Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (34 page)

“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?”

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.