Trouvaille

Chapter 4

Later, after everything had gone back to a semblance of normal, Nikki would try to remember those days, but all she remembered was seeing her phone ring and the vivid, sharp focus the world had come into afterwards. She had always thought that when the world came crashing down on you, everything would be muted out, but that was not what happened. The entire world came crashing into sharp focus, and she was aware of everything, of every bad thing that could happen, and the bad thing that had already happened, it felt like she was holding up the entire universe on her shoulders.

Nikki was shooting for her new film, where she played a bulimic girl- it was a mentally exhausting role and today, they had been shooting a particularly tiring scene, where the girl's mother walked in on her making herself puke. It was a very emotional scene, with lots of screaming and crying, and the director was not content until both Nikki and Jennifer Garner, who played her mother, were showing the rawest of their emotions. By the time they were done, Nikki's eyes felt like they had swollen up to 10 times its size and her head hurt from all the screaming. She headed to her trailer to get some rest before the afternoon's scene- which, thankfully, would wrap up the shooting for a while.

Nikki grabbed her phone- only to see that Tom was calling her. Before she could pick up, the call went to a missed call, and she saw that she had around 2 missed calls from Tom and 16 missed calls from an unknown number . Feeling a prick of anxiety in her stomach, she called back, only to get the signal that it was busy. Two minutes later, the unknown number called back and Nikki picked up the phone only to hear a woman's voice asking her if she was Nikki.

'Yes,' Nikki replied, now feeling really dreadful.

' Thomas Holland has been in an accident , and you're listed as his emergency contact,' the woman on the other end of the line said, 'Can you make it to the hospital?'

Nikki dropped her phone, picked it up, jumped out of her trailer and forgot how to function. It was Jennifer who saw her standing, tears streaming down her face, helplessly jabbing at her phone to bring up the Uber App, who bundled Nikki into a cab to the hospital and promised to tell her director what had happened. She also made Nikki promise to call someone she knew for backup so that she wouldn't be alone at the hospital. Sitting in the cab, Nikki couldn't sit still, and she was distinctly aware of everything around her - the horns blaring, the cab driving tapping away on his

phone as the cab idled in traffic, the kid in the car next to them blowing a bubble and popping, the fact that her best friend could be dead. Nikki brought up Calum's contact on her phone and composed a text, which she then deleted when she remembered that they had just released an album and were completely occupied with interviews and performances promoting the show. Nikki tapped her feet and desperately wished that everything was a blur like it was supposed to

be.

Decades Later, they reached the hospital and Nikki rushed to the Emergency. A couple of people from the Spiderman crew were there, along with Jacob Batalon. Jacob told Nikki about how it happened- Tom had been insistent on doing his own stunts this movie, and he was doing a good job at it. Today, there had been a scene involving him landing on top of a car- the car had slipped out of control and skidded across the set, sending Tom flying and hitting a wall, landing on the ground with a loud crack, Jacob said. They didn't know yet what the crack had been from, Tom was unconscious and it had been about an hour since they'd been in surgery.

Nikki paced back and forth, still acutely aware of everything- two of the crew members talking about how the accident happened, Jacob kicking the table in front of him rhythmically, some girls at the other end of the corridor whispering about her and Jacob, the buzzing sound from inside the surgery theatre, the tip- tapping- Nikki felt like she could hear every sound that was being made inside the theatre. She got up from her chair, and paced across the corridor, trying to tune out of the noises around her.