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

holidays, to singing along with the mariachi band whenever we have dinner at The Big Sombrero.”
    Behind Ralph, I saw my mom smile at that. I hadn’t sang at a restaurant in a while, but only because we’d stopped going to The Big Sombrero when Mom found out that they cooked their beans in lard. My parents had roared with laughter the first time I’d gotten out of my chair at the age of six and crooned along to Mexico Lindo y Querido, which I’d learned in my bilingual first grade class. The mariachi band had appreciated my bravado because they made a lot of tips when I sang along.
    “What would be your greatest fear as a contestant on the show?” Ralph continued.
    Gee, Ralph, that would probably have to be Chase Atwood finding out that I told his daughter off and hung up on her three months ago, I thought. “Um, well, probably I’d be most afraid of…”
    I became distinctly aware of an awful gagging noise behind me.   Buster, our terrible traitor of a cat, defector of our family, was stretched out across the top of the couch directly behind me, coughing up a hairball. Gack! Gack! He sat up, thrusting his tongue in and out of his mouth as he unabashedly tried to vomit the clump of hair stuck in his windpipe. I had no idea how long he’d been back there, as I hadn’t heard him jump up from the floor.
    “Buster, you are disgusting!” I reprimanded him sternly and turned back around to the crew. “My greatest fear about being on the show would be looking like an idiot when I’m trying to act all cool. Just like this.”
    Ralph and the cameraman shook with laughter. The guy holding the boom mic over my head was laughing so hard that the microphone pole was quivering. I tried to be a good sport about it, but my composure was ruined, and all I could do was be thankful that at least I wasn’t being broadcast live .
    “I’ll take care of this. Come on, Buster boy.” My dad swept in and carried Buster off, still yacking, down the hall.
    “Sorry. That cat thinks of himself as a star, so naturally he just had to get in front of the camera,” I grumbled.
    “No problem at all, that’s what we like to see,” Ralph assured me. “Just you in your regular daily life. Okay. So back to business. Do you think you have what it takes to win Center Stage!?”
    My eyes darted from my mom over to my dad, who had just returned from his little trot down the hall to lock Buster in a bedroom. “I think I have a great voice, and fierce determination. Whether or not that’s enough to win is up to America to decide.”
    I flashed a smile intended to endear myself to audiences at home, and just for a second, I felt like Katniss in The Hunger Games . Her fate depended on how many viewers liked watching her on a television show. I wasn't going to perish in the woods if audiences didn’t like me enough to vote for me to receive airlifts of bread, as was the case in Katniss’ considerably grimmer situation. But if I were to lose just because I was unlikeable ¸ that would have been way worse than losing because the other singers were better than me.
    “That was great, Allison. Just great,” Ralph assured me. The crew began wrapping up in the living room so that they could interview my parents out on the deck by the pool, and I panicked. Maybe I should have thought more about what my strategy would be on the show. The four contestants who’d made it to the semi-finals during the last season had all fallen into perfect stereotypes: Liza Martucci, the bombshell from the Bronx; Jax McBride, the handsome cowboy from Oklahoma; Becky Wylde, the punk rock princess from Seattle; and Curtis Wallace, the sexy R&B singer from Atlanta who could dance like Michael Jackson. All of them seemed to have had their acts together when it came to projecting an image. I was just a plain old American high school kid. In the two weeks that had passed since my audition, I should have been preparing some kind of persona instead of daydreaming about Nigel