GIRL, UNPLUGGED
YA Novel Chapter 7 | 17 Minute Read
This is Chapter 7 of a YA novel. To see where the story began, check out the GIRL, UNPLUGGED table of contents post, or head to the GIRL, UNPLUGGED section of the Story Hoarder Substack page to see all the chapters.
This chapter is a 17 minute read.
CHAPTER 7: Disconnection
Heading back to the museum was awkward. Murph didn’t “catch the rainbow.” He was missing a green dragon, and he wasn’t happy about it. Or maybe he wasn’t happy about Russ, I wasn’t sure. I also wasn’t sure how to address it. He wasn’t talking, and Amy kept texting me about the picture of me and Russ that Russ had evidently posted somewhere on the Internet. The awkward silences I feared had finally fallen upon us. I ended the text and tried to break the curse.
“I’m going to get a bottle of water before we head back,” I said as we approached the cart we bought our hot pretzels from earlier. The shared lunch seemed so far away. Murph stood quietly by my side as we waited. That’s when I noticed Amy never texted me back.
I guess she didn’t have to, I wrote, “With CD. Talk l8r?” Maybe she thought not responding was response enough. But I put a question mark there. A question mark means I’m asking something, all texting etiquette demands a response. It was also unlike Amy to leave a text-versation like that. I was due a glib remark, a gif, or at the very least an eye rolling emoji! She was curious and I left her hanging — about a picture of me with a boy… a boy that wasn’t Matthew Murphy! As I walked up to the line at the hot dog cart I dug my phone back out of my pocket to see if maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t felt a buzz. That’s when I discovered that I couldn't get any service.
Daria was in front of me muttering over her own screen, “What the hell? I can’t post the castle clips.” I tried to remember if I had any connectivity issues by the cart earlier.
"You can't live without that thing, huh?" Murph said, pointing to my phone as I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans, distracted by the cacophony of the traffic's blaring horns on the street behind us. We had plenty of traffic in Staten Island, but nothing quite so noisy, or animated. The street was pretty far off, but I was pretty sure I saw some people getting out of their cars yelling at each other.
"Huh? No – I-I mean yes! I think I could if I had to," I said defensively. That’s when I heard the loud alert beeps from phones of people passing by us in the park.
“I don’t think I could live without my phone,” Daria interjected. “No apologies from me, either,” she added, still checking for service. “YouTube has changed my life.” Daria had a real reason to be incessantly connected — she was earning money doing so.
“I guess so,” Murph said. Then he turned to me and said, “I’m gonna sit down while you wait.” He climbed up onto one of the giant rocks off the path. He sat down and immediately pulled out his sketchpad. Murph could criticize my phone usage all he wanted, he had his own crutch.
“Sounds like an Amber Alert or something,” Rose said, who was standing just ahead of Daria. “You guys getting anything yet?”
I checked again and still saw nothing coming through.
Rose shook her head in the direction of Murph and said, “You know, he can talk all he wants, but I wouldn’t be on this trip without my phone and my tablet. There would be no point.”
“Keeping me company would be the point!” Daria said.
“I can do that at home,” Rose answered leaning her head on Daria’s shoulder looking a bit cartoonish.
“You feeling okay?” Daria asked her. These two were a lot closer than I thought.
“Little swishy, but maybe it’s just the long day. You know this is the most excitement I’ve seen since my last ER visit in August! I’ll take it slow this afternoon.” Rose pulled the strings on her hood a little tighter. It wasn’t the least bit chilly out. She turned to the cart attendant and ordered two bottles of water and two sports drinks. The girl must have been extremely thirsty.
“She’s not kidding about her tech usage,” Daria said to me. “We take so much for granted — our sight, our ability to get around, the reliability of our own body. Being with Rose has taught me so much about that stuff, you know?”
