Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) (24 page)

“Hey,” the contestant grunted in greeting. Neither of us replied. I waited until we heard him pass through the door on the fourth floor above us before I spoke.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Rules were rules. I didn’t realize until we were arguing in that stairwell just how badly I still wanted to win. My feelings about Elliott complicated everything, but I yearned for fame. I wanted my picture on the cover of
Expose Magazine
. I wanted to tour with All or Nothing. I was in grave danger of losing my shot at those things on Friday night.

“This whole thing is a mind game,” Elliott said simply with a shrug, his words laced with bitterness. “I mean, come on Allison. Do you think it’s any coincidence that I auditioned after you?”

I was dumbstruck. Of course it was a coincidence. We were all assigned numbers at the audition on that Wednesday in September at the Dolby Theater, and herded into the waiting area… weren’t we?

“Don’t you think they queued us up with a strategy based on our audition tapes? They taped us one after the other because they knew as soon as they listened to our submissions that we were the cream of the crop. They even made special accommodations so that we could both compete even though we lied about our ages. They were setting us up since before either of us even got our invitations to audition in Hollywood.
We
are the season finale. You and me.”

Before I could even reply, he impulsively pulled me close, and greedily kissed me on the mouth.
 
His tongue found mine and for a moment the stairwell was perfectly quiet as we both stopped being shy and gave into how much we liked each other. There were no parents watching through a living room window, no fans snapping pictures with their mobile phones. It was a real, passionate, grown-up kiss. I was stupefied and couldn’t even find words once he stepped back, caught his breath, and waggled his finger to indicate the space between our bodies.
“This
is the only thing on the show that’s real. The rest of it all is make-believe.”

He turned and hopped up two steps, and then hesitated to say, “All these weeks I’ve been kind of wondering how we could get through this together, but Chase was right. Eventually it’s going to come down to one of us, and if you can’t even see that I’m trying to help you do whatever it takes to stay on the show, then I guess that time is now.”

His footsteps echoed as he dashed up the remaining three flights to the seventh floor in his Jack Purcells. I leaned against the cool cinderblock wall of the stairwell trying to figure out what had just happened. I could still taste him on my lips, and I was dizzy from the force with which he had kissed me. So. Elliott wanted to keep me around on the show badly enough to create a scandal that was certain to make my parents and kids at my school flip out, or so he said. And then something clicked in my head and everything made sense.

Elliott had pulled the fire alarm while I’d slept.

“Maybe he’s just… you know. Peeta Mellark-ing you.”

Lee’s candid hypothesis almost made me choke on a sweet potato fry as we both ate veggie burgers in my hotel suite Wednesday night

“Lee,” I said after recovering, “You know an awful lot about
The Hunger Games
for a dude.”

“I saw the movie,” Lee claimed in self-defense. “You know how I am about film adaptations. It’s grossed over four hundred million dollars. Look, everyone loves a love story, Allison.”

Lee had a point. Maybe Elliott didn’t even like me. But he must have known that having a romance with another contestant—especially one that the audience supported—would better his odds if his grip on first place were ever in jeopardy. Fans sure did love a romance, and in the twenty-four hours, bloggers had not wasted any time in posting pictures of me and Elliott standing on his hotel room balcony during the fake fire emergency. There were two voicemails that I was ignoring from my mother on my cell phone. I already had an unpleasant suspicion about why she’d left them.

The way Elliott had kissed me in the stairwell sure hadn’t felt like an act. There was no point denying it: he was probably going to win
Center Stage!
with or without the world believing that we were in love. I liked to believe that if I could just manage to follow Marlene’s instructions and survive the next Expulsion Series, I’d pose a real threat to him… but I wasn’t sure. He had a lot of girls texting in votes for him, and it was pretty hard to dissuade fan-girls once they’d set their hearts on a cute boy.

So if he didn’t need the benefit of the storybook romance to win the show, then why had he bothered pursuing me? Elliott didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d waste his time on anything he didn’t truly care about.

“I don’t know,” I murmured. “I
know
he wants to win, but I don’t think he needs me to do that.”

“Well,” Lee said, using a more cautious tone, “Maybe, more specifically, he needs for you
not
to win.”

“What do you mean?”

Lee lifted the bun off his burger and peeled away the slimy pickle, which he banished to one side of his paper plate.
 
“Maybe he wants you to fall in love with him so that you
let
him win.”

I squinted my eyes at Lee. “You mean, you think he’d want me intentionally to lose?”

