Dear Allison,
When you get to be my age, you realize that the only prizes worth winning can’t be handed to you on a stage, and the true definition of what it means to win isn’t found in a dictionary, but rather in your heart. Make me proud, star material.
I slid the notecard back into the silver envelope and returned it to my backpack, intending to cherish it forever. My experience on Center Stage! had taught me exactly what she’d hoped to convey: that sometimes winning isn’t really winning. Marlene’s words of comfort reminded me that there was one remaining loose end in the plan that Elliott had concocted for tomorrow. I called Marlene’s number on my cell phone. When she didn’t answer, I had no choice but to leave a rambling and probably insane-sounding voicemail for her.
Without another thought, I bid my trailer farewell.
Later that evening, I was a ball of nerves when Nicole, Kaela, and Michelle arrived at the hotel. I would have been nervous that night no matter what—even if I’d still wanted to win—but the kind of mutiny that Elliott and I were planning required a complicated balance of circumstances and luck.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Michelle asked, reaching into the plastic bag from Savon. “Because seriously, there will be no turning back. If you don’t like how it looks and try to dye your hair brown again, you might end up looking terrible on the show tomorrow night.”
“I’m positive.”
Michelle and Kaela pulled on rubber gloves and sectioned my hair into chunks. As I sat in the chair by the little desk area in my suite, Kaela mixed powdered bleach with activator in a plastic bowl. Michelle wrapped each chunk around the bottom half of my head that Kaela had painted in a strip of foil.
“You look insane,” Nicole commented from the couch where she was watching television. “Like a robot Medusa.”
Michelle teased, “Way to help out.”
“I am here for moral support,” Nicole reminded all of us.
My cell phone rang, and Nicole answered it since I was in no position to walk across the room with such a delicate disaster balanced atop my head. “It’s someone who says she’s Marlene,” Nicole informed me, carrying the phone over to where I sat.
“Marlene!” I exclaimed. I’d left her that voicemail earlier in the day unsure if she’d be willing or able to help me out now that she was no longer affiliated with the show.
“You’re cleared on the rights, kid,” she said without even saying hello. “The publishing rights are owned by Sony Music, and they aren’t any more expensive than the publishing rights on Nelly’s song. You should be good to go.”
“Oh my God. Thank you, Marlene. Thank you so much,” I exclaimed. Once Nelly had brought up music licensing, I hadn’t been able to shake the fear that the producers of the show would come after my parents to pay outrageously expensive fees if I sang a song on live television without the network securing the proper rights in advance. That would have been a very unfortunate outcome of my reckless final performance on Center Stage!.
“I have to admit, Allison, I am very curious to see what you have in store for tomorrow night,” she said, sounding humored. “Just promise me you’ll be smart. They’re not very nice people when you cross them.”
“I’ll be smart,” I vowed. “This is about ratings and publicity. That’s all.”
After saying goodbye to Marlene, Michelle (whose own curly hair was a shade of toxic green that week) unwrapped all of the foil strips to reveal locks of pure white all the way around my head. “Now, the real fun begins,” she said, twisting off the cap on a jar of pink hair dye.
“Remember, nothing too close to the top or bottom,” I warned. The only way I was going to get to look the way I wanted on television was if I didn’t tip anyone on the production staff off throughout the day on Friday. My hair would have to look completely normal until it was too late for Martha and Geoffrey to do anything about it.
“Your mom is going to go seriously nuts,” Kaela said, dabbing blue hair dye onto one of the bleached chunks.
I didn’t think so. I was pretty sure my mom would understand exactly what I was going to do on Friday night.
When we were done, I called Taylor on video chat. “Check it out,” I said, running my hand through my hair and positioning my phone so that she could see Michelle’s hairstyling handiwork.
“Wow. That looks so cool,” Taylor said. She sat at her desk in her tiny dormitory bedroom. “Are you nervous about tomorrow night?”
