GIRL, UNPLUGGED
YA Novel Chapter 24 | 9 Minute Read
This is Chapter 24 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 an 9 minute read.
CHAPTER 24: Times Square
On the other side of the barrier was a world running on a different rhythm. Times Square was transformed. I looked up and saw enormous slate-gray rectangles of useless electronics attached to the sides of buildings. Of course, there were still billboards plastered in between, but the difference was un-ignorable; there was no animation, no movement. That was, of course, until I looked around me. While there were still cars, cabs and even two city buses stuck in the middle of the streets, another wave of movement and life bustled in between them that I hadn’t seen before because of the crowd at the barrier. You could almost believe it was a normal day in Times Square. You had to look closer at the people moving in and out of the cars to notice the difference. The movement wasn’t made up of slow-moving, ogling, distracted tourists stopping to take pictures, gawking up at all of the building sides and signs, or trying to find their way to the Broadway show that wasn’t actually on Broadway and the strange opportunists dressed in costumes trying to gain their attention and money, these people were orderly, uniformed, and purposeful. These streets were filled with emergency personnel who were all busy working.
There were tents set up with handwritten signs stuck to the front of them all along the sidewalks and throughout pedestrian walkways. Some labels were different neighborhood names like Chelsea, SoHo, and Battery Park. Other tents had hospital names on them. I recognized Langone and Sloan Kettering from the commercials on TV. The last category of names I recognized was school names like Stuyvesant and Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. Regardless of the type of tent we passed, inside each was the same. Every tent contained a table with a number of people sitting on folding chairs behind it. Each person had notebooks or index cards in front of them. The routine in front of each tent followed the same rhythm as well. People walked up to the tents, pulled out a pocket pad and read it off to somebody at the tables, or, in some cases, handed over whatever they had.
“We got ‘em!” an officer shouted as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of phone books up to a tent in front of the Marriot Marquis. “Use these as a starting point for now. We’ll need to be organized by location and alphabet, so let’s get moving.” A group of officers moved quickly to the piles and began sorting through them.
We walked through quietly. I was in awe of what looked like our city trying to rebuild itself. It was becoming increasingly obvious, simply by the way the police were responding to this particular power outage, that there was little hope it would be fixed quickly. This group wasn’t waiting for power to be restored, they were rebuilding the system.
A policewoman approached Stella. “Thank God you’re finally here! You’re the volunteers, right?”
“No, I’m sorry,” Stella said cautiously. She looked over to me.
“We’re trying to get downtown, to the ferry,” I said, feeling a little bit like a TikTok video stuck in a loop.
The officer looked at me skeptically. “The ferry’s not running, Ma’am.”
Ma’am? That was way too official for me. I nodded, “We know, we’re trying to connect with some family on our way home to Staten Island.”
“Ma’am?” the officer said, looking utterly confused.
I took a deep breath, readying myself to start our story all over again, but Colin saved me. “We were on a class trip to the New York City New School Museum.” He sounded like he was tired of the story, too.
The officer’s face grew grim.
Rainbow continued the story, “We slept there last night, because we didn’t know what else to do.” Dustin explained the plan for our walk downtown and the more he continued, the more upset the officer looked. She started shaking her head.
When he was done she said, “Hold on one second.” She held up her hand and added, “Don’t move, please.” And then she ran off to a tent with a sign I could not read and spoke to an older man who kept shaking his head. She got more animated, pointing over at us. I looked down immediately. For some reason I felt like I shouldn’t be caught watching. “What is she doing?” I whispered to Russ.
“I’m not sure, but it looks like she wants to help us.”
“How the hell is she going to do that?” Brenda asked, stealing the words right out of my mind.
“We’re about to find out,” Rainbow whispered. I looked up in time to see that the officer was approaching us with the older man.
He was a scruffy guy in his fifties who didn’t look comfortable in the jeans he was wearing. I got the impression that he was used to a uniform, or a suit. When he reached us he was scratching his head. “So eh, hey. You guys the -uh- class trip?”
We all mumbled our affirmation.
“A-ight, I’m Chief Grady. Officer Avery has a ridiculous idea that might work, if you are willing to help us out,” he said.
