GIRL, UNPLUGGED

YA Novel Chapter 5 | 14 minute read

This is Chapter 5 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.

created by Nicole Rivera using CanvaPro

CHAPTER 5: Chaos

Posted to TALIA’S TALES  
Oct 6 @ 10:25AM

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#Alliteration #schooltrip #slightlysignedoff


I crossed the threshold of the museum leaving behind the bright autumn morning in exchange for the blue-hued lighting of the interior of the museum. I think they used those light bulbs that were supposed to be like sunlight, but after just being in the real thing, I can tell you these did nothing to emulate the experience. As I blinked to adjust to the change, looking ahead for Mrs. Krimble’s next instruction, Murph leaned over to me and said, “Ready for some Krimble chaos?” 
“For some what?” 
“Come on. Don’t tell me you never heard of the Krimble chaos theory,” he said with a crooked smile that really needed to be worshiped by the masses. I could imagine Murph as a character in Barista Boys — he’s the starving artist that comes to the shop faithfully to do his sketches, the barista boys are jealous of him, the girls all fawn over him, but he only has eyes for one: me. 
I was drifting away in a flurry of fanfic in my mind when a handful of worksheets were handed to me by Brenda. “Here comes the crazy,” she said, rolling her eyes as she did. I took a sheet and handed one to Murph before giving the rest to Daria. Rose declined one, evidently Mrs. Krimble had to email her everything the night before so Rose could have them on her tablet.
Every year Mrs. Krimble’s trip followed the same pattern: “find, share, learn, teach.” First we’d have to find stuff through her scavenger hunt, then we’d have to share what we found, then usually we’d break for lunch, after which we’d either go to a lecture, or an exhibit, or a movie, or something where we learned stuff and then our “big assignment” to culminate the trip would be a personal teaching project. Mrs. Krimble was pretty open-ended about how we approached this — video, presentation in front of the class, podcast, or (the option I always selected) the basic written report.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Murph said, raising one eyebrow and brandishing the worksheet between our two faces. “This thing is always pure chaos. Or, at least, that’s the hope.”
The scavenger hunt? I looked down at the worksheet in my hand and wondered what the glint in Murph’s eye was all about. Was he excited about this thing? Looking at it I was struggling to comprehend what looked a lot like glee in Murph’s eyes. “You are hoping for chaos?” I asked.
“Of course! The Krimble chaos theory states that the more chaotic the activity, the more fun you will have. You sure you’ve done this before?” he asked, elbowing me playfully before securing his bag strap tightly across his chest and pulling his phone out of his pocket.  
“Get your phone ready,” Murph said, nudging me again. “We gotta have everything ready!”
“Is it ‘game on’, Murph?” Terrell asked.
What the heck is going on? 
“Isn’t it always Falcon?” Murph answered back.
I was so confused.
“Oh hell no,” Daria chimed in from behind us, “you boys are going down!”
I had been on this exact trip twice before, with almost all of these same people, when did it become so charged with energy? When did my class start to enjoy the assignments given? My memory served up quiet, tortured walks through the halls of the museum, taking poorly-lit pictures and doing the bare minimum to get this job done. 
“Okay guys. You know what you’re doing,” Mrs. Krimble said from the front of the group. 
I don’t think I do…
“All pictures need hashtag SIPrep and hashtag Krimble,” she continued. I watched Murph studying the worksheet and nodding along. 
Is this a competition? Is there something to be won? My heart began to race with worry. 
“Remember that there’s no running!” 
Was that even a threat?!
“Aww come on, Mrs. K!” Rainbow moaned.
What?! Rainbow too?
“No need to run. You have ninety minutes starting…” she raised her phone in front of her face, “NOW!”
Murph tugged my arm and said, “Let’s go!”