“Totally,” I confessed, although I couldn’t tell her why. I hadn’t even told the friends who were flipping through the thousands of cable channels on the television in my hotel suite the full extent of what Elliott and I planned to do. Elliott was upstairs in his room, rehearsing the song he intended to perform, which he was keeping a secret even from me. “Are you going to be watching?”
“Of course,” she said. “I mean, I’m supposed to be practicing for this symphony thing in Spain, but I’ll take a break to watch.”
Taylor would be traveling to Madrid at the very same time as Todd, a little fact that I was sure my brother had strategically neglected to inform our parents. Her stepmother had agreed to let her join her boarding school’s symphony on the trip to play a special holiday concert. She believed that a change of scenery would be better for Taylor than spending the week before Christmas in New Jersey immersed in family drama. Even as Taylor described her school group’s itinerary she sounded morose; it would be the first Christmas she had ever spent away from West Hollywood in her whole life.
“Just don’t forget to watch tomorrow. There’s going to be a surprise for you, and don’t tell your dad,” I said.
“You don’t have to worry about that. I’m never speaking to him again.”
When I ended my conversation with Taylor, Kaela asked, “Hey, can we order, like, whatever we want from room service?
It was probably my last night as America’s sweetheart, so I reasoned, why not?
“One more time. And one, and two, and action…”
By the third time Mark ran all of us—Chase, Jay, Nelly, Lenore, Tia, Elliot, and me—through our opening number on Friday morning, I was already having fantasies about just bursting through the front doors of the Dolby Theater out onto Hollywood Boulevard to escape the insanity. The song we would perform that night, an absurd mash-up of musical styles, was cheesy and abrasive, but tolerable only because the coaches were participating, too. My stomach was tied in knots as I wondered what would become of me before midnight. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to assume I’d be permitted to go out for dinner with my parents that night after the show wrapped. There was a possibility that I was going to end up in some kind of show business jail cell.
“I’m so nervous, I think I’m going to be sick on stage,” Tia confessed to me during our lunch backstage.
“Don’t be nervous. It’s going to be exactly the same as any other Friday night,” I assured her. Tia would perform first before Elliott and I pulled the rest of the broadcast to pieces. The order of our performances helped us rationalize what we had planned. If there had been a chance we were going to upset Tia’s shot at winning, we would have reconsidered.
That afternoon when I changed into the outfit Aubrey had chosen for me to wear on the show (a black leather shirt with a zippered front and red fake snakeskin pants), I eyeballed the plastic bag I’d brought with me from the hotel. It inconspicuously waited on a countertop next to the steamer that the producers had provided me with to warm up my vocal chords. In it, the real outfit I planned to wear on stage was balled up, but I couldn’t put those clothes on until moments before I took the stage for my performance.
“Let’s get this hair blown out,” Martha said as she stepped into the Group 2 prep room, which was now my private dressing room. It was three in the afternoon: two hours before the studio audience members would take their seats, and the cameras would start rolling. Far too late for any of the production assistants to dash off to a pharmacy to buy a box of brunette
hair dye. I’d pulled my hair into a tight bun on top of my head that morning, careful to hide all of the colored strands. Martha gasped when pink, purple, green, and blue tumbled out to my shoulders.
“What did you do?” she asked in horror.
“I wanted something special for the finale,” I said, figuring that just acting like a selfish, impulsive teenager was the best way to explain my actions. “It’s not that different from what we talked about a few weeks ago, right? I thought it would be cool.”
Martha ran her hands through my hair, and I watched her face contort into an expression of utter anxiety. “Cool, sure, but… I think I need to go tell someone about this.”
She rushed off down the hall to summon a production assistant, and I dug my phone out of my backpack to text Elliott with an irrepressible smile on my face.
Ten minutes later, an emergency task force had gathered to determine what to do with my hair. “What in the world were you thinking?” Nelly demanded, hands on her hips. “I just knew you were going to do something foolish to ruin tonight’s show.” She turned to Martha and ordered, “Put it in an up-do. I don’t want to see a single weird color when she’s up on that stage.”
Grumbling the whole time, Martha teased and sprayed my hair into a French knot. Shortly before five o’clock, Rob the evil production assistant knocked on the prep room door to fetch me for the opening number. As we walked toward the double doors leading to the backstage area, butterflies fluttered in my chest just as they had the first time I’d taken this walk, the day of my audition. I could hear the studio audience talking and laughing, waiting for the show to begin. The coaches and Tia were already in formation, and Mark rushed around wearing a headset, snapping out his last round of orders before he would disappear into the control room to direct the live broadcast.
I felt warm fingertips stroke the inside of my palm and turned to see that Elliott had crept up behind me. We shared a stealth smile, and I was humored that he’d stayed true to his refusal to let the stylists dress him right up until the very end of the season. He wore a denim shirt and jeans, along with the same dirty Jack Purcells he’d been wearing since the first time I’d ever seen him.
“Alright, everyone, this is it!” Danny Fuego cruised over to us to give us one final cheesy pep talk. “This has been a fantastic season, the best ratings we’ve ever gotten. So I want to thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart for contributing to the ongoing success of Center Stage!, and I wish you guys—Tia, Elliott, and Allison—the very best of luck tonight.”
The show’s theme song played, the colored lights shifted across the stage, and Danny dashed out in front of the cameras as the audience clapped. The last episode of the season had begun. Just like on the first episode, when I’d been so nervous about my ill-fitting jacket that I could barely remember the dance moves, the opening act went by as if it were a lucid dream. When the spotlight fell upon me for my solo, applause swelled, and I hit the notes exactly as I’d exhaustively practiced them to spare myself the ire of Chase Atwood.
Backstage once again, I didn’t even catch a glimpse of Elliott before I was ushered back to the Group 2 prep room. A video montage of all of Tia’s turns on stage over the course of the season spliced together with footage of her in dance class preceded her final performance. It included a clip from her audition when she’d nervously taken the stage at a hotel in Miami and gripped the microphone stand for dear life. The segment ended with Secret Suite footage of Tia telling the audience how being on Center Stage! had changed her life. “Even if I don’t win tomorrow night, this has been an experience I’ll never forget.”
She took the stage in a stunning silver dress. “What song are you going to sing for us tonight, my dear?” Danny asked.
“I’m going to sing ‘Endless Sky,’ Danny,” Tia said. “It’s the first song I remember hearing on the radio when my family moved to Miami from the Philippines, and it shaped my idea of what it means to live in America.”
I had underestimated Tia. Either she had learned how to cast a spell on an audience during her time on the show, or her genuine instincts were spot-on. She tore through the song with unbridled emotion. Even though I’d only been half-heartedly paying attention to my competitors’ performances throughout the season, I could hear a difference in Tia’s voice since the earlier weeks. Her work with Lenore and her vocal trainer had given her more control over her range.
Pins and needles tickled my arms and legs as the show paused for a commercial break. The time had come to make my quick change into the outfit I planned to wear on stage. I pulled on my Pacific Valley School gym shirt and slipped into Taylor’s sky blue hoodie. I wiggled out of my skintight red pants and tugged on an old pair of jeans. It had been Nicole’s contribution to this endeavor to stop by my house on her way to the Neue Hotel the night before to pick up the elements of my costume from my mom.
When Rob appeared in the doorway of the prep room moments later, his face fell the instant he saw me. “What are you doing? You’re on in three minutes!”
“This is what I’m wearing,” I said, pulling the hairpins out of my French twist and letting my hair swing to my shoulders.
Rob shook his head and raised his walkie-talkie. “Go for Mark,” he said in the lingo that the crew used, and then paused for someone in the control room to acknowledge his request.
“Copy for Mark.”
“We’ve got a small problem down here,” Rob said. “I’m flying Allison in, and she’s changed out of wardrobe and into some clothes she—maybe found in a dumpster?”
We engaged in a hateful staring contest until the control room buzzed him back with directions. “Just fly her in,” a male voice commanded through the static on the walkie-talkie.
Rob walked so briskly down the hall that I had to trot to keep up with him. Every production assistant we passed paused to stare at me. “Radical hair,” a guy in a heavy metal t-shirt wearing a headset told me with a thumbs-up.
I lingered in the darkness of the backstage area while my video introduction played. It began, surprisingly, with an interview from Marlene. “The first day I met the contestants on Nelly’s team, I was just blown away by the amount of talent in the group. I thought to myself, it’s going to be simply impossible to select a winner from this fantastic assortment of singers. And then this little girl, maybe five-foot-three on the tallest day of her life, stood up and belted out an R&B classic and just knocked everyone’s socks off.” Marlene was beaming. “I knew on the very first day that Allison had what it would take to win. There’s nothing this girl can’t do. She’s star material; the real thing.”
My lower lip trembled. The heartfelt praise from Marlene made the rest of my video, which was a sensationalized chronicle of my life story, tolerable. I wondered what my parents were thinking in the audience as that video aired. They both knew all too well that I had hardly been considered a stand-out student at Pacific Valley prior to Center Stage!. They also knew that my self-professed love of working in soup kitchens was an outright lie since I’d never been to one prior to Tuesday. My segment ended just like Tia’s had, with my Secret Suite recording. “If I’ve learned anything on this show, it’s that nothing’s more important than being true to myself. One of the coaches told me that whatever I do in my career, it’s got to feel right, and that’s advice that I think applies to everyone’s life. You’ve just got to be yourself.”
If Danny Fuego was at all startled by my appearance when I stepped out on stage, he was enough of a professional to not let it show. The audience seemed to understand that my outfit had been explained by my Secret Suite statement, and their applause by the time I reached Danny was thunderous. “And here she is, the girl who’s vowed to be true to herself,” Danny greeted me, as if he’d been expecting me to step into the spotlight wearing a ratty hoodie all along.
“Thanks, Danny,” I said, speaking into the microphone. “Everyone at home has seen me dolled up throughout the season, so I thought that tonight,
for the finale, they should see me as I am in real life. This hoodie I’m wearing belongs to my best friend, and she’s been going through a very hard time in her life, feeling like she’s all alone. Instead of supporting her these past few months, I’ve been here, trying to win votes. So I wanted to wear this tonight to show her that she’s always in my thoughts.”
“Well, that’s very sweet of you,” Danny said as the people in the studio audience collectively said aw.
“In fact,” I said, reaching into the back pocket of my jeans, “I was planning to sing one of Nelly’s greatest hits that she rewrote just for me tonight, but the song is so beautiful that I think it makes more sense for Nelly to sing it on her next tour. Instead, I would like to sing something else.”
Before Danny could object, I walked toward the pianist and violinist who had set up on stage for my performance of “I Love You, But I Don’t Know What to Do.” I handed them both the sheet music for the song I’d decided was a more appropriate send-off for me on the show, and shockingly, they both nodded in agreement. My heart was beating so hard I thought I might seriously have a coronary on live television if one of the producers were to dash onto the stage to stop me from doing what I was about to do.
Danny, stunned, looked around with his hand raised up to his forehead to block the bright stage lights. “Okay, Allison’s going to sing a different song. Can she do that?”
We were broadcasting live. Danny didn’t have much of a choice other than to cut to a commercial break. One of the producers backstage nodded at him, and he told the audience, “I guess she can do that! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Allison Burch.”
The lights lowered, and I stepped into the spotlight, taking care not to look down at the coaches’ table where fire was surely shooting out of Nelly’s eyes in my direction. As soon as the pianist plunked out the first few notes of Ben E. King’s classic, “Stand By Me,” another wave of applause swelled.
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