The day I went missing, I was wearing a pair of jeans, slightly tight, a black tee shirt, tan men's shirt and my old bottle green vest from when I was Tom Sawyer for Halloween. I wore thick hiking boots, none of this was out of the norm, I didn't like wearing the revealing shirts my friends did. I wasn't as thin as them, but also I just didn't see the point in wearing that stuff. My freshly bleached hair was pulled back into a braid, decorated randomly with hair ties.
I'd been bleaching my hair since I was thirteen, my real hair colour was a deep strawberry blonde, some parts shimmered gold, others a rich copper. I hated it. I bleached to look more Nordic, with my pale skin and large blue eyes it worked on me without looking cheap.
I was on my way to return a DVD, nothing special about it. Though people later thought there was some symbolism to my running away with Benny and Joone in my pocket. I don't know what happened. I think it may have been a slip in the time space continuum that I fell into.
All I know is I slipped, fell and when I woke up, my head hurt, and there was a stench in the air that put manure season to shame. It smelt like a million bodies all in the same small room, none using deodorant, a smell of rotten vegetables, of dead animals. And I hated it. So what did I do? I turned over and added to the stench, throwing up on the cobbles.
Now I had been to the city a fair few times previous to this. And was able to recognize that I was in the Lower east side. Previously I had stayed in a friends deceased grandmother's house in the center of the most orthodox area. I recognized a few of the words being said as Yiddish.
This ment one of two things, I was in a coma and was imagining this. Or I had died.
Neither turned out to be true. Because as I sat up, I felt something dripping from the back of my head, I reached back and touched it. I was bleeding, not too badly, but the moment I saw the blood I felt the pain, unreal, I turned over and threw up again.
"Get outta da street ya crazy goil!' I sat up quickly feeling the cobblestones shake under me. As I ran over to the sides I saw that a carriage had nearly missed me
"Goyisher kop!" the carriage driver yelled back at me. I realized then, that I wasn't dead, or in a coma, I was back in time.
Upon realizing this I did the only thing I could think of, I threw up again, this time there was little of my burger I'd had for lunch left in my system and I threw up stomach acid. Wiping my mouth on my shirt I looked around. No one had really noticed me yet. I doubted that would last long. My dress was very different from those around me. Old women wearing head scarves, young boys wearing yarmulkes.
For a second I stood, watching around me, hand against my head, mouth agape at the vastness of this market town. I realized it was a miracle that I hadn't been run over by a cart in the few seconds it had taken me to throw up and move. The pain in my head had started to recede, as well as the stench around me. Slowly just as when I had been working in the town bakery I got used to the scents around me until I did not think about them. Though I still noticed the rotten smell I didn't think about them. My eyes gaped around me.
This was a dream come true. How could I not look around, I reached around inside my pocket, feeling only the broken DVD, I hadn't hoped much that I would find a thousand historically correct dollars in my pocket, but it would have been nice.
My hand still on my bleeding head I walked down the street, not many people looked at me. My clothing aside, I didn't look much like the rest of the people around. Horrible as it seems to say most of them looked very Jewish and I ever in my quest to look more Nordic stuck out like a sore thumb.
The words around me zipped around in a thousand different languages. I identified Yiddish, Italian, German, Hebrew, some English. The whole thing was different then anything I'd ever seen.
Even now when I remember those amazing Sundays on the streets, everything in the world being sold, bought, stolen. Nothing I have seen to this day matches the beauty and marvel of the Jewish markets on Sunday.
Wandering around the streets I noticed the poor newsboys. Many only nine or ten, they yelled in as many languages as I heard, reciting headlines that could not possibly be real. Headlines that I would have remembered from history classes if they had been true. Then just as soon as I was almost comfortable in this new enviroment I realized something.
Something fairly important to the rest of my time there.
I was a girl, unemployed, penniless, and had no place to live.
Disclaimer: I own our unnamed main charachter and nothing else.
Author's notes: Okay there will be newsies in this. Just not immediatly. I'm trying to make this as historically accurate as I can.
Well not completly, becasue then it would be a history lecture. But more so then a lot of others I've seen.