Kimberly Sterns: Writing a Teenager Who Has Already Survived Too Much

Kimberly Sterns is 17 years old. She lives alone in a two bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. She works part time at a GameStop on 86th and Broadway. She goes to high school. She makes her own dinner most nights and waits for her father to come home on weekends.

On the surface, she manages. That’s the thing about Kimberly. She always manages.

But managing and being okay are two very different things, and that gap is where her entire story lives.

Who She Is Before the Lights Go Out

Kimberly grew up as a military kid. Her father is an Army captain based at Fort Dix in New Jersey, close enough to come home on weekends, far enough that weekdays were always just her and her mother. That was the rhythm of her life for as long as she can remember.

Then her mother died during COVID. A healthcare worker at Roosevelt, the hospital her mother’s generation still called Roosevelt even though the sign above the door said something else, she was on the front lines before anyone truly understood what that meant. Kimberly was sixteen.

Her father told her she was strong. That she could handle anything. He meant it as a compliment, as encouragement, as the highest thing he knew how to say. Kimberly heard it as an instruction. So she handled it. She pushed the grief down into a place where she didn’t have to look at it and she got on with her life.

She’s friendly at school but not close with anyone there. Acquaintances fill that space instead, people she sits with at lunch and nods to in the hallway, but not friends. Not really. However the one person she’d actually call a friend is Natalie, a coworker at GameStop who she clicked with in the way you sometimes click with someone unexpected. Natalie is older, a little more grounded, and she makes Kimberly laugh in a way that school never quite manages.

At night, alone in the apartment, Kimberly drifts. Thoughts of her mother find her in the quiet. She’s learned to outrun them. She turns on music, or the TV, or a game, anything to fill the silence and keep the grief at a distance. It works. It always works.

Until the night it stops working entirely.

The Night Everything Stops

It’s a Friday evening in autumn. Kimberly made herself dinner and is waiting for her father to come home for the weekend. He’s later than usual. She’s not worried yet.

Then the power goes out.

Like everyone else, she waits, assuming it’ll come back on. It doesn’t. As the hours pass and the silence outside starts to carry something different in it, something distant and wrong, the understanding arrives that this isn’t a power cut.

The First Decision

Her first instinct is her neighbors. Carmen and Luis, two doors down, an older couple who have known her since she was small, who check in on her, who she checks in on. Before she does anything else, she knocks on their door. Because that’s just who she is.

After that, once she’s satisfied they’re okay and she’s back inside with the door locked, the training her father drilled into her starts to take over.

She goes to her father’s bedroom and opens the closet. The gun case sits on the top shelf where it always does. A Beretta 92 and his hunting rifle, one loaded magazine each. She has fired both. She can field strip the Beretta with her eyes closed because he made her practice until she was bored. She doesn’t take the case down. She just confirms it’s there and closes the door again.

Her father followed New York’s gun laws exactly. Ten rounds in the Beretta, five in the rifle, and no spare ammunition anywhere in the apartment. Whatever is in that case is all there will ever be. That single fact sits with her in the kitchen while she waits for a text that doesn’t come.

He’ll come. That’s what she keeps telling herself. Within 24 hours, maybe 48, he’ll come and this will become a story they tell later.

Later, deep into the first night, she goes back to the closet. She takes the Beretta out of the case, checks the magazine, confirms a round is chambered and sets the safety. She carries it to the living room and sets it on the coffee table next to the candle.

Then she lies down on the couch and waits for morning.

The Silence She Can’t Outrun

It requires distraction, noise, and something to put between herself and the grief she’s spent two years refusing to feel.

The blackout takes all of that away.

No television. No music. Games are gone too. Just a dark apartment on the Upper West Side, the distant sound of something getting worse further up the city, and a silence that gives her nowhere to hide.

She holds it together. That much she’s good at. But the grief finds her anyway, not all at once, but in waves. On the good days she’ll be completely fine, clear headed, practical, doing what needs doing. Then something will happen, a tense moment, a close call, a sudden reminder of how alone she actually is, and she’ll find herself breaking in a way she didn’t see coming. Crying in a stairwell. Hands shaking after they stopped shaking. Sitting on the kitchen floor at 3am not entirely sure why.

There’s no language for what’s happening to her. So moving forward is all she knows to do.

Day Two. Day Three.

The Upper West Side stays quieter than other parts of the city in those first days. She can hear what’s happening further uptown from the apartment window. But her street holds.

48 hours in, she sees the first police. Not going door to door, not knocking to check on residents. Just small squads moving through the streets on foot, visible, present, doing what they can without any way to coordinate anything beyond their immediate line of sight.

Her father doesn’t come.

Another day passes. Then another. And slowly, in the way that hard truths arrive when you’ve run out of reasons to keep them away, she starts to understand that nobody is coming to get her. Whatever is stopping her father from crossing from New Jersey into the city is not something that gets fixed in a few days. For the foreseeable future, she is on her own.

Kimberly Sterns has been on her own before. She knows how to do this.

What she doesn’t know yet is what she’s going to find when she finally decides to go looking for answers.

Writing Her

The challenge with Kimberly wasn’t making her sympathetic. That part came easily. Making sure she never felt like a victim took far more work.

Every reason to fall apart exists here. A lost mother. An unreachable father. A seventeen year old in a city coming apart at the seams. But Kimberly doesn’t fall apart, not completely, not in the ways you might expect. She adapts, acts, and makes decisions that most adults in her situation wouldn’t have the clarity to make.

At the same time, the grief is real. The loneliness is real. The moments where the composure cracks are real. She’s not a superhero. She’s a teenager carrying more than any teenager should have to carry, doing the best she can with what her father gave her and what life took away.

That tension is the whole story. The strength and the fracture, running alongside each other, every single day. You can read more about the world she inhabits on The World page.