangling over me, and smiled, clearly quite pleased with himself for having climbed the tree.

  “Your turn,” he told me.

  “Are you insane? This is trespassing!” I exclaimed. “There could be, like, bats or owls in that tree!”

  “It’s not trespassing. We’re in a public park. It’s more like trees-passing.”

  I groaned and rolled my eyes. If I had known Elliott was as corny as my dad, I might not have fallen so hard for him.

  “Come on, Allison. You’re more afraid of owls than you are of singing on live television?”

  I took a deep breath and looked around, certain that we were about to be apprehended by park rangers with automatic rifles. The entire theater structure behind me was completely silent, and Elliott was only visible above me because of the full moon shining down on him.

  “You’re probably safer up here anyway,” Elliott said casually. “Isn’t there a mountain lion around here?”

  The very real possibility of being attacked by a mountain lion (P-22 was the name that wildlife biologists had given to the famous mountain lion who lived in the park) was enough to make me hop up and grab hold of the branch. I mimicked the method Elliott had used to climb the tree, although I struggled a lot more than he did. The bark of the tree was smooth but I still felt the top layer of skin across my palms being scraped away.

  “You can do it. You’re almost there,” he encouraged me.

  “Yeah, you’re like, twenty feet taller than me!” I complained, finally using my upper body strength to balance my torso across the branch so that I could join him. As I huffed and puffed, I noticed that my headache had vanished. I hadn’t exactly been planning on climbing trees when I’d gotten dressed that morning and was already hoping that it wouldn’t be too hard to wash tree sap out of my favorite pair of skinny jeans.

  “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Following his gaze, I was finally able to see why we’d climbed up there. From our vantage point, we could see directly over the side wall of the theater’s outer perimeter. If there had been a concert that night, we would have been able to see and hear everything. “Wow,” I murmured. “This is amazing. How did you know about this place?”

  Elliott shrugged. “When my mom and my dad were young they used to do this all the time with their friends because they were too broke to buy tickets to shows.”

  We weren’t very high up, but it felt like we could pluck stars from the plum-colored sky. All of Griffith Park was our domain.

  “One day I want to headline on that stage.” He sounded more wistful than I’d ever heard him. “I’ve never even seen a show here because my first time inside that place has to be the time. You know? I don’t want to be a spectator in there.”

  In all of the conversations I’d had with Elliott about our chances on the show, he’d never seemed to have much of an appetite for winning, and this was why. Headlining at the Greek was his version of winning Center Stage!

  “What was in the note you left in my trailer?” I asked. When he’d mentioned the note in his car on the drive over, I’d been so infuriated that Robin had dared to steal it I hadn’t bothered asking him what he’d written.

  “I’m quitting the show.”

  “What?” He had to be joking. “You cannot be serious. It’s the eleventh week.”

  Elliott shrugged, his eyes fixed on the empty theater. “I’m totally serious. I already told Chase, and he had his attorney check the contract to make sure that the producers can’t sue my mom or anything. I wouldn’t have even shown up this morning for that stupid meeting, but I wanted a chance to, you know, like, talk to you before I left. Just in case…”

  “Just in case what?” I asked softly, my voice trembling.

  “Like, in case I never see you again.”

  Now I knew he wasn’t joking. Miraculously, I’d only cried once so far that season when someone had switched my songs during the roulette episode, but now I felt a flood of tears building up behind my eyes. I didn’t want to be a part of the show for a second if Elliott wasn’t there anymore. Even if there were only two weeks left, even if I was closer to winning than I had ever dreamed when I submitted my audition video.

  “Elliott, come on. You can’t quit. You’re probably going to win,” I insisted, and I knew it was true. There
was no denying the fact that Elliott had championed the votes almost every week since the start. He was the audience favorite, and his musical talents surpassed everyone else’s, including—I reluctantly had to admit—my own.

  Elliott hesitated and glanced up at me briefly before saying, “Yeah, I know. I am going to win. I think they kind of planned that from the start. That’s why I’m quitting. I knew before I even got into this that most of the show was going to be total B.S., and up until last week, it was like, whatever. But now…”

  He trailed off, and before he continued, I knew what he meant. “Now it’s personal.”

  Elliott nodded, his lips pressed together in a straight line. “Yeah.” Another long pause followed during which I assumed he was trying to decide how to phrase his thoughts. “Last week, that whole thing with the traffic tickets? That wasn’t what they wanted to produce. I’m failing out of high school. Like, I knew my grades would fall as soon as the show started, but the producers… God,” he shook his head. “They called my school to ask about me, just like, hunting for a story, and, of course, my stupid guidance counselor said I hadn’t turned in any homework since September. They wanted to shoot this whole thing about me striking some kind of deal with my school to get my grades back up.”

  I sensed his embarrassment. I wouldn’t have wanted the producers sniffing around at my high school, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted the whole country knowing about my grades. I could just imagine Mrs. Gambaryan hamming it up for the cameras.

  He sighed. “I tried telling them that it didn’t matter. I was going to take the GED after the show wraps anyway, but Claire was all, like, what about college? It was totally pointless trying to explain to someone like her that there is no college for someone like me. Not even with a fancy music scholarship. I don’t want to waste four years in some classroom having someone else tell me what qualifies as good music.”

  Elliott’s thoughts echoed my own feelings about college. Education was important to my parents. But I knew that if I committed to four years of studying on a campus, even if it was to study music, my fearlessness about pursuing a singing career would probably fade. By the time I graduated, I’d most likely have become preoccupied with the kind of things my parents concerned themselves with, like health insurance, retirement plans, and career paths. The very same things that had probably ultimately distracted my mom away from her own dream.