“Think about it. Who, other than him, has a shot at winning? Maybe that chick Robin with the skimpy outfits, but more girls than guys watch the show, and they’ll be more likely to vote for Elliott. Besides, you’re the contestant who girls our age can relate to. I mean, have you even looked at the show’s demographics? Seventy percent of the viewing audience is under the age of twenty-one.”

I folded my arms over my chest, wondering how Lee Yoon had ever gotten to be so smart. “Would any guy our age go to all that trouble just to win a contest?” I wondered out loud.

Lee stated, “It’s not like it’s, you know,
awful
for him to hold hands and kiss a cute girl. He might even think he can be with you
and
use you to win. Like having his veggie burger and eating it, too.” He chomped into his burger for emphasis.

We worked on my strategy for overthrowing Christa until it was almost Lee’s curfew. The previous afternoon, when Nelly had joined me and Christa for twenty minutes to supervise our progress on the duet, she had suggested that we add a little Country flavor to our performance. She'd said it would be cute to put a new spin on the song. I had pretended to be bummed out by that direction, but secretly, I applauded myself. For once, I had anticipated Nelly’s next move, and with Lee’s help, I’d be pitching her a curveball that she’d never, ever in a million years expect.

I tossed and turned that night, thinking about Elliott. He’d avoided the bus and ignored me all day. What did I really know about him, anyway? That he came from a broken home, that he and his mom were financially struggling, that he didn’t enjoy high school and probably hadn’t given college much consideration. If someone could deserve to win simply by not having many other shots at happiness in life, then Elliott deserved to win the grand prize on
Center Stage!
.

However, the criteria for winning didn’t have anything to do with personal hardship or even desire. The criteria were talent and votes from the at-home audience. Already, and a little shamefully, I could see Lee’s point. One pleading look from those intense turquoise eyes, and I might just have considered throwing the contest for Elliott. Something hardened inside of me. It was that burning hot coal in the pit of my stomach that I’d first felt the night before my audition in Hollywood. I wanted to
win.

Without even entertaining the idea of talking things over with Elliott, I decided that if winning were truly important to me, I couldn’t continue to have any contact with him. I was reminded of advice my mom had given me back in first grade when my crush at the time, Ryan McMahon, had given a Valentine to another girl. She’d said, “There are more fish in the sea.” I was simply going to have to find myself another fish one day. It was as easy as that.

But as I drifted off to sleep, my determination faded. Sure, there were more fish in the sea. But did any of them have turquoise eyes, messy heads of hair, and voices that made every molecule in my body fizz like a shaken can of soda?

On Friday evening, I sat in the Group 2 holding room on the couch listening to a meditation mix of jungle noises that Mom had downloaded for me and reading a book about werewolves. Or perhaps closer to the truth, I was trying to make it
look
like I was doing both of those things. In actuality I was sweating, watching the other contestants in my group prepare for their performances, and silently cursing the infernal, stupid costume I’d been forced to wear. Robin, not surprisingly, was using the Halloween costume element of the show to her advantage. She and Ian were both dressed as angels. In Robin's version of heaven, angels wore white sequined bikinis and platform high heels.

I was more nervous than I’d ever been before taking the stage. Christa gave me a dirty look as she huffed steam at one of the dressing tables. I’d been sipping hot green tea and visiting the bathroom ever since we’d arrived at the theater, terrified about the plot that Lee and I had hatched. Even though it was almost time to step into the spotlight with Christa, I still wasn’t positive I’d have the nerve to go through with my big plan. I also wasn't sure that my voice would behave and hit the kind of insane note I was going to reach for when the moment arrived.

Adding to my anxiety was the rather strategic Secret Suite interview I’d taped the day before. It hadn’t been posted to the show’s website yet, which made me suspect strongly that the producers were going to edit it into the broadcast.

“Allison and Christa?”

Evil Rob arrived to fetch us after the show’s second commercial break. I let Christa take the lead as we followed him down the hallway. She fastened her cowgirl hat, which hung on a cord around her neck, and the silver spurs on her boots clanged as she walked. My knees felt wobbly, my fingers were icy, and I barely felt Marlene’s pat on my shoulder as I passed her on my way backstage.
 
The commercial break drew to a close and the cheesy
Center Stage!
intro music blasted throughout the theater on overhead speakers. As Danny Fuego announced the next duet, I shuddered. It would be
“Texas Highways,”
performed by Elliott Mercer and Jermaine Frasier. When Elliott stepped into the spotlight from the other side of the stage, he was carrying an
acoustic guitar.

