Things go quickly after Lance's mother says yes. They fly to Orlando on a Wednesday, he misses an American Lit test and his mother writes him a note. "I don't suppose we can say we're going to see a child star's stalker mother, can I?" she says and laughs shortly. She tells the school they have a family emergency.

They fly back on a Friday, with a freshly inked contract in Lance's mother's purse and a promise that Lance will be back on Monday and ready to start rehearsing. Two days to say goodbye and pack up and leave everything behind and it's still completely surreal to Lance, he can't quite believe that he won't be around to present his chemistry project on Tuesday and that he won't be at show choir practice Wednesday afternoon. He thinks these four guys are a little bit nuts, but he never imagined that he'd be able to make a living singing. He's still not sure but he's willing to try until the money runs out. Just until then. He still thinks he'll be back before the school year is over.

So he packs clothes, mostly, and leaves lots of stuff behind. He brings his Discman but only six of his CDs, as many as he might bring on a family car trip. He brings three that he likes and three that he thinks the other guys will like because Garth, Reba, Tim McGraw, they don't make him a dumb hick. He doesn't drive a pick-up truck with a confederate flag draped in the back window to school. But just in case, he brings Nevermind and CrazySexyCool. He brings the Immaculate Collection, too, because he thinks that if there's any group of guys who will be cool with a guy who owns a copy of the Immaculate Collection, it'll be a group of guys who spend sixteen hours a day in dance rehearsal.

He doesn't bring his half-finished application for student body president. Before the call and everything, he was still only thinking about running. Stuff like that was always a popularity contest. This is a different kind of popularity contest, with fewer voters and much higher stakes.

He brings the button-up silk shirt he bought with a gift certificate from his grandmother to Marshall Fields at Christmas. The salesman winked at him and said, "Here, try this, honey, it matches your eyes," and so Lance bought it but he's been too embarrassed to wear it out in public.

He leaves the four magazines that he paid some stranger to buy when he was on a show choir competition in Tennessee. Because just like Lance knows to hide them between his mattress and the box spring in his room at home, he knows there might not be such a good hiding place in the house Mr. Pearlman rented for them. If Lance wants to stay in Orlando long enough to wish he'd brought more than six CDs, he'll have to leave the rest behind.