I saw Brenda’s reaction before I heard it. Her eyes grew wide and her head shook back and forth like some hinge had come loose. The second the chief stopped to take a breath, she was on him. She stepped forward as she blurted, “Ha! Help you guys out?” She swung her head to flip her loosening ponytail back over her shoulder, but I think it was her way of deflecting the chief’s comment. “We don’t have time for this!”
Chief Grady flinched. It appeared he was not the type to deal in petty nonsense the likes of which Brenda was dealing. “Eh, Miss?” He raised his large hand up as if he was stopping traffic. “Why don’t you just keep your head still and hear me out before you go all drama queen on me a’ight? This ain’t a perfect situation we’re finding ourselves in right now, so the solution’s gonna be far from perfect. You don’t like it, you go.”
Brenda folded her arms over her chest and looked around for support that couldn’t be found.
“Avery, go ahead,” Grady said, “this is your show.”
Officer Avery stepped forward, nodding to the chief before addressing our group. “Here’s how I see it. No offense, guys, but you don’t look great. You’ve already asked for medical help, so I can’t see you all walking all the way downtown today without at least some of you getting really sick.” She cut a quick glance over at Rose, setting a fire of worry to my insides. It had happened gradually, but Rose’s invisible, mysterious disease was starting to show. It wasn’t just the wheelchair that was making her look like the sick one. It had become present in her eyes, expression, and her skin color. She was not doing well.
Avery looked back at us and continued, “On the other side of things, we need help. Half of our guys need to hit the streets pretty soon. We need people to man the help stations, collect supplies and food, continue the inventories — in other words, a ton of stuff needs to get done.”
I looked around and saw, at each cross street, tents with tables facing outside Times Square. Behind them were coolers filled with smaller boxes that were being handed out by people in bright yellow vests. The crowds were even thicker at each of those barricades than where we had just come from. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be at a help station after seeing how agitated the crowds had already become.
Daria leaned on the side of the wheelchair and sighed, “But if we stop to help you, where will we sleep tonight?” From the look on her face, I think sleep was the only thing on Daria’s mind.
Officer Avery gave Daria, who wasn’t even looking at her anymore, a worried look. “Well, the thing is, we can get you out of here a lot quicker than you can get yourselves.”
As she spoke, the crowd behind us grew even louder and the mounted officer on the megaphone bellowed, “Step out of the way! Move to the side!” I had to look to see what was going on. The crowd hesitantly parted to make way for one of those old-fashioned horse pulled carriages that my mom and dad took me and Roger on a couple of Christmases ago through Central Park. It was an odd sight to see. I was used to seeing those carriages filled with tourists, or couples looking for a romantic interlude, not police officers.
Officer Avery pointed at the carriage. “They’ve been taking sidewalks and bike paths where streets aren’t cleared and have managed their way through the city quite well. As you can imagine, they’re the fastest mode of transportation we can manage right now. We can put you in the carriages and take you downtown.”
It was an odd offer, but between how exhausted Daria and Rose looked and how my feet already felt from our short walk, I was really hoping we could get the group to agree.
Officer Avery looked Daria up and down again, “And I’m not thinking everyone’s getting to work. We’ve got that medical tent, so we would treat anyone who needs it.”
Brenda looked over at Rose and nodded. “What time would we leave?” she asked.
“Probably when the sun reaches about there,” Chief Grady said, pointing to the edge of the skyscraper on the right.
We all looked up. Some people put their hands in the air to see how much space there was in between where the sun was now and where it would be. Grady chuckled, “What? No one has a sense of humor in this group?”
He got a couple of smirks from the group, but no laughs. “Yeah, well, we’ll get you someplace safe before it’s dark. Avery, here, will make sure of it.”
“Absolutely,” Avery responded. “That’s my guarantee to you. Safe by dark. So, what do you say?”
It was one of those silly silences that seemed to fall over the group whenever a decision needed to be made. I looked around and found everyone else also looking around. No one said anything. But, what was important to me was that no one was saying no, so I stepped closer to Daria and Rose and asked, “So, where is that medical tent?”