My phone rang. I’m guessing any normal person would have ignored it, let that one go to voicemail, and stayed by the side of the insanely cute guy that wanted her to join the fun with him. I’m only guessing that’s what a normal person would do because I don’t know. I didn’t do that. When my phone rang I grabbed it, saw it was Amy and escaped into the distraction she unknowingly offered me.
I auto-responded “In public,” because I had no intention of actually picking up the phone to talk to her. I couldn’t risk being overheard. 
“Everyone knows I’m Talia,” I texted.
Verrt. “HOW IS IT GOING?” Amy texted almost immediately. It was obvious we were off-sync in our conversation — she wasn’t responding to my text, she had one of her own.
I looked around as the rest of my class split up around the room reading placards aloud, debating over which exhibit represented a particular “find” for Krimble’s chaos. I watched them jab each other in jest, pair off conspiratorially trying to take selfies no one else noticed. I saw Rose taking pictures of the placards and then examining her phone by bringing it real close to her face as Daria captured it all on video. I nodded politely when Stella signaled to me that the weird bird in the corner was something of note.  I typed my text as Murph pulled me gently to one side to frame me in a selfie with him in front of some artifact behind us that must have counted for something else on the scavenger hunt. I forgot to smile as I pressed send on the text, “It’s weird. I think it’s going well, but I don’t feel like I should.” 
Verrt.“That’s great!” Amy’s text came through, again — hopefully — not in response to what I had just written. Then the three little dots, she was typing, probably trying to fill in the awkward gap between my worry and her congratulations. I pointed Murph in the direction of the weird bird and slowly followed behind his dash toward it while I waited for Amy’s words to appear. “I wish you would just talk to me. Is everything okay with CD?”
“Everything okay?” Murph asked, echoing Amy’s text as I reached his side, as if he somehow sensed he was being discussed and needed to know what the conversation was about. “Do you want me to wait for you to finish texting?” A look of concern flashed across his face and then I realized that he must have assumed that there was some sort of emergency since I felt the need to type away instead of partake in the fun we were supposed to be having together.  
  “Nah. I’m okay,” I said, already beginning to type my response to Amy. “I can text and walk. You lead the way, I’ll follow.” 
“Right… of course,” he said. The space between us and the rest of the class was growing. 
“With him now,” I texted quickly to Amy, shoving the phone in my back pocket before Murph could see that I was writing about him. Then I looked up at him and saw that he had been deflated by my lack of enthusiasm. I smiled and said, “Let’s catch up!”
Murph beamed at me, looked down at his worksheet and said, “I know exactly where everyone’s going next! We’ve got this!” Then he turned and walked like the power-walking old ladies every Sunday morning in the mall. “I’m not running!”
Verrt.
I did not keep up. I walked forward, but not quickly.
I pulled my phone out of my back pocket desperate to see what Amy texted back. “OK. Sry. Have fun!” along with a winking emoticon.
It was a closing. A send off. An “I’ll talk to you later” kind of text. But I wasn’t done. I hadn’t received the guidance I needed.
“What should I do?” I texted Amy. I heard more laughter up ahead.
“?!?!?” Amy texted back.
“Let’s do the big guy all together!” I heard Princess shout from the room in front of me.
“About Talia?” I clarified in a text to Amy. I reached the room with the rest of the class. I looked around as I watched Murph reading a placard shouting to no one in particular, “Princess is right. This is the one!”
Amy’s text was, sadly, predictable. “BE TALIA!” along with a gif of a cheerleader jumping up and down thrusting pom-poms in the air. 
Oh no she didn’t.
“Wait for Natalie!” Rainbow shouted.
“Hurry up Nat, get in this one!” called Brenda who was crouched at the base of an enormous dinosaur skeleton along with the rest of the class. From the looks of it, I was the only one from our trip missing from the photo-op. I walked up and stood in front as my phone buzzed again. I looked down to see Amy’s last text. “Bell rang. Gotta go.” 
My heart sank, the camera flashed.

“It never stops, am I right?” I heard the question over the voices of everyone else asking to see the picture before it was posted, but didn’t realize it was meant for me. Daria walked in front of me and then said, “The creation… the art-making… It’s like that part of your brain is always working, always ready to upload something new.” She was looking right at me. No ignoring she was talking to me. Daria had this cool short blonde hair that hung over her left eye whenever she wasn’t vigilant about pushing it back or, as she did then, flipping it away by rocking her head back the way the ladies on the shampoo commercials did with their much longer locks. I must have looked as confused as I felt.  “I caught you typing away over there while I was getting more video. Figured you were adding to the blog.”
“Oh…” I said noncommittally. 
“I see how prolific you are on Talia’s Tales. You are an animal! Now it makes sense. You must be writing every minute of the day. I strive for that kind of production. Maybe someday. The editing kills me. Slows me down so much, you know what I mean?”
That was a question. I was meant to interact now, but I didn’t know what she meant and I didn’t want to insult her in any way by saying so. 
She let me off the hook by continuing. “I feel like the Internet, or at least the part that follows me, is constantly waiting for something new from me and no matter when I post my stuff I’m late for somebody.” She stopped, looked down at her camera in her hand, like it always was.  Daria’s camera could have been an appendage she was born with. She smiled. “I love it, though. Don’t you? I thrive on it.” Then with a simple swipe of her thumb across her tech appendage she turned the camera on and focused it on both of us. Her face transformed. She was on. “Surrounded by scientific discoveries through the ages and ideas that will thrust us into a prosperous future, my greatest discovery of the day so far has to be this girl here standing right beside me.” She flipped her hair again, somehow not head-butting me in the process. “This little thing has been hiding out in my plain sight for at least three years. Nothing but stealth right here, mi gentes. I know a good portion of you count yourselves as this little lady’s ‘peeps’ —including me — so I couldn’t be more honored to be the one to bring you the big reveal right here on Daria’s Day. Mi Gentes — fellow peeps — I present to you the creator of Talia’s Tales, this is the Talia herself.” Daria stopped for a moment to act out a look of complete surprise. Then she switched back to pro-vlogger mode, “I can attest to the fact that she’s been writing up a storm while on this trip! Brace yourself for juicy fanfic on locale, reflections about our place in this world, and maybe,” she looked over the camera scanning the room before stage whispering, “maybe even some personal romance!” She elbowed me while arching her eyebrows comically. I was speechless — not in the “oh I am so flattered” way, reflective of overwhelming modesty — I was stunned silent. I was also scarlet. That is not an observation based on an internal feeling. It was a fact. Daria’s camera was in selfie mode and I was staring at my flaming red face. 
I was on fire and couldn’t decide if I wanted to stop drop and roll, or let the whole museum go up in smoke with me inside. The Internet loves the phrase “all the feels” which usually denotes the warm and fuzzies, but as Daria flicked her thumb again to stop the recording all my feels were raging through me. Daria looked down at the camera in her palm, replaying the capture most likely trying to decide if she needed to do a retake, and I started to pull apart everything that fueled my fire. Here are all of the feels I mapped out:

1. Fury. This girl took it upon herself to bring me into the public eye without bothering to even ask me for permission. Is this legal?

2. Fear. The second this video hit the web, the world — not just this group on the class trip — would know who I was. Could I — should I — stop her?

3. Embarrassed. She gave me no time to prepare. She didn’t even let me speak. She mentioned my not-so-successful up until now romance.  What did I look like?

4. Pride. She spoke to her followers (a pretty enormous bunch) as if they should all know me. She said she was a follower of me too, something I, at least until now, hadn’t bothered to reciprocate. Before recording she was speaking as if she looked up to me. Should I feel happy?

5. Happy. It was over. Whatever the hell it was, or whatever I felt, it happened and I didn’t die. Yet. Smile, Natalie, Daria is one of the good guys. 

I desperately clung to the last two emotions and tried to feed them while the other three monsters continued to wreak havoc in my psyche. I started to regulate my breathing and tried to click the autoresponder saying “in public” for whatever device controlled my tear production for the day. Daria finished watching the clip back and said, “Thanks. This is great. Your face is perfect. You look so surprised. Are you okay if I use this? I won’t, if you don’t want me to, but I needed to get your pure reaction for the best shot. You were perfect.” Her face was so soft and gentle — so human. I saw a trace of insecurity in her questioning eyes. This was not the face of the all-popular vlog Daria’s Day, this was Daria Abel, my classmate, my peer, the other girl with two faces for the world, asking me for a favor. “Natalie, the peeps will love this!” Her smile oozed with sincerity. I thought about how different she looked when on the camera. She had a face she presented to the world. She didn’t show them what she showed me. I didn’t have a face like that. What she recorded was me, Natalie, not Talia. I remember thinking it was courageous for Daria to bravely show the world who she was, but she didn’t show them who she really was. I wondered if I could be Talia for Daria, for her “gentes”, for my “peeps”, for me. 
“Are you women of the web done with your tiny convention over here?” Murph appeared out of nowhere interrupting my train of thought. “We have a scavenger hunt to complete!” 
“Nat?” Daria asked. “What do you think?”
I think I am not brave enough. I do not want them to see me. I think you deserve a better subject than me. I think I am not Talia. I think…
“No. I’d rather you didn’t,” I said drowning in a wave of new conflicting “feels” wondering why those words weren’t as liberating as I thought they would be.  

