Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (31 page)

“What time do you have to go back to the studio?” Taylor asked. I could see through my window that the sun was rising, but it was barely dawn.

“Nine,” I grumbled. I wished more than anything that there wasn’t a show that night. Usually on the day after Thanksgiving, I helped Mom pull our boxes of Christmas decorations in from the garage, and we decorated the house.

Taylor sat up and pushed her hair back from her face. “I wish we could do something, like old times. Like take the bus to Larchmont and get iced coffee.”

“We could walk to your house,” I offered, wondering if she’d been back at all since leaving Los Angeles in September.

“Not into that. I don’t think I can handle seeing other people living there.”

“Well,” I said, “We could probably convince Todd to drive us for coffee. Or, rather,
you
could. I can’t get him to do anything.”

Forty-five minutes later, we piled into Mom’s Sentra. The block was still silent except for the tweeting of birds until Todd started the car. As we backed out of the driveway, and my sense of dread about returning to the studio surged, Taylor suddenly said, “You know? Maybe we
should
stop by my old house. It would be good for me.”

We drove the four blocks east toward Taylor’s old street. I still thought of it as her street in the present tense because I’d not been back to her house since she’d left town, either. Sitting in the back seat behind Taylor, I noticed her tense up as we crossed Melrose and slowed down on her block. Her old house looked just as it always had, with a little stone path wrapping its way through the front lawn toward the stairs leading to the front door. The camellia bushes lining the driveway blazed hot pink. It would have been easy to believe—if the name Beauforte hadn’t been replaced on the mailbox by Stuart, and if there hadn’t been an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway—that nothing at all had changed since the summer. That if we stepped inside, her mom would be stretched out on the couch, flipping through the pages of
Expose
while her toenail polish dried.

Todd slowed to a stop, and we were both surprised when Taylor unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of the car. “Should we go with her?” my brother asked me.

Without answering, I climbed out of the back seat and heard him shut off the car’s engine behind me. Taylor took a few steps right into the center of the front yard, and then she sank to her knees in the grass. I managed to say, “Taylor, are you—” and then she crumpled forward. A bark came out of her that sounded a little bit like a noise an injured wild animal might make. She sobbed so uncontrollably that she couldn’t stifle the volume.

I put my hand on her shoulder, and Todd put his hand on her other shoulder, and we just stood there like that. Neither of us could bring ourselves to tell Taylor not to cry, or that everything would be alright because there wasn’t any need. She already knew that her life would never go back to normal. The moment was solemn for me, too, because it felt like something precious and irreplaceable from my past had been robbed from me. I’d spent many afternoons at that house. One afternoon, Taylor and I had decided to give each other haircuts. My mother had just about had a stroke when she arrived to pick me up that evening and saw the crooked bangs that Taylor had given me, on the very same stoop I was staring at now.

Right then, at that moment on North Laurel Avenue, I felt more like myself than I had since
Center Stage!
had started. I was just a teenager from West Hollywood. I was a best friend; I was a little sister.
 
And that made my return to the studio later that morning all the more bitter because I had finally admitted to myself that I was tired of pretending to be someone else.

Later that morning at the studio, I managed to avoid Chase Atwood until it was time for us to depart for the Dolby Theater. As the contestants corralled around the mini-bus bound for Hollywood in the parking lot, Chase bounced toward us dangling the keys to his Hummer from his fingers. I cringed, not wanting to acknowledge that I knew about what had unfolded in his personal life over the last two days. Instead of conspiratorially winking at me or mentioning anything about Taylor, he told me, “Tell this character that he missed some killer
elotes
on Wednesday, Allison.”
 
He playfully punched Elliott on the upper arm as he passed us.

Elliott rubbed his arm as if Chase had unintentionally hurt him a little. “What are
elotes?”
 
Elliott asked me gruffly as the line to board the bus advanced.

“Mexican corn on the cob with, like, spices and cheese on top,” I explained. I followed him onto the mini-bus and sat in the seat in front of his. While the bus navigated down Franklin Avenue, a street lined with classic Hollywood mansions (many of which were on the brink of dilapidation), my mind raced with potential ways to ask Elliott about how his Thanksgiving had been. Since he’d dared to reopen the lines of communication with me, I feared that if I didn’t continue our conversation before we arrived at the Dolby Theater, a perfect opportunity to reconcile would be lost. I even worked up the nerve to look over my shoulder once, but he was busy doing something on a fancy new iPhone I’d never seen before. I chickened out.

That night, because Nelly drew the final Wild Card of the season, she was able to spare me, Robin, and Ian from expulsion. Tia was the only contestant remaining on Lenore’s team. Derrick, the last contestant on Jay Walk’s team, was voted off by default because he had the lowest score.
 
“Y’all are killing me!” Jay Walk exclaimed into his microphone. Jay’s team had suffered because of the Wild Card policy since the fifth week.

And of course… there was Elliott. Elliott had knocked me out of first place by several thousand votes. He and Laura were last contestants standing on Chase’s team; Jermaine had been voted off.

The weekly Expulsion Series had become torturous. Since we were inching closer to the season finale, the producers had started adding all kinds of dramatic music and anxiety-packed pauses to Danny’s weekly reveal of who would be sent home. My nerves were still raw from the experience even forty-five minutes later on the bus. During the hours that had passed since Elliott and I had traded words on our way to the theater earlier that afternoon, my urge to reestablish a connection with him hadn’t faded at all. He was sitting in the seat across from mine staring vacantly out his window.
 