Officer Avery wanted to make sure we were all okay before putting us to work, so our entire group ended up at a medical tent in front of the enormous Express clothing store on 46th Street — a sad replacement to the epic Toys R Us that used to be there, if you ask me! I was given a clean bill of health, like almost all of us, but we were each forced to drink two bottles of water once we told them our story. And then there were the sandwiches. Tons of sandwiches. Not only did we have to eat them, we had to make them to hand out.
That was my first job. Making sandwiches out of the donated cold cuts and bread from the local stores. I thought it was ridiculous, I mean what the heck would anyone do with a bologna sandwich in a blackout? But Janice, a volunteer from the Food Bank who reminded me of a casual jeans-wearing version of my mom, said that hunger made people unstable. “Plus,” she said, “spoiled food makes me nuts.” I didn’t understand why all these stores gave up all of their inventory for free. Janice shrugged. Her expensively highlighted hair slipped from her messy ponytail. “I know it seems crazy, like everyone in New York City has suddenly lost their minds, but there are still loads of generous people out there. When the news came out that this was going to be long term, most of the restaurant owners wanted to get home to their families any way they could. They knew it would mean leaving their businesses behind. Food can’t stay forever without power or refrigeration of some sort, so they came out — in droves — opening their kitchens to us. It has been a wonderful morning.”
A wonderful morning? I looked around at the chaos beyond the barricades. I thought of how I tried to run away from my group. I thought of Murph’s panic about taking any route home that would bring us near large groups of people. I thought of the hungry man who spat in my face, the woman in the T-shirt, Daria and Rose still in the medical tent… “Wonderful” was not the word I would have used.
The thing is, I knew my city was generous. That’s why I didn’t think twice about trying to share what I knew about this storm with the confused people on the street the day before. But ever since then — ever since I got slapped in the face and Mrs. Krimble had her head cracked open — I was slowly losing my confidence in humanity and, more importantly, my ability to help. Evidently, Janice had not had any of those types of experiences. Rather than looking downtrodden like our group, she was beaming just about as bright as her orange Food Bank T-shirt. She was pretty calm and optimistic, considering the madness around us.
I sat watching her help the police, the nurses, and my classmates and I felt like it was all going to be okay. Not because I was with Russ and I thought he might be as attracted to me as I was to him, not because we made a deal with the police to hitch a ride for the epic journey in front of us, and not because I finally had some real food in my belly. I thought it was going to be okay because now I could see that for every one of those crazy people screaming at the barricades, there was a Janice. She wasn’t alone. There were lots of people in Times Square that were helping, looking optimistic, and I was about to be one of them… I hoped.
I looked around at my classmates and saw their despair. I knew where it was coming from — I could feel it right below my epiphany of hope — I wasn’t going to give into it. I was going to be like Janice. She looked at our group and said, “I know we are going to have to split you up around here, but I’m going to call first dibs — anyone want to help us collect more food?”
I shot my hand in the air while everyone else still hungrily munched away.
“Cool,” Janice said. Her eyes crinkled when she smiled, just like my dad’s. “First come, first served. You know this isn’t going to be easy, right?”
A flicker of doubt danced over me, but I wouldn’t let it capture me. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m ready to help.”
Written in Natalie’s Notebook
Times Square 10/7
So I’ve been thinking… I feel more comfortable in my skin when I’m writing — specifically when I’m writing for someone, like I do on Talia’s Tales. Why is that?I mention it now because in this moment I sense lingering tastes of the same feeling being here in Times Square. And the last time I felt it when I was not writing was when I was on the street yesterday trying to make everyone understand what was going on. Or when I was given the ticket to take our group through these checkpoints. I never saw a connection before, but I think I see it now.
I was helping. Or at least I thought I was helping each time. I think when I ask the question, “What would Talia do?” I think the answer is that Talia would try to help. It seems strange because my posts — my writing, my fanfic, my memes — are not what my parents would categorize as helpful, I’m sure, but to my peeps? Yeah. I think so. I’m helping them laugh, smile, swoon, and — probably most of all — connect to each other in the comments.
I look forward to what’s coming next here. And that is just plain nuts. But I’ll take it..
Leave a comment - Question of the Week
Thanks for continuing to read the GIRL, UNPLUGGED. How do you feel about this plan to stay and help in Times Square? Would you advise the group go it alone, or take this offer from Chief Grady and Officer Avery?
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