I didn’t know, but I didn’t have time to ask because Rose was done and Daria was ordering. While she did so I watched Rose. She stepped to the side of the cart, loaded her backpack up with three of her drinks and stuffed her money in one of the pockets. Then she turned on the flashlight on her phone to look around inside her backpack finally pulling out a long, hot pink box with a ton of flaps on it. She turned the light off, but kept the phone on the box, opening the camera app and immediately zooming the screen. Her thumb traced along the flaps, opened one and dumped out three enormous pills into her palm. She looked at the pills through the camera screen while she turned them over in her palm with her thumb counting them. Finally she seemed satisfied by what she found there, so she popped all three in her mouth following them up with a long drink from the bottle of water she purchased. She closed up the pink box, shut off her phone, and put everything back into her backpack.
“You good?” Daria asked her as she waited for her change.
Rose gave her a thumbs up and then swung her bag over her shoulder. “But I did put my phone away.”
Daria looped her arm around Rose’s and asked, “Need a guide?”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said as she placed her hand over Daria’s.
Daria turned to me and said, “See you guys inside!”
“Well… I might not be able to see you, but –”
Daria jabbed Rose in the side. “Don’t joke around like that!” They both laughed, already immersed in each other, no longer in a conversation with me.
As I waited for the cart attendant to dig out a bottle of water for me I wondered what Daria had meant by taking things for granted. Was Rose blind? I thought about how the conversation all started, with Murph questioning my phone usage. I was just trying to talk to my friend. I wasn’t making money like Daria. I wasn’t physically dependent on the technology like it seemed Rose was. I was just… what? Pathetic?
I walked over to the base of the rock Murph was on. “I’m ready,” I said. Murph put his sketchbook away, reached down and grabbed my hand, pulling me up to sit next to him.
"What are you doing?” I said. “We’re going to be late.”
"I just want to ask you something,” he said. "I see you typing away all the time, eyes on your screen, your mind on who knows what. You’re freaking out the second you lose connection — I mean… don't you just want to be here?"
I guess I had insulted him somehow. Was this a date? I tried to figure out if what I had done was rude. If what I had done was weird, or obsessive, or any different from anyone else on this trip. Before I could respond, or ask for clarification, he went on and took my breath away.
"Blinding screens — blazing thumbs — emoticons showing — we've gone numb," he said.
I gaped. That was the beginning of one of my poems. One of my very old poems.
Had he memorized it?
"The screams of nothing — the loudness of the mundane — I sit back and see — how this world's insane.” He knew even more! He stopped and looked at me, "Didn't you write that?"
"Yes," I said, uncomfortable with my words exposed.
"Did you mean it?" he asked.
"Of course..." I didn't know what to say. How could I begin to explain to him that my one friend in the whole world was torn away from me and the only means of communicating with her was digitally? Would he understand that? Would anyone? I felt childish in my need for connecting to Amy. I thought about all of the people on this trip with me. Couldn't they be enough? Then I thought about Talia’s Tales and looked down at Murph’s bag sitting beside him. Why couldn’t he, of all people, understand the importance of a different kind of expression — one that doesn’t always happen “here.” Murph had spent so much of this trip pouring his soul into his sketchpad and for that he was deemed an artist, but if I do the same with a phone instead of pen and paper I’m suddenly deemed a disconnected soul?
"Whatever." He cut off my thoughts with a bit more of an attitude than he had any right to. That pissed me off — which is saying something.
I found my voice. ”What do you mean, 'Whatever’?" I asked, trying to suppress a wave of annoyance. "You've had your sketchbook and your phone out more on this trip than I have!"
"I was taking and sketching pictures," he retorted.
"I don't get the difference, Matt. It’s not like you were even talking to me the whole walk over here. Is it so wrong that I was connecting with someone else? Plus — just now, when you made your little comment — I didn't even begin to do anything on my phone. There's no service here," I said, flustered. I don't like confrontation, but I felt like he was attacking me for no reason.
"The difference is that you live there and I live here.” He patted the gray stone in between us.
That hurt me more than I wanted to admit. "I do not live there."
Is that what everyone thought of me?
“Natalie, honestly, when was the last time you talked to anyone in this class before that train ride this morning?” He asked it so softly he must have known how much it would sting.
