Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (4 page)

Then, when Todd moved away to Connecticut for school in August, my parents let him sell his car and put the money toward his meal plan instead of turning the car over to me. So unfair. My parents told me they’d help me buy a car the first time I received Straight A’s on a report card; as
if
that was ever going to happen.

That night I laid in my bed fully clothed. I was too excited to change into pajamas because the act of preparing for bed seemed like too great of a commitment to falling asleep. It seemed like if I permitted myself to sleep, by morning when I woke up, the entire day’s events would have been erased and the opportunity to sing on
Center Stage!
would be no more real than the last hurried moments of a lucid dream playing out as my alarm clock buzzed. Through the wall separating my room from the hallway leading to the living room, I could hear my parents speaking in hushed voices but couldn’t make out any words.

I had company that night. Our rogue cat, Buster, made a rare appearance in my bedroom and was stretched out across the foot of my bed as if it were his own. For a few minutes, lying there in the dark, my thoughts drifted to Taylor’s deceased mom. Even though I thought Taylor’s mom was beautiful, I could see that she wasn’t exactly the greatest parent. Taylor never had a curfew, and my parents never let me sleep over at her house. Taylor had to lug her laundry two blocks over to the laundromat every Saturday; the washing machine at her house had been broken since we were in junior high and it wasn’t much of a priority for her mom to get it fixed. Even still, there were times when I wished my own mom was more like Taylor’s. I solemnly mourned Taylor’s mom that night, knowing with certainty that she would have been thrilled for me.

I was all too aware of the
click
made by
the lamp in the living room when my parents turned it off and walked past my room on the way to their own bedroom.
 
Somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles (was it Temecula? Chatsworth? I couldn’t remember), Elliott Mercer was probably also lying awake, staring up at his ceiling and wondering if he’d just started the next chapter of his life. I wasn’t sure why I had started thinking about Elliott Mercer so late at night, but he was the only other contestant whose audition I’d bothered to observe that afternoon. It irritated me that I hadn’t even taken a good look at him in the waiting room before I’d gone on stage.

If he’d taken a good look at
me
,
he probably wouldn’t have felt any more threatened by my appearance than I’d been by his before he heard me sing. Although no one liked pouting in front of the mirror more than me, on days when I was honest with myself, I knew I was cute but average-looking, at best. I took after my dad’s side of the family in that I had chubby cheeks and eyebrows that needed frequent plucking. My only stroke of luck in the looks department was inheriting cobalt blue eyes from my mom to match my brother’s eyes. Only, my brother’s big blue eyes made him look dreamy and poetic. Mine made me look sleepy and at times, stoned (or so a jerky senior guy at Pacific Valley School had told me).

In the morning, both of my parents were waiting for me at the kitchen table when I emerged from the bathroom, ready to face them for their verdict before school. My dad, the man least interested in nutrition in the United States of America (much to my mom’s chagrin), was polishing off his second toaster strudel and pressing a paper towel to his lips to clear away crumbs.

“Good morning,” I said in my most chipper voice, opening up the fridge. I couldn’t help but noticing the forms I had left on the counter after dinner the night before were on the table between them. From my vantage point near the fridge, I couldn’t tell if my parents had signed them yet or not.

“Did you sleep well?” Mom asked, calmly stirring artificial sweetener into her coffee.

“Yes,” I lied. There were bags under my eyes; I hadn’t fallen asleep until almost three in the morning and had awakened at dawn’s first light when the birds outside our house began chirping. I was so simultaneously happy, nervous, and full of dread that I thought I might sustain irreparable damage to my internal organs from having so many emotions crammed inside of me.

“I left the check for the landscapers on the credenza,” Dad told Mom, surely in an attempt to drive me completely insane by avoiding the topic he knew I wanted to discuss. “Don’t forget to ask Gary about that limb on the tree in the yard.”

I set the carton of almond milk down on the counter and sighed. “Oh, come on.” It was just like them to pretend as if there was nothing important going on; like that day was just any old Thursday.

“Allison,” Mom began, “your father and I discussed the show last night. If you are serious about participating, we are setting some rules and limits that you’re not particularly going to like. So if you can’t commit to these terms, then I will call the producers of the show and tell them that you’ll be auditioning again in two years after you’ve graduated from high school.”

My lungs swelled with an almost unbearable amount of air. They were going to let me do it. I knew already that their terms would be ridiculous and unrealistic, but that didn’t matter. They were going to sign the forms and send them back to En Fuego Productions. I’d step onto that stage and into the spotlight again. Nelly Fulsom would give me private singing lessons. People in America were going to know my name.

My mom kept talking, and her words melted down into an indecipherable sauce of noise. All I heard her say clearly was that she’d send the paperwork back to the production company. There were other things about keeping grades up, tidying my room, emptying the dishwasher, and cleaning up after Buster, but I could barely hear them over the deafening beating of my heart. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, thank you, Mom!” I squealed. Unable to control myself, I jigged my way across the kitchen in my rainbow-colored sneakers to throw my arms appreciatively around my mom’s neck.

“I mean it, Allison. If you give us any reason at all to believe that this isn’t a good idea, we’ll pull you out of the show faster than you can even realize what’s happening.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dad!” I exclaimed, switching from my mom to my dad, whom I kissed on the cheek as he folded up the newspaper on the table in front of him.

“Listen to your mother,” he instructed me.