When Murph caught up to me he was full of questions I didn’t want to answer, “What was that? Did you guys have a fight or something? Daria looks upset…”
I kept walking, with no destination in mind when I said, “It’s nothing.” And maybe it was, but it didn’t feel that way. Daria and Rose walked by, Daria didn’t look up, but Rose turned back with a questioning, though not accusatory, look.
“Natalie?” he said as his warm hand closed gently around my elbow. “Wait a second. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. We didn’t get all the pictures yet, did we?” I searched all my pockets looking for the damn scavenger hunt worksheet when Mrs. Krimble walked by.
“Ten minutes left!” she announced. She had been walking through the halls of the exhibit floor where the class was scattered about. My classmates were shouting back and forth about what parts of the worksheet they thought we still needed. The chaos Murph had described earlier wasn’t a competition, it was a wacky, unified front. No class ever completed the whole hunt in the time allotted. Everyone knew that, hence my previous attempts being so lackluster — what was the point in getting all crazy if there was no expectation of ever finishing it? The rest of my class saw it differently. In their eyes it was our job to make Staten Island Prep history. 
With ten minutes left, as everyone shouted what they thought we were missing, I scanned the one sheet Murph and I were now sharing and scrolled through the class’ online posts. Every single item on the list had at least one photo. It looked like we were done, but the way we knew if we had found the right item was whether or not Mrs. Krimble liked the photo. There was one item left on the list that had a bunch of entries, but so far no like from Mrs. Krimble. It was the very vague request to find “The beginning.”
The pictures posted were varied and all held their own validity. Colin dragged Rainbow into the hall of reproductive science and took a picture in front of the diagram of the ovaries, and added two emoticons — a chicken and an egg along with the caption “The egg came first!” That received no response. Stella, Princess, and Brenda took a picture in front of the indoor, translucent water wheel generator. Their comment was “All life begins with water.” No like from Mrs. Krimble. I thought we were really on to it when Murph and I took a picture with an exhibit devoted to Lucy, the first human ever found. The comment we left was “our beginning.” I was so confident I hadn’t even realized we didn’t get it until Mrs. Krimble gave the ten minute warning and I was double checking the list. 
“The beginning!” I said to Murph. “None of us got ‘the beginning’!” Murph relayed the message to everyone else. The class gathered around. 
“That’s Lucy,” Terrell said. “Weren’t you guys the ones who posted it?”
“No like,” I said.
“What?” yelled Colin. Then he leaned in. “I’ve got forty bucks on this guys. Gino’s class couldn’t do it last week and I bet him we would. He’s been texting me all morning.” 
“Tell me you’re joking,” Terrell said. “Gino’s got me for fifty!”
“I’m gonna kick his his ass,” Daria said, “I bet him twenty!”
Murph and I looked at each other wide-eyed. He asked the question. “How many people here have a bet with Gino?” Eight hands went in the air.
“Dammit!” Dustin yelled, yanking his hand out of the air. Then he stepped out of the group so he was facing everyone. “Listen up. I’m sick of him pulling crap like this. Let’s find this damn thing, post it, and win. I don’t even want his money. I just want him to squirm for the rest of the day thinking he’s got eight people he needs to pay off in the morning. One night of torture for him is more than enough for me. Anyone else?”
“I’d like the money…” Russ said quietly. 
“Do what you want with the bet,” Dustin said. “Let’s just figure this shit out.”
“What about the first exhibit?” Rose said quietly. “You know, like the beginning of the museum when we came in the door?” We took off not-running as fast as we could. 
Mrs. Krimble followed us, watched us take the picture in front of a replica of Thomas Edison’s light bulb, and then she watched as Dustin posted it. She made absolutely no move to head to the Internet to like it. She smiled softly, and said, “Seven more minutes.”
I stared at this woman and tried to figure her out. I really thought I had her with Lucy. That was definitely a right answer, it just wasn’t her right answer. I tried to think back to class, to the things she talked about, to any reference to what she thought was “the beginning.” I could think of nothing. I looked at her and couldn’t remember past the last 24 hours — the subway, the ferry, the ferry terminal, detention. All this woman spoke about was the sun. 
The sun?
I didn’t think it was worth sharing with everyone, but in our desperation I stepped away from my class. “I’ll be back in a sec,” I said to Murph.  On a whim, I walked out the front door. I stepped far enough away from the museum to get a clear view of the sky above. It was almost noon, so the sun was basically right above my head. I put my phone’s camera in selfie mode and held it at my waist. I looked down before snapping the shot. I posted the picture with the caption “In the beginning, there was light. #SIPrep #Krimble.”
Almost immediately the picture was liked by siprep_krimble. I could hear the cheers of my class before I even reached the door. That’s when I decided not to open it. 



Posted to TALIA’S TALES  
Oct 6 @ 12:03PM

Hey Peeps. Maybe you could help me with this thing I can’t figure out. I don’t like attention. Not real life attention. Not even a celebration of me. I hear cheers and I feel sick. And yet, here, in the wiggly world of the web, I love it. I love subscribers to my blog, I love followers on Twitter, I love to find that my online contributions are trending. I desire almost every kind of virtual attention… until I find one I don’t.

I’m currently finding myself immersed in a bunch of things I probably shouldn’t be complaining about, but I have no idea how to process them. 

Questions: How important is it for you to know who I *really* am? Are you happy with my avatar, or do you need more? Is it ridiculous for me to feel uncomfortable with the idea that my *true* identity may soon be revealed? 

Super Scary Question: For those of you who recently found out who I am IRL, does that change how you see me, or this blog? (Remember we can be honest here, it’s the Internet!)

~Talia

#isntTaliaenough

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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.

What do you think, should Natalie just get over it already? Was she being mean to Daria? Was Daria out of line just recording Natalie like that and sharing her secret identity?

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