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

without fail those rarities would have astonishingly good voices, they’d be voted off simply because audiences at home always texted in more votes for the bikini models and dimpled guys with fierce moves.
    “Elliott,” I said in all seriousness, “Why in the world would you want to audition for Center Stage! ?That show is so gimmicky.”
    “Because I could win it,” he said with such utter confidence that he completely convinced me. Elliott, once I thought about it, could win it. The rest of America didn’t know how socially awkward he was. If he appeared on television screens and just sang, everyone would think exactly what I thought when I first laid eyes on him: that he had serious potential. “At least,” he backtracked with a little more modesty, “I think I could get on the show. I could probably do okay.”
    I plugged my electric guitar into my own tiny portable amp. “I think you’re right. I think you could at least get on the televised auditions. You can shoot your audition on my phone if you want. When is it due?”
    “Tomorrow,” he said. “I wish I’d known about it sooner but I don’t really watch TV much. I have to email in my submission before six o’clock tomorrow night. You should submit one, too.”
    “Me?” I choked. “Oh, hell no. I couldn’t be on television.”
    “Sure you could,” Elliott insisted. “You’d have just as good a shot as me. Your voice is so-so but it might get better with practice.”
    I bit my lower lip. Elliott’s brutal honesty was something I’d not quite gotten used to yet. I realized that he wasn’t intentionally being cruel, but also that for whatever strange reason, he was unable to understand how just blurting out his unfiltered opinion sometimes wasn’t kind. Or normal. I had never considered myself to be much of a singer, so I shouldn’t have been offended, but still.
    “But you’re super pretty, and that counts a lot,” he added, making me instantly forgive him for slighting my vocal abilities. Melissa burst into the room, bringing an abrupt end to what might have been Elliott’s feeble attempt to flirt with me, as well as our discussion about Center Stage!
    Elliott and I lingered in the hallway after practice as Miss Chlodowski locked up the classroom behind us. Melissa rushed off down the hall to the parking lot, where the brand new sparkling Audi she’d gotten for her seventeenth birthday was waiting for her. Even in the brief period of time I’d had Melissa in my lifetime, I’d quickly learned that her favorite topic of conversation was the very expensive gifts she often received from her father, who had recently divorced her mother.
    “Can we go to your house to shoot the audition?” Elliott asked. “I already called in sick to work.” That had been rather presumptuous of him, but that was kind of his style.
    On the drive to my house in Elliott’s unbelievably crappy Ford Fiesta, I learned that he bagged groceries six days a week at the giant Von’s supermarket on the outskirts of town. I didn’t press him for details as to why, at seventeen, he worked almost forty hours a week. Having been raised by my middle-class grandparents and then living with my penny-pinching Spartan mother, I already knew all too well that not everyone was as lucky as Melissa Feldman, being given Louis Vuitton handbags and Audis. His explanation about his job as well as the state of his car, which was literally held together by Gorilla Tape and hope, completely relieved me of shame about my own tiny house in one of the town’s few not-so-fancy neighborhoods. I didn’t feel any need to impress Elliott, or perhaps more accurately, I sensed that even if I tried to impress him, he would have been oblivious.
    “Wow, this is a nice house,” he said as we pulled into my driveway. There wasn’t anything I would have considered nice about it, but it was a decent two-bedroom house. We had a freshly mowed lawn, since our landlord’s son came over every