Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) by Caitlyn Duffy Page A

temporarily, even though I’d promised my parents I’d keep up with homework. My teachers had informed me that they’d e-mail me weekly assignments during my absence and wished me the best of luck.
    Over the weekend, I hung out at the Farmer’s Market at the Grove with my friends as if it were any other weekend. My friends grilled me about what the show was going to be like as we wolfed down enchiladas, and I was at a loss for what to tell them. Other than the schedule that Claire had supplied to my mom and the general rules for the show, which everyone in America knew, I had no idea what to expect. The truth of the matter was, I was getting nervous . Almost three weeks had passed since my audition. Even though I’d been singing in my room just like I always had, I was growing paranoid that maybe I wouldn’t be able to deliver the goods once the show started.
    We finally all gave in and bought tickets for the Sanborn Meyers movie that Lee wanted to see. In the darkness of a movie theater, I wondered what Elliott Mercer was doing that weekend and how he was preparing for the show.   Maybe he was boarded up in his bedroom, writing deep, soulful songs. It bothered me that I couldn’t exactly remember what he looked like, or the hue of his eyes.
    It was comforting to think that even if he were busy doing broody, artistic things, he would presumably be forced into a dance lesson on Monday morning, just like me.
    “Hey. Do you have a good cell phone?”
    At first I thought Elliott was trying to be ironic by asking me such an odd thing, but the expression on his face suggested that he was being completely serious. On Monday, we were the first to arrive in Miss Chlodowski’s classroom, and his question was posed so immediately that it seemed like he’d been thinking about it all day.
    “Uh, it’s an okay phone,” I said uneasily. It wasn’t the latest model or anything, but my phone was the one perk my mom provided to me as some kind of half-hearted consolation for our frequent moves. I think she erroneously thought that I used the phone to keep in touch with friends in towns we’d left behind, when in fact I primarily used it to entertain myself during moments when I was self-conscious about being alone (like during lunch time in the cafeteria).
    Elliott was intrigued. “Does it make videos?”
    I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t all phones make videos these days?”
    He pulled an ancient flip phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and exhibited it to me without any shame whatsoever. “Not all phones.”
    I took his phone from him and examined it with amusement. Its screen was cloudy and cracked, and the buttons on the key pad were sticky with grime. It had been manufactured at a time when the fanciest of phones had low quality cameras in them. Handling it made me antsy to wash my hands with bacterial soap. “How long have you had this thing?”
    “Forever,” he admitted. “Hey, whatever. It still works. It was my mom’s and she gave it to me when she got a free upgrade. It’s not like I call a lot of people.”
    I handed his relic back to him and assured him, “Mine shoots video. But, why? What kind of video do you need to make?”
    He slid his phone back into the pocket of his jeans and unzipped his guitar case. “I want to send in an audition for Center Stage! ”
    At this, I nearly burst out laughing because I thought for sure he was joking. The contestants on Center Stage! were always the cheesiest, most ambitious, all-American nerds. The female contestants were typically former beauty pageant queens, and most of the guys could dance like Michael Jackson. Occasionally bikini models with halfway decent voices would cross the stage, sometimes girls who were the stars of the choirs in their small-town Baptist churches. Every once in a while, someone who broke that mold would step out in front of the audience—a heavily tattooed mechanic, an overweight middle-aged mother of five—and even though