"I don't know," I lied.
It was with Amy.
Amy talked to everyone and, since I was usually with her, I would get looped into the conversations. I didn't know how she did that. I didn't know how to do it on my own.
"And how often do you write back to people on Talia’s Tales?" He was looking right in my eyes, with pity. I hated it.
I stood up, "That's different."
"Maybe it is," he said, grabbing my arm, "but that's my point. I know how active you are online. I follow you."
"Says the guy who 'lives here'," I said, pointing to our rock.
"Sit down," he said, raising his eyebrows, "Please?" I sat down, wondering what would come next.
"I do live here," he said with a smile, "I've been out there trying to find you."
"What?" I looked around and realized we were all alone. There was no one left on line at the hot dog cart. Our classmates had probably all made their way back to the museum by now. Murph had no audience but me.
“Natalie Turner, I like you, but you are hard as hell to talk to," he said looking down at the space between us. I was sure I was hallucinating the entire thing. Then my butt buzzed. Verrt. And buzzed again. Verrt.
And again. Verrt.
And then came the long, loud alert buzz. Verrt Verrt Verrrrrrrrrrt. There was no ignoring all of that.
"What the hell?" Murph said as he grabbed his own phone. "Bad timing, huh?" He laughed.
"Me too," I said, grabbing my phone, happy to have a distraction from a situation I had no idea how to handle.
It was a text-plosion, which was especially weird, since I had no reception just a couple of minutes ago. First two texts were from Rog and Amy, both saying they had a blackout in their school. Then there were three different texts from Notify NYC — a service I signed up for to find out about snow days the moment they were announced — about ConEd responding to power outages in my zip code. The alert buzz was not an Amber alert like Rose had suspected. It was from something (someone?) called NOAA and said. “Expect intermittent power disruptions from 4AM 10/7—5AM 10/8.”
“Looks like NOAA has no — uh — idea what they are talking about!” Murph said laughing. His phone had a similar rundown to mine — his cousin Tracie, his mom, and the NOAA alert. “It’s a little disturbing when my mom can give me news before one of these ‘real-time’ alerts. Looks like there’s a blackout at home, which means NOAA is off by about a day.” But even with that news, Murph was more caught up in the news from Tracie’s text. While we walked back to the museum he talked of nothing else. She said there was a blackout back at SI Prep too. Murph went on and on about how he always misses all the coolest stuff and tried to figure out what Mr. Gideon would have done without his SmartBoard, and how Mr. Chancey would have to cancel all of his counseling appointments for the day because he had no idea who any of his students were without the aid of the electronic grading software the school used.
As Murph continued running through all of his subject teachers and what types of quandaries he was sure they were facing without him to witness the mayhem, I was stuck thinking about one other fact: Amy doesn't go to our school anymore. Amy didn’t even live in the same state as us anymore. I finally said it out loud, "You know, my friend Amy moved to south Jersey last semester. That’s almost seventy miles away from us.”
Murph's face contorted in confusion, "And?"
"Yeah, well, she had a blackout, too," I showed him the text.
"That's weird," he said.
I agreed.
After an hour outside in the clean crisp air of Central Park, I wasn’t looking forward to those harsh artificial lights inside the museum. That’s probably why I noticed they were missing right away.
“Lights out here too,” I said to Murph as we stepped inside.
“They just went out as your class came in from lunch,” the girl at the front desk said. She looked understandably bored with her position at the front desk. Days like this must have been a nightmare for her — the NYC New School Museum was open to the public six days out of the week, but every Wednesday was trip day which meant one class had the whole building to itself. “Your teacher’s upstairs in Astronomy Alley. Not sure what you guys can do up there without any power, but I guess she’ll let you know.” The whole time she spoke to us she did not look up from her phone. Then she scrunched up her face and threw her phone on the desk in front of her. “This thing is such a piece of crap! I swear to god every time those bastards release a new phone, my phone starts doing the craziest shit. It’s a scam! They always find a way to make you need the newest phone!”