Concentration was impossible that day at school. Instead of focusing on lessons in my classes, my brain kept drifting into rehearsals for songs I might use on the show. I wondered if my potential had crossed Nelly Fulsom’s mind at all since yesterday. Would she have a ton of ideas for my competition strategy when we next met? When would we next meet? Where would we meet? What would I wear? Would my mom indulge me in a new pair of jeans? Would the production company buy me a new wardrobe? I realized I knew painfully little about how the show would operate and what I’d be required to do. I wondered if my mom had sent everything over to Danny Fuego’s production company yet. I hoped she would pay close attention if she spoke with any of the producers about next steps.

At lunchtime, Nicole barraged me with questions
even though I hadn’t given her much of a reason to suspect anything was up.
 

“Where were you during Chemistry yesterday?” she asked when she joined me in line at the grill station where I was waiting for a veggie burger. During sophomore year, most of our classes had been together, but we were on very different schedules this year. Nicole was in Advanced Placement English, and was taking college preparation a lot more seriously than I was. I hadn’t felt particularly ambitious when I had chosen my junior year classes with Mrs. Gambaryan, my guidance counselor, despite her efforts to encourage me to challenge myself.

“Nurse’s office,” I lied. I wasn’t prepared to tell her about the show yet, at least not until I was positive that my mom had done as she’d said she would. I felt a buzzing in my handbag as we sat down at our table with the usual suspects—Michelle, Kaela, Colton, and Lee—and I withdrew my phone to see that I had a voicemail. Voicemail? No one ever left me voicemail. I rarely even spoke on my phone. Text messages were my primary method of communication. “Weird,” I muttered, and tapped the security code into my phone to unlock it so that I could listen to the message.

“Hi, Allison! This is Claire Robinson at En Fuego Productions. I just wanted to let you know that your mom e-mailed us your paperwork, and was hoping you could give me a call at your earliest convenience.” Claire’s voice was upbeat and musical.

I shuddered and replayed the message so that I could jot down the phone number on a napkin since it was different than the last phone number to appear in my recent calls list, suggesting that maybe Claire had called me from her direct extension at the office.
 
“I have to make a phone call,” I announced to my friends. As I rose from the table, I heard Colton croon, “Oooh-oooh-oooh” behind me, insinuating that my need to make a call was romance-related. As
if.
Just outside the entrance to the cafeteria, I paused near the row of vending machines and stuck one finger in my ear to block out the roar of lunchtime noise while I tapped the
CALL
button.

“En Fuego Productions. This is Claire.” A perky voice answered after one ring.

“Hi, Claire. It’s Allison Burch, from the auditions yesterday,” I said nervously.

“Allison! Yes, how are you?” Claire asked.

“I’m okay.”

“That’s great. Everyone’s still buzzing with excitement around here about your audition,” Claire said, making my heart soar with hope. “We think you’re going to be a big star! But first, there are few things that I need to discuss with you that we hadn’t foreseen when we taped your spot yesterday.”

I knew what was coming. They knew about my real age, obviously, since my mom had no doubt filled in the correct information on my paperwork. When I had skimmed the documentation that Claire had given me, there were warnings about parental guardians of people under the age of eighteen all over them. But surely with my mom’s permission, I’d be allowed to compete.

“Typically we require contestants under the age of eighteen to gain their parents’ permission to participate on the show for a variety of legal reasons,” Claire said, sounding like she was scolding me a little. “It looks like on your initial application, your year of birth was misinterpreted, and our casting team thought you had already had your eighteenth birthday.”

I blushed, remembering how I had intentionally smudged the year of my birth date on my application to make it more difficult to read. I hadn’t technically
lied,
but had simply obscured the truth a little with my fingertip.

“Oh,” I said dully. “I don’t think I knew that when I sent in my audition. But... the application said between sixteen and twenty-four. I already tried out. Nelly chose me for her team.”

“Yes, yes,” Claire agreed. “The producers are thrilled with you, and as it turns out, another one of our contestants who’s made the cut this season is also under the age of eighteen, but he’ll be having his eighteenth birthday before the end of the season. And now that your parents have consented, we just have to work through the details of how you’ll be able to accommodate the taping schedule.”

Relief. I was so overjoyed by this news that I leaned against the cool cement wall of the hallway to keep myself from falling over. “That’s awesome.”

“So, here’s the issue. Your mom tells me that you’re a junior in high school.”

I couldn’t exactly lie about that since I was standing inside of my high school at that very moment.
 
“Uh, yeah,” I admitted.

“We have very strict confidentiality rules for any contestant participating on the show. All forty of the contestants selected each season are brought to Los Angeles, and any contestants who remain on the show after the first four weeks—our twenty-four finalists—are required to live in accommodations provided by the production company. This is entirely for ratings, you see. We can’t have any contestants talking to the media or leaking show secrets before the season finale.”

I tried to put all the pieces together. I’d have to live in a hotel? Would my parents be permitted to come with me? That didn’t make sense—the show aired live every week. Who’d have time to talk to the media? I responded with a dull, “Oh.”

“What I’m getting at, here, is that you’d inevitably have to miss a fair amount of school if you were to become one of our finalists. Now, of course, even though you had a strong audition, there are no guarantees, but let’s just say you made it past the first four rounds of expulsion. You’d probably have to miss about two months of classes,” Claire explained. “Even if the paparazzi were to see you entering and leaving your school every day after you were voted off, you’d still be under contract not to provide them with any information about the show, and they can be very pushy. It’s a risk we couldn’t take.”