Natalie Oliver: The Person Kimberly Needed Without Knowing She Needed Anyone

Natalie Oliver is 22 years old. She’s from Indiana. She saved up for two years after high school, packed everything she owned, and moved to New York City at twenty to start college at one of the city’s many universities. She had never lived anywhere bigger than a mid-sized town in the Midwest and she took to the city like she had been waiting for it her whole life.

She works part time at a GameStop on 86th and Broadway to cover her bills. She goes to parties. She breezes through her coursework without breaking a sweat because she is, underneath the surface noise of her social life, genuinely sharp. She is currently single by choice and perfectly happy about it.

On the surface, Natalie Oliver looks like someone who has it figured out. That’s exactly what she wants you to think.

Who She Actually Is

Natalie is an extrovert in the truest sense. She draws energy from people, from rooms, from the particular electricity of a city that never runs out of either. New York suits her in a way that Indiana never quite did. The anonymity of it. The scale. The fact that you can reinvent yourself on any given Tuesday and nobody asks questions.

She uses humor the way some people use armor. Not because she’s hiding anything dramatic or dark, but because keeping things light is how she keeps control of a room. She reads people quickly and accurately, a skill she has never formally acknowledged but uses constantly, and she adjusts her approach accordingly. Around most people she is the funniest person present. Around the right people she is something quieter and more genuine.

She has college friends, people she likes well enough, people she’d call if she needed something. But she doesn’t have many people she’d call just to talk. That distinction matters more to her than she lets on.

Her family is back in Indiana. All of them. She calls home regularly, more regularly than she tells anyone, because the city is exciting and loud and exactly where she wants to be, and also because home is home and she misses it more than she expected to when she left.

The GameStop on 86th

Kimberly Sterns walked into the GameStop on 86th Street and Broadway looking for a job and Natalie was the one who interviewed her. Within a week they were working the same shifts and within two they were friends in the way that sometimes happens between people who have no obvious reason to connect and connect anyway.

Natalie noticed something in Kim early. Not the grief specifically, not the shape of it, but the presence of something being held at a careful distance. She didn’t push. She didn’t ask. She just made Kim laugh, and kept making her laugh, and let the rest follow at its own pace.

What developed between them was something closer to a sisterhood than a friendship. Five years apart in age, completely different in personality, with almost nothing in common on paper. It didn’t matter. Natalie became the person Kimberly could be herself around, which for Kimberly was rarer than it should have been at seventeen.

For Natalie, Kimberly was something she hadn’t expected to find in New York. Something real.

Friday Evening, Autumn 2021

Natalie is closing the GameStop when the blackout hits. Alone in the store, working through the end of shift routine, when every screen and every light dies at once. She locks up fast, keeps the gate down, and waits.

When Kim appears on the other side of the gate a couple of hours later, Natalie lets her in without hesitation. They sit on the floor of the dark store in the glow of a Game Boy from the retro display case, the only thing in the building still running, and they talk through what they know. Which isn’t much.

What Natalie brings to those first hours is what she always brings. Steadiness disguised as jokes. Practicality dressed up as sarcasm. The ability to make a terrible situation feel survivable just by refusing to treat it as anything else.

She moves into Kim’s apartment on West 84th Street within the first couple of days. It makes sense practically. It makes more sense than that, but neither of them says so.

Writing Her

The challenge with Natalie wasn’t the humor. That part came easily. The challenge was making sure the humor never felt like a barrier between her and the reader.

Natalie is funny because she is genuinely funny, not because she is deflecting. The deflection is there too, but it sits underneath the wit rather than wearing it as a mask. Getting that balance right on the page took more work than I expected.

She is not Kimberly’s sidekick. She is not comic relief. She is a fully formed person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same as everyone else in this story, and what that costs her is something the book will show in its own time.

What I can say here is this. The girl in that polaroid, laughing in a room full of people in August 2021, has no idea what is coming two months later. Neither do any of them.

That’s the whole point. Read more about the world they both survive on The World page.