I smiled politely and Murph laughed while we made our way down the hallway.
“Oh hey, hey, hey, hey!” the desk girl called out to us. “Gotta take the stairs. Hang a left at the end down there and look for the blue door.”
The stairwell was creepy as hell. It was one of those “no one really uses these” kind of stairwells. I don’t know why, either. The building wasn’t tall at all — four floors, maybe five with storage space — the elevator was an unnecessary extravagance. They designed it to be more like an exhibit than a means of traveling from one floor to the next. Inside the elevator, screens surrounded you and, depending on what theme your teacher picked for the day, a mini lesson was played during the ride. I wondered what Mrs. Krimble had lined up for us today.
When we found Mrs. Krimble she was preoccupied and sucked dry of all of her typical cheeriness. I found this particularly disconcerting considering our location. This was her dream locale. I wasn't alone in my observation, our whole class stood uncharacteristically silent in front of her waiting for direction, or just some acknowledgement that we had arrived. It was Rainbow who finally spoke up, "Mrs. Krimble? Should we go in?" We had been standing in the hallway outside of what we had all come to call the “space theater.”
Mrs. Krimble took out her cell phone and looked back at Rainbow, "No... I think we have to go."
Murmurs erupted in the group, "Go? Go where?" I was just as confused as everyone else. It was barely one o'clock, and Mrs. Krimble hadn’t even gotten her shot to drown us in science yet! If we went back to school now, surely we would have more classes to attend. No way. We were not going back. This was our trip, our day out of the building, our day at the museum. Why would Mrs. Krimble, of all people, suggest we leave before we had even begun to explore?
Two men approached Mrs. Krimble. The three stepped aside for a quiet conversation. The shorter man, wearing glasses and – I’m not kidding – a pocket protector, said to Mrs. Krimble, "It's honestly the fastest moving CME I've ever seen. We expected effects on the Earth's surface, but not until tomorrow, at earliest.”
I won’t even pretend that I had any idea what any of this meant, but the mention of tomorrow made me think of that NOAA alert.
The other man, a much taller, lanky and good-looking in a geek-gorgeous kind of way, added, "Merle, let's not forget that our prediction software hasn't been truly tested. Some of these early effects are atypical. I think we may have missed something.”
Mrs. Krimble interrupted them, bringing her voice down to a very low whisper while casting a sidelong glance at our group, "I'm sorry, guys, listen — I don't want to seem alarmist, or anything — but I have twelve kids here under my charge, one who is technically disabled. Do you think there was an EMP or not? I need to get them home. Was NOAA wrong?”
There it was again. What the heck was NOAA? I pulled my phone out and googled it, using all caps just like it was on the alert text. The top site was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I clicked it. The picture that came up was familiar, and that frightened me. It was the same picture of the blazing sun, with enormous bright yellow arcs of what must have been the lava-like substance that covered the sun’s surface that were on the screens of every computer in detention the day before. I clicked the link and saw… well… science stuff. There were graphs, some funky green lined satellite pictures of earth on a black background, and a bunch of numbers that meant nothing to me. I scrolled down and saw three boxes next to each other, one with a green version of the picture of the sun labeled as “The Sun’s X-rays,” one with a bunch of bright white lights on a blue background labeled “Coronal Mass Ejections,” and the last one was another satellite picture of the Earth with some big orange ring going around it labeled “The Aurora.” Scrolling down some more yielded only more confusing graphs and things that were way beyond my comprehension.
What I couldn’t find anywhere was EMP. I googled it and suddenly didn’t want to be on this quest for knowledge on my own, too many of the results said something about an attack. Everyone knows New York City is a hot target for terrorist groups. I was not as hyper about these things as my mother, but I was raised on her stories. She was walking to the Staten Island Ferry when Tower One of the World Trade Center tumbled to its demise on September 11, 2001. She saw it disappear before her eyes. I am a victim of terror by association. Any day could be another attack — we tried to live like that wasn’t the case, but smaller threats always made their way back to our city — shootings, pipe bombs, mysterious packages — New York City continued to be a large target. I thought maybe that could explain Mrs. Krimble's attitude, her worried look, her frightened request of the science nerds.
