Caught in the Crossfire

Oakley hadn’t always been okay. She may have told her therapist, her brother, her cat, and her one concerned neighbor that she was totally fine, that she and Zayn were just friends, and there was nothing she could have done to save him, so she was at peace with the whole thing. She couldn’t tell them the truth of what happened, obviously, but they’d all concluded it was a suicide. Which was, in a nutshell, kind of true, but reality was so much more complex than what could be contained in a nutshell.

Time passed, and Oakley allowed herself to mourn. She locked herself up in her apartment, on her couch, with a bottle of whatever alcohol she had available in the house, drinking herself to oblivion every night as she thought about Zayn kissing her that last time over and over. The way his lips had been soft and loving against hers, how he had refused to make it lustful and spoil the moment, even though it was more comfortable and familiar to her. She had thought then that it was like a goodbye kiss, but she hadn’t realized that he was going to be gone, and she was going to be stuck picking up the broken pieces left behind.

Slowly, as the weeks passed, Oakley got a hold of herself, helped along by late rent notices shoved in the space under her door. The drinking decreased until she only allowed herself to get drunk a couple of times a week, and her mind calmed down so she stopped replaying different scenes of Zayn until she cried herself dry.

Even then, she had bad days. On the really bad days, she’d take her alcohol to go and stand on the edge of the bridge where Zayn died. So many people walked by, unalarmed, not remembering what had happened months earlier. Or maybe not caring.

But Oakley remembered and cared. She would dwell on that final moment, think about different things she could have done to stop him. Would there have been time to do a flying tackle? To cut in front of him and take the bomb off the bridge herself? To disarm the bomb?

She couldn’t deal with the thoughts, and eventually, they dimmed away. She was sane enough to get a job waitressing so she wouldn’t get evicted, she stopped looking at the bottom of the bottles for the answer to what she was supposed to do in life with Zayn gone, and life went on.

But she still wasn’t making anything for herself. She was a waitress getting paid minimum wage who was barely hanging onto the apartment that was across the hall from where she and Zayn had first made their relationship real. Where he’d told her that he hated how she looked at all other guys because it meant she wasn’t looking at him, and where they’d had sex the first time.

Zayn had clearly been wrong. She wasn’t doing anything great. She wasn’t even doing anything decent. When Zayn died, she put her Sphere clothes away, vowing never to take them out again, for any purpose. So she wasn’t even saving people. She was just making them fat with the greasy food they sold at the restaurant.

And then, when she was walking down the street, out of nowhere, something smacked her square in the face. At first, Oakley simply composed herself and smoothed down her hair, pretending the embarrassing occurrence had never happened, but then she got curious. What if that piece of paper was the key to what she was supposed to be doing? What if it was a sign that she still wasn’t getting, even though it had quite literally hit her?

So Oakley abandoned all shame and chased after the little thing, crumpling it as she scooped it up into her hand. It declared that a director whose name sounded somewhat familiar to Oakley was holding open casting calls for his new film, and all roles were available.

Oakley had never been interested in acting very much, but it dawned on her how much she could do if she were a movie star. She’d have endless amounts of money to give to charity, she could build homes for people struck by tragedy or people who’d never had a home at all. She could do those great things that Zayn had promised she’d do. As long as she didn’t succumb to the insanity of stardom, anyway.

So Oakley auditioned, reading up on the movie online and printing a script off the website listed on the flyer. She interpreted her character in a way she hoped agreed with the director's vision, and she practiced her lines until she was saying them accidentally to the poor man who handed over her coffee on the morning of the big audition.

And she’d nailed it. She landed the part, and she became the newest It-Girl in England. It was nice to be talked about, of course, since Oakley had never been the kind of girl to shy away from any kind of attention, and people loved to chat about how sweet and spicy her personality was, how she never moved out of the humble apartment building she called home before her first movie, and how she gave half of all her earnings to charity.

Of course, some people thought she was crazy, giving away half of every salary from every movie and television show and commercial appearance to charity. She was throwing her money away, she heard them say in hushed tones when she walked by the hostile citizens. But she knew she was doing great things, and the confusion of other people wasn’t about to change that.

After all, she was sure Zayn was watching somewhere to make sure she stayed on track. And she’d have to get him someday in the future, when she finally kicked the bucket, for making that damn piece of paper collide with her face on a public street.