Every Reagan Bleeds Blue: A "Blue Bloods" Fanfiction

So... Plan B? ~ Part 1

The plan was simple. Go, walk around, take some pictures, and leave. Obviously, Emily wasn't going to rush through it and leave as fast as she could. She valued the history and was grateful for the opportunity, but at the same time, she knew she wasn't going to spend forever there.

In her Advanced Placement World History class, they were discussing the Holocaust and the Second World War. So, her teacher decided to assign them all a project: they had to go to a museum or interview someone (like a Holocaust survivor or World War II soldier, or their families) and write a report. Emily chose the former, so she decided that after school on Friday, she'd visit the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a synagogue turned museum in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Like she said, the plan was simple. Nothing could possibly go wrong. Or so she thought.

The plan started to change at dinner the previous Sunday. When she mentioned the project and her plan to the rest of her family, Nicky asked if she could tag along. Not because she was exceptionally interested in visiting the museum, she later told her cousin, but because it'd give them an excuse to hang out. And who knows? The Synagogue's in the middle of Chinatown. Maybe they could stop to get some Boba tea afterwards? Win-win for both of them!

Okay, not a problem. Emily loved Nicky's company, and she could have her cousin take the pictures for her presentation while she took notes. Nicky loved photography, so she gladly agreed, and besides, that way Emily could be in the pictures, proving that she actually did the assignment herself.

Then, Thursday evening, the plan went awry a bit more when her mom said that she'd have to take Jack and Sean with her.

"But Mom," she countered. "It's a museum." She emphasized the last word. "They're going to be bored out of their minds, I mean, Jack is ten and Sean is eight! Why do I have to babysit? I'm doing a project."

"Come on, it'll be good for them. Learning about history and all that stuff." Linda responded absentmindedly while folding the laundry. "And besides, I told you, baseball practice got cancelled, and I'm working late at St. Victor's."

"But Mom," she repeated, before Linda cut her off, setting down her laundry and giving her daughter a mom look.

"Emily, my decision is final. You and Nicky will get the boys from school, go to the museum together, and then you guys walk the half a mile or whatever down to One PP and your grandfather will take you all home when he's done with work. Easy-peasy."

Seeing that the conversation was going nowhere, Emily resigned herself to her defeat and agreed with her mother's instructions, grabbing her socks from the laundry pile.

So while the plan was certainly disrupted by the party of one becoming a party of four, things weren't completely hopeless. If she bribed her brothers with ice cream, maybe they'd be just patient enough to give her the time she needed to explore the museum.

And so, around four o'clock the next afternoon, she followed her new plan. Emily and Nicky waited for the boys outside their school, and the four set off across Manhattan to Chinatown. They walked next to each other down the sidewalk, the girls on the ends and the boys in the middle. Emily and Nicky talked about drama in each of their classes, with the boys jumping in every once in a while to share a disgusting food combination one of their friends made during lunch that day. After the third recipe involving chocolate milk and ketchup, Nicky had heard enough, and promised them an extra scoop in their ice cream cone if they stopped being so gross, which they gladly agreed to.

The museum trip actually went pretty smoothly, much to Emily's surprise. Jack and Sean were actually fairly interested in the stuff around them, for a couple minutes at a time, asking some pretty good questions for elementary schoolers before returning to their own conversation about who would win in a fight between a dinosaur and a superhero.