Murph looked distracted, deep in a conversation with Brenda about something that was making her roll her eyes at him, so I asked Rainbow, who was on the other side of me playing with her phone, “Do you know what an EMP is?"
"A what?" Murph said, looking half amused. "Isn't that some kind of biological warfare or something?"
"What?!" Rainbow asked louder than I had hoped.
"You’re an idiot," Brenda said of Murph's explanation. "An EMP doesn't have to be a weapon, plus, even if it is, it's not biological warfare, it would be, well, I guess it would be technological warfare. It wipes out electricity. Like that show Dark Times."
Murph stared at her. "You watch Dark Times? My grandmother watches Dark Times!"
"Whatever, Murph. At least your grandmother wouldn't go around sounding like a complete idiot!"
I asked Brenda, since it seemed Murph was going to be of no use to me, "Hey, Brenda, you have any idea why Mrs. K would think there was an EMP now?" I pointed over to her corner conversation.
“She said that?” Rainbow asked.
"Oh shit!" Brenda said, "Did she say that? That’s more than lights out. That means stuff gets fried.”
"Just a second ago she was asking about it.”
"There was a blackout at school. Was there one in here too?” Brenda asked.
Princess leaned over, “Hey Bren, remember the stairs? There is currently a blackout in this building.”
“It’s been like this for a little while,” Rainbow said. “Stella and I came in to use the bathroom and all the lights were out in here and on the street too. The cars were going crazy out there without the street lights."
“Oh — hey — I heard all of that noise,” I said remembering how crazy the traffic sounded when I was at the hot dog cart.
Stella must have heard her name and decided she should contribute to the conversation. “But did you guys notice that some of the lights are on up here?”
“You guys all need to chill,” Dustin interrupted. “Didn’t you get that alert? They said there’d be power outages.”
“Yeah, but that’s not supposed to be ’till tomorrow,” I said, noticing the lights Stella pointed out for the first time. They were different than the blue lights on the first floor. They were warm and less assaulting to my senses. “They must have a generator here or something. Those things run through everything. My dad bought one after Hurricane Imelda.” I kept trying to talk my way through this without addressing the news that was sounding an alarm in my brain: Amy's blackout all the way down in Jackson, New Jersey.
Of course, because I had to go and open my big mouth in an effort to keep myself calm, fate stepped in and put me in my place. The lights went out. Evidently those generators do not keep everything running all of the time.
Mrs. Krimble pulled out her cell phone again and looked at it. The two men leaned in over her shoulder. Her expression can be explained in one word: dismay.
I checked my phone to see if I could understand what the problem was. No WiFi. No 4G. No LTE. No Service. Okay, I thought, that's typical blackout-scenario stuff, but then my phone began to flicker in my hand. I never saw it do that before. "Look," I showed the group.
Everyone pulled out their phones. The same things were happening.
Daria yelled, “What is this?”
Colin cursed at the phone in his hand, and our group got louder with the combined complaints of what we were all experiencing.
“This isn’t supposed to happen,” the taller man said.
Mrs. Krimble clicked her phone, turned it to the man and said, "It just did.” I checked my phone again — it was stone cold dead.
The moments following the death of my phone flashed in a blur of activity I observed but didn’t participate in. The panic in me reached a level of incomprehension. It was gone. The screen was black, the buttons pressed in, but yielded no result. I thought back to the tiny whisps of power I woke to two days in a row and wished I could gather them up and put them to use. Oh what I could do with 3% power! Now, nothing.
Mrs. Krimble sank to the floor with her head in her hands while the two men at her side spoke excitedly, debating how our reality was not scientifically possible.
