'Emergency Quarters' is a debut children's book by two children from the 90s: NPR

Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

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A few years ago, Carlos Matias was living in Florida and feeling homesick for his hometown.

“I just started writing short stories about New York,” Matias says. “And then I started sending them in to the New York Times Metropolitan diary.”

His short story, Emergency accommodationsbecame one Finalist 'Best of the Year' 2021 and this year a children's book.

“When I was growing up and first starting to walk to school, my mom would give me a quarter every day,” Matias says. She would tell him, “‘If you need me, or if you’re going to be home late, or if you’re going to hang out with your friends, call me and let me know.’ So I was a young Carlos running around Queens with a wad of quarters in his pockets.”

Emergency quarters is about a boy named Ernesto who, like Matias, is allowed to walk to school without his parents for the first time.

Ernesto throws on his lucky kicks and his favorite Mets hat.

“I feel fresh!” he says to the mirror.

But before he can sneak out the door, his mother stops him.

“For emergencies, Ernesto,” she whispers, covering his right hand with both hands. “If you need me, find a public phone.”

A what?

“When I do story time and the like, I always have to start by asking the child, 'Do you know what a public telephone is?' And I get the funniest answers,” laughs Matias.

If anyone reading this doesn't know what a public telephone is, send a telegram to NPR headquarters and someone will contact you. They may be scarce now, but when Matias was growing up in the 1990s, there were public telephones on virtually every street corner. At its peak, there were more than two million in the United States, according to the FCC. But in 2016, fewer than 100,000 were in use.

Emergency Quarters, written by Carlos Matias and illustrated by Gracey Zhang

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“This was really fun to work on,” says Gracey Zhang, who illustrated Emergency accommodations“I think because we're both '90s kids.”

To bring Matias