“Sorry about Jermaine,” I offered as a conversation starter. Jermaine didn’t appear too upset about the end of his run on the show. A few rows of seats behind us, he animatedly talked on his cell phone to his family back at home.

Elliott glanced over his shoulder at Jermaine. “He’ll be fine. He’s already gotten an offer to star on Broadway in some revival
.
That’s better for him than winning because now he doesn’t have to stay in Los Angeles until the end of the season.”

“Yeah, but still,” I continued. “You guys seem pretty friendly. I’m sorry you won’t have him on your team anymore.”

Elliott shrugged but with only one shoulder and muttered, “None of these people are my friends.”

His bitterness hit me hard. Elliott had always had a grim outlook on the show, but now he seemed downright hateful. Sensing that it was probably not the best time to try to make amends with him, I turned back toward my window. It was late on a Friday night in Hollywood, and the city was bustling. Kids not much older than me were on their way to nightclubs behind the wheels of fancy sports cars with bass pumping loudly enough to make the windows on the mini-bus vibrate. I wondered if my life would be like that in a few years, cruising around in a hot car on my way to parties where paparazzi would assemble to snap my picture. Oddly, that night watching television with my parents at home seemed like a better option.

“I thought you said you and that guy Lee didn’t have any history.”

When Elliott spoke up again, I wasn’t sure if he was even talking to me because a few minutes had passed since his last remark, long enough that I’d thought our uncomfortable conversation was over. His comment made me wonder for a second what on earth Lee Yoon had to do with anything. Weeks had gone by since Lee’s birthday party. I was surprised that Elliott even remembered his name. “Maybe you should just tell me what your problem is instead of speaking in riddles,” I replied.

Elliott just shook his head.

The next morning when I checked my e-mail, I found out what had put Elliott in such a bad mood. I had an e-mail from Nicole containing a link to a blog post, and the subject of her message was:
OMG too funny.
Before the blog even loaded on the screen of my laptop, I felt like I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs, already suspecting what I was about to see. There, beneath a headline of,
“Look Away, Elliott! Allison’s New Guy!”
was a picture of me standing in my driveway, embracing Lee on Thanksgiving. I’d been so worried about the paparazzi outside my house snapping a picture of Taylor; it hadn’t occurred to me that a picture of me hugging Lee might be easily misconstrued.

Elliott was jealous.
Good,
I thought smugly.
He deserves to be.
 
If Elliott was going to welcome giggling girls into his hotel room, I didn’t see the harm in letting television audiences think that Lee Yoon had edged him out as the man in my life. That, at least, was the first falsehood presented by the show about me that worked in my favor.

Or, so I thought.

“Allison,” Tommy Harper purred in his office on Monday morning during the tenth week of the season. Ralph, the unit director who had interviewed me and my parents at our house back in September, leaned against Tommy’s desk sipping thoughtfully from an enormous thermos of coffee. “Since we’re getting very close to the end of this journey, we’d like to start digging a little deeper into who you are, as a person. Ralph, here, has some ideas for video segments we could shoot this week for Friday’s broadcast to share a little more about your life with the viewing audience.”

As if he was startled by Tommy’s cue to speak up, Ralph cleared his throat and uncrossed his legs to stand up a little straighter. “Ah. Yes. We were thinking that it might be kind of cool to explore your family’s dedication to health and fitness. You know, since you were raised vegetarian, and your mom teaches yoga.”

It seemed a little too good to be true that after nine weeks of Nelly’s ceaseless efforts to make me act like someone else, the producers would want to focus on the real me. However, I was cautiously optimistic. I agreed to meet with Ralph and his segment producer that afternoon, envisioning a light-hearted shoot at Levity with Mom. I was tempted to call her about it, knowing that she’d make a big fuss but secretly be thrilled.

However, Ralph’s team had already worked out all of the details for what they wanted to shoot, and it was far different from what I’d spent the day imagining. “We’re going to Cedars Sinai to have you meet with one of their leading experts in nutrition. He’s going to provide you with some tips on staying healthy.”

An impromptu trip to the hospital seemed a little fishy to me. Pictures of me and Lee were still burning up the blogosphere. There had to be some kind of connection between that and the producers’ desire to suggest that I needed attention from a doctor. It infuriated me to think that Elliott probably would have been smart enough to deduce what they were up to, but my best shot at figuring it out on my own was to nag Claire.

I found Claire in her office, reviewing video submissions from hopeful contestants in the UK on her laptop.
 
She was squinting her eyes behind her glasses, and when she noticed me approaching her, she stacked up a bunch of askew file folders on her desktop. “Why are they making me go to the hospital?” I asked. “I already know all about alternate sources of protein.”

Claire exhaled loudly to express her annoyance with me and general exasperation with her job. “They’re just building momentum for the season finale. They’re developing stories to create tension for all of you guys. Yours happens to be about the stress of the show impacting your health. Just go with it.”

“How are they building tension for Elliott?” I dared to ask with one eyebrow arched.

Claire took her glasses off and set them down on her desk. “I guess you’ll have to wait until Friday to find out if you’re not comfortable asking him yourself.” So, she’d seen the blog posts suggesting that Lee was my boyfriend, too. It was becoming abundantly clear that this proposed trip to the hospital was a mildly malicious punishment that the producers had concocted for me for not making their lives easier.

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 magnetic 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?”