“Okay, okay,” Rainbow whispered while digging through her oversized tote bag. “I’ve got this. No big deal. We can fix this.” She began to sing as she searched. It was soft, and to herself, but it was nice. Next to her, Russ was flipping a cigarette from one finger to the next while biting his bottom lip with such ferocity I wondered if I would see blood dripping if we didn’t have any answers soon.
“I don’t get it,” Murph said. “What happened to my phone? Is it you too, Nat?” I felt him lean over me to get a better view of my inactive screen for himself. “Brenda? Do you have power?”
“Nothin,” she said while she tapped, like crazy.
That was enough for Murph, I guess. He took out his sketchbook and walked over to the window. It could have been how he dealt with stress, or maybe he realized that was as close as any of us would get to taking a picture of the chaos around us.
Rainbow pulled a long white cord out of her bag and said, “Got it!” She had a wild look in her eyes as she walked away from the group toward an outlet in the wall.
“They said it’d be tomorrow,” Dustin said. He began to pace back and forth within the space of four square feet. “But they said blackouts. Not this.What is this?”
“If this is terrorists, I want outta here now,” Princess said.
“Oh no,” Rose said as she sank into a crouched position. Daria, who had already plugged her phone into one of the back-up battery chargers she carried with her, followed her to the floor.
“What is it?” Daria said.
“I have to get home. Soon,” Rose said.
“Is it one of the bad ones?” Daria asked.
“So much worse,” she said. She rubbed the side of her head. “I think something’s wrong with my shunt. This is weird. I don’t like it.”
“Shit,” Daria said. She stood up and turned in the direction of Mrs. Krimble who had yet to compose herself. I understood Mrs. Krimble’s panic. I was frozen. I hadn’t moved since realizing my phone was dead. My classmates, on the other hand, lived within that reality and each found their own ways to cope with it. And in between their coping, their idiosyncratic natures – those little things we each do in times of stress and boredom – began to emerge. All the things long kept dormant, hidden under our texting fingers and plugged up with our headphone-clad ears.
What was funny is that everyone had something to do.
Except me.
I was just watching. I was waiting. I was wondering. My mind was racing with what to do next. I grabbed my phone at least four different times to text Amy. Three times to check Talia’s Tales and six different times to jot down a thought for a later post.
A later post, I thought, on what? If this EMP had reached home – and considering the school had a blackout too, that seemed likely – then my computer was fried. Was it all gone? Everything I had ever written? I gasped at the thought.
“Looks like the traffic lights are out too,” Murph said to no one in particular while sketching the scene outside the window.
The shorter doctor walked over to the window and said, “Shit.”
“What Dr. Smithe means,” the taller Dr. Davies said, “is…” he walked over to the window, looked outside, then pushed his hair back with one hand while the other hand clenched his hip, “well… shit.”
“Oh god,” Princess said. “Are we under attack?”
“This is not an attack,” Dr. Smithe said, still standing by the window. “This is an astrological event.”
“The solar storm,” Mrs. Krimble said staring at nothing.
I couldn't help but think of my great loss the last time Mother Nature decided to act out of character. I lost —
Amy.
The weight of my phone doubled. I looked down at it, again, and saw nothing, but this time I realized the deep, painful implications of it. “Will landlines still work?” I asked in a shaky voice.
“I’m sorry?” asked Dr. Smithe.
“Phones,” I said louder than I wanted to. “Older phones, like plugged in ones. Will they work? Can we call anyone?”
“Depends on the phone model,” Brenda said. “But probably more important is which phone company your using.”
Mrs. Krimble raised her eyebrows at Brenda.
Brenda shrugged. “Dark Times knowledge. I keep telling my mom, the TV’s not rotting my brain.”
Dr. Smithe’s eyes shone with an attempt at compassion, but I felt nothing. “I imagine most types of communication will be down for quite some time.”
Communication’s down.
Amy’s lost.
Again.
Leave a Comment - Question of the Week
First, thank you for reading this part of my novel GIRL, UNPLUGGED. A new chapter will be posted on Wednesday. A new short story will be posted on Friday.
Faced with the death of your tech as the characters are in this chapter, what would be the first thing you would do?
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