So far, no other contestants had insisted on playing their own musical instruments during the competition, but there he was, nodding over his shoulder at the house band as the applause died down. The lights lowered with one spotlight shining on him and Jermaine. He’d plugged his guitar into a massive amplifier, and he strummed the simple chords of the beloved song’s introduction. No wonder Elliott had been pleased about the song he and Jermaine had been assigned; it served as an opportunity for him to showcase his talent. The audience erupted into wolf whistles and wild applause.

Elliott and Jermaine were both dressed like zombie hillbillies. Jermaine began the song, and when Elliott chimed in, providing harmony with his gravelly voice, a hush fell over the audience. Even in the darkness, I could see Chase Atwood sitting at the coaches’ table, clapping along and beaming like a proud father. My heart twisted into a knot at the thought of intentionally avoiding Elliott for the next few weeks. A uncomfortable reaction of desire and intimidation overtook me as I watched him. He looked out over the audience and I yearned to see a flash of his eyes.

His excellence unwound what little confidence I’d had when I’d left the Group 2 holding room. It just wasn’t fair that Elliott got to perform from the heart whenever it was his turn, and I always had to spend my time on stage trying to outfox Nelly.
 
I cracked my knuckles. I bit my lower lip. I sincerely hoped with all my might that what I had planned for Christa would be well-received by all of America. She quietly hummed beside me to keep her vocal chords warmed up.

Before we stepped onto the stage after Danny Fuego announced our song, the production assistant standing next to us motioned for us to wait. My Secret Suite video diary for the week was projected onto the huge screen on stage. I held my breath, a little horrified, as it began to play and hoped that Elliott was being directed back down the hallway toward his group’s prep room, out of earshot. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the producers had structured the show’s format so that our duets were separated by my video confession. Elliott had been absolutely right: they were playing us.

“The whole country wants to know: are you and Elliott an item?” I heard my voice ask in the video footage that everyone in the whole theater was watching. It had been the question waiting for me in the envelope when I’d entered the Secret Suite alone, and I’d been expecting it. The answer I provided had been carefully crafted by me and Lee on Wednesday night. “I don’t know,” I’d told the camera with my most innocent, earnest face. “Have you ever really liked a boy, like, dreamt about him and wanted him to like you back, but had no idea how he felt about you?”

And then, to my great surprise, the producers hadn’t cut my footage where I thought they would. I continued, “I really like Elliott. But he’s my competition, and I don’t think a girl should step back and let a boy grab the prize without making him sweat a little.”

I didn’t have to see the screen to know what happened next; I had even
practiced
winking with Lee to make sure it would look okay on camera.

“Ugh,” Christa mumbled under her breath.

The production assistant nodded at us to advance onto the stage. Stomping and whistles greeted us. Adrenaline pumped through me as I grabbed my mic and waited for Christa to belt out her first few lyrics. I was energized with both terror and desire to hear the audience’s reaction to my big surprise. Maybe Elliott thought that seeming like a hopeless romantic would earn him favor with audiences, but young female viewers wouldn’t vote for the girl who was enjoying an on-camera romance with the boy they thought was cute. Their envy wouldn’t get me anywhere; I needed their admiration.

Once the audience recognized the song we were performing was a countrified version of the Leeza and Tawny hit, they clapped along with the beat. I chimed in for the first chorus, “Get your hands, keep your hands, off my man!”

I waited patiently for the fiddler to play his little solo (Nelly had insisted on a fiddle), and then I fired up the engine in my throat. As Lee and I had discussed, I launched into my best Dolly Parton impression. Almost immediately, the audience realized that I was mimicking the Country legend’s high-pitched, sweet timbre and broke into nuclear applause. Lee hadn’t any clue which song I’d be performing that night, only that I needed his opinion on which female Country Western star I could best copycat.
 
I hadn’t changed my voice at all while practicing with Christa and Nelly. Up until that moment, I’d had to trust Lee’s opinion that my impression was adequate to justify risking the Expulsion Series.

Thanks to my training with Marlene, I didn’t have to worry about retaining volume or staying on key even though I was doing something unnatural with my voice. Down below the edge of the stage, a look of abject horror formed on Nelly’s face. She was the one who’d insisted on a Country Western interpretation of the duet, and I was serving her up one with rhinestones on top. The studio audience was going ballistic.