America's Next Star

by Katie Dozier

  America’s Next Star :

  The Singer

  ♪ Reality Girls Book One ♪

  * * *

  Katie Dozier

  “Hope is the thing with feathers—

  That perches in the soul—

  And sings the tune without the words—

  And never stops—at all—”

  Emily Dickinson

  Part One

  Chapter One

  ♪ Don’t Stop Believing ♪

  * * *

  W hen I went clothes shopping, I always hid a thick pad of neon sticky notes and berry-hued markers in my backpack. In every store, I scoured the racks to find something to whisk away to the dressing rooms, but—between you and me—I had no intention of slipping into zebra-striped bell bottoms for my chorus recital. And I never dreamed of rocking a sequined dress at my senior prom.

  This ritual started way back in fourth grade, when I tried on my first bra (yep, in the freaking fourth grade). The sales woman kept doing things like sighing and stepping away from me with her hand scrunched up against her chin. Even though Mom and I never actually talked about it, I think it had something to do with the fact that I’d yet to outgrow my baby fat. By the time we left the store, I was crying, which I tried to blame my newfound allergies to Florida on, even though we’d lived in Cocoa Beach my whole life.

  After shutting myself in my room for hours, I went to take a shower. Mom had done something with her signature spectacular flourish. I saw them the moment I approached the mirror to engage in some ritual self fat-shaming. Where I expected to see rolls of skin and red-lined gray eyes staring back at me, I saw paper. Little squares of multi-colored paper everywhere.

  Mom had covered the entire bathroom mirror in Post-It Notes, and her curly handwriting sang out to me from every single one. They said things like “Ella, you are beautiful!” Man, it was corny, but it stopped me from pinching the fat on my stomach and made me consider the idea that the bra saleswoman was actually the one with the problem.

  Some of the notes managed to stay adhered to the mirror—despite all the shower steam—for months. The last ones cascaded down like a wilted rose petal from Beauty and the Beast . I still have them all, curled up inside a purple Converse shoe box.

  Even once I was in high school, Mom and I didn’t shop in the kind of places where women used those dressing room mirrors to admire their polished reflections. We shopped in the kind of places where the fluorescent lights hum in B minor and cast shadows terrifying enough to convince me—a freaking seventeen-year-old—to save up for the wrinkle-fighting cream they’re hawking outside.

  And that was just how bad I felt before examining myself below the neck in the mirror. I guess there are two ways to sell clothes:

  Make you feel really good about how you look, or

  Make you feel so bad about how you look that you become desperate for something, anything, to distract people from actually looking at your face.

  Maybe that explains the zebra-print bell bottoms.

  I tore a neon green note off a sticky pad, and scrawled, “Finding beauty is easy once you look for it!” I pushed it onto the center of the mirror, like hitting a bull’s eye. But when I caught my own reflection, and didn’t know if I believed what I’d just wrote applied to me.

  Whenever people told me I looked just like Mom, I agreed with the face part. I have her big seafoam gray eyes, and perpetually pouty lips. The combination of those two features makes me look like I’m always about to ask a question, or so they say. Not that I asked!

  But I don’t have Mom’s slender, tall frame. In that regard, I resemble my great grandmother Mildred Windmill. When Dad came across a picture of her recently, one of those yellowing black and white pictures, he remarked that she was built like a “Brick Shit House.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, but suffice it to say that if Grandmami Mildred were alive today, she wouldn’t be an influencer on Instagram.

  Maybe I was being more critical of how I looked than normal because that particular shopping trip held a real purpose, I mean besides my secret little ritual, at least in Mom’s view.

  “Not that one either?” Mom asked, as I shook my head and added a black rhinestone dress to the reject pile without trying it on.

  “It would look great on you though,” I said, with an ounce of sadness in my voice that I hadn’t intended to put there. “You could wear it on your date night with Dad.”

  Mom rolled her head back and laughed in C sharp, a half note too high to be her normal laugh.

  “I don’t think people wear ball-gowns to Panera,” she said.

  “At least you go out.”

  I don’t know why it sounded like an accusation. I was happy enough spending my time singing in chorus, running tech for plays, and watching America’s Next Star with my best friend, Huck.

  Mom put her arm around me.

  “Maybe we can just order some online, return the ones we don’t like,” she said.

  A traitor to my generation, I hated getting clothes online. Then I didn’t get to do my sticky-note vandalism, and Mom managed to wrangle me into actually trying the stuff on for her. As much as we tried to convince ourselves that I could branch out, I always wound up back in my uniform of denim cut-offs and formless tank tops.

  But then I spotted a different dress. It flicked into my gaze like I’d caught a glimpse of a hummingbird. It posed in the corner of the store like it was straight out of some old Hollywood movie in a shocking shade of the brightest red. I doubt I'd ever worn anything that color since Mom dressed me up for my first Valentine's Day.

  It looked like something Zelina, the uber-famous singer, would wear while judging America’s Next Star . Or like Lady Gaga would step into on a day where she wanted something a little bit more understated than a meat dress.

  Mom followed my gaze.

  “Huh. That one?”

  But I looked away. The dress was not dangling from the clearance rack Mom walked me to earlier. What right did I have to start imagining myself wearing it? I didn’t even really want to go to prom. We weren't poor, but we weren't Huck's family either, and I knew that dress had to cost at least three-hundred dollars.

  “Let’s try finding one online,” I said, with a shrug.

  Mom took my hand as I strode towards the exit and pulled me back in. She grabbed a few sizes of the red dress, discreetly managing to hide my real size among the hangers. For the first time, a clerk popped up from behind a register.

  “Oh, please let me help you with those,” she said, and she escorted me to an unmarked single dressing room that was by a smattering of wedding dresses. Inside, it was more of an actual room than just a dressing room. The lights didn’t have the off-key hum of fluorescents and it was bigger than our family room.

  I slid the cherry-red satin fabric between my fingers, and it was so unlike the cotton tank tops that I always wore. I knew it was the kind of thing more suited for say, a daring woman attending a fancy New Year's Eve party, but that was actually what drew me to it. It was inappropriately bold for a senior prom being held in the gym of a school a couple blocks from the beach. But it was appropriately bold for someone that was a little sick of spending her high school days behind the scenes. Floating on that hanger was my last shot at a grand entrance before we all graduated.

  I caught a glimpse of the label, with a tiny image of an egg in a nest, and loved the dress even more. While Huck knew all about fashion designers, there was only one I cared about, and right above the nest, her name was stitched in gold: Katherine Egg. The costume designer for America’s Next Star ! It didn’t matter to me that the dress was only part of a special budget collaboration, because even if it was the bottom rung, I was about to try on a dress that she’d actu
ally had a hand in putting together!

  Sliding it on was like slipping into a cloud—a wispy, shimmery cloud that accompanied a windy day. I pulled my hair up in to a messy bun, and studied the way the satin halter simply gave way to a cinched waist that cascaded out like a waterfall of lava. I pictured myself with false eyelashes to accentuate my eyes instead of hide them under my bangs like I usually do. For a moment, my day dream of wearing the dress to prom escalated to one where I wore it while singing on the biggest stage in the world, Star Stadium.

  Without thinking, I did something I hadn’t done since that fateful day bra shopping so long ago. I unlocked the door to the dressing room and went out to show Mom. She was squinting at her phone but her eyes shot open when saw me in the red dress.

  “My God,” was all she said at first. She walked around me like she was checking to see if I was still in there between the swirls of red satin.

  “You look like a movie star,” the clerk said, repeating her habit of popping out from behind the register like a champagne cork.

  Mom smiled at me, her eyes locked on mine. “Actually, you look like America’s Next Star .”

  It’s the closest that I ever came to that magic moment of a hopeful bride-to-be emerging in the dress of her dreams.

  As I carried the dress, sheathed in plastic, out of the store, I said, “Thanks, Mom. I just feel bad. It must’ve cost a ton.”

  She laughed in her normal, chirpy pitch of high C. “I paid too much for you to feel bad about any part of that.” Sensing an opportunity, she continued, “Do you think you might wear it not just to prom? I mean, what about auditioning for the next season?”

  “Maybe,” I said with a smirk.

  “Can we compromise on sending in a video audition?”

  I looked down at the dress she’d probably worked a week to earn.

  “Okay,” I said, “I mean, assuming I manage to make one that’s good enough.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Mom sang like a songbird with the simple melody of E, G, F, E.

  Chapter Two

  ♪ A Whole New World ♪

  * * *

  W hen the doorbell rang, Huck and I were as still as if we were being hunted by a T-Rex. True, it was my house, and I’d ordered the pizza on my phone. Even so, my best friend rolled his eyes and caved. He waved away the cash I held out, sparing me from repeating my embarrassing tale of woe. Once, I spoke up about a missing garlic sauce to the hot delivery guy, only for him to open the box of pizza and display the “missing” condiment along with an eye roll.

  “Alright, alright,” he said. “But it better be Zac Efron on the other side of that door with pepperoni for me!”

  A royal flurry of trumpets heralded us from the TV.

  “Hurry up, it’s starting,” I called out.

  On screen was THE Katherine Egg in a white silk gown. The sleeves extended beyond the wide scope of the camera, billowing in the wind like slender clouds. The fabric swirled around her, and when the camera zoomed in, there was the signature little nest that she always had somewhere on her head. This one was sculpted of her own hair, with a giant pearl acting as the egg.

  After seducing the camera for a few beats, Katherine began.

  “This evening, I am honored to invite you to glimpse inside the brand new America’s Next Star . Next season will be filmed entirely here, in the brand-new Universe, created just for us. The Universe transcends the old boundaries between real and imaginary. The Universe is difficult to believe, even when you see it.”

  “Ohmygod this is a techie’s wet dream,” Huck said, as he slammed the pizza box down and forgot about it.

  It wasn’t difficult to see how Katherine had won a billion awards, including a few Oscars for costume design. People said she could’ve been a famous actress, instead of the world’s most famous costume designer, and especially in white silk, I could see why. As the dress hanging in my closet attested to, she’d even branched into becoming a mainstream fashion designer. Though she’d been in the business too long for her to be young anymore, her creamy beauty had a quality, led by her sapphire eyes, that transcended her age. I guess that’s what they meant when she’d landed the cover of Vogue alongside the headline, “Timeless Beauty.”

  “Do you really think they paid her over fifty million for this one season?” I asked.

  Huck pointed at the screen as the camera zoomed out to reveal she was on the balcony of a castle, her sleeves instead of disappearing as the camera zoomed further and further away, stretched further still. Past the moat and thousands of rows of neon tulips. Like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, the end of her billowing sleeves was unreachable.

  “They must be longer than a football field,” said Huck.

  “Since when do you make sports analogies?”

  “Hey, I paid for your pizza. Indulge me.”

  He handed me a slice of supreme and I picked the toppings off onto another plate, and Huck added them to his own slice. It was one of our wordless little routines, the kind of thing that seemed so insignificant at the time.

  “You know we could just do half cheese, half supreme,” he said for the umptenth time.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “But then you wouldn’t get double the toppings, and it’s a worse deal since we’d be paying for a supreme but just getting cheese on half of it.”

  I guess another part of the routine was that Huck just put up with my thriftiness even though we both knew he (or really the deep pockets of his lawyer parents) always paid for the pizza anyway.

  “Welcome back,” Katherine said on TV. Like a bride that changed into a new dress for her million-dollar reception, her rippling silk sleeves had been replaced with little feather ones. She was in a ballroom, and the arched beams of the ceiling were so far above her that it looked like she could have skydived from them. Floor to ceiling, the walls were lined with mirrors. Gilded mirrors, bejeweled mirrors, platinum mirrors. They shot her face around the room in boundless prisms.

  “Here we are in the modern Hall of Mirrors, just one room, in one of the many castles in the Chateaux Constellation in the Universe.”

  Huck’s voice woke me from Katherine Egg’s spell. “Remember how we used to record those music videos?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  He pointed at the TV, where a chandelier was being lowered from the ceiling. The mirrors refracted the glow of thousands of candles.

  “That would’ve been a killer setting for ‘Man in the Mirror!’”

  “True, but I still don’t think it could top when we filmed ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ inside Ron Jons.”

  “Until we got kicked out,” Huck said.

  I’d never forget the day I met my best friend, on the white sand of Cocoa Beach the summer before fourth grade. I stumbled upon an enormous sand castle and a kid begging his parents to sing, but they were glued to their cellphones.

  I thought about walking by, but he was so earnest in begging his parents for attention and I was so curious as to why he wanted someone to sing so bad, that I called out, “I can sing.” He’d just moved from New York, and we wound up in the same class only a few weeks later.

  The TV displayed a graphic in the style of an old school treasure map of the whole new world Katherine Egg was tantalizing the audience with. In the center of the Universe was Solar Stadium, with a path labeled the Milky Way down the center. To the left was the Chateaux Constellation, seemingly a large area with a lot of subdivisions. To the right was something Katherine Egg had yet to show us: Contempo Constellation.

  Then the TV flashed the first officially released image of the entire Universe, zoomed out to the same point as the map had been.

  “My god,” I said. “I thought they’d been exaggerating when they said they built a city. But it’s huge.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “You’re still on that one?” I raised an eyebrow at him.

  It had begun as, “That’s what she said,” back in elementary school,
before we had a clue what it meant. Then the joke morphed into at least a partial understanding for me in high school, although I sensed more than that for Huck. He’d switched to “he” soon after we both realized something about him that made it very easy to stay in the friend zone.

  Since everyone already thought we were anyway, we decided to try being boyfriend and girlfriend our freshman year. While I’m not exactly proud of this fact, the truth is we’d shared my only kiss, right before his mom mercifully barged in on our awkward attempt. I’m not sure if he knew before that moment, but he had yet to tell anyone else but me.

  Back on the screen, Katherine Egg was wearing black leather in the Contempo Constellation section of the Universe. The camera zoomed inside an enormous limo, with neon lights flashing. With a martini in her hand, Katherine said, “Driver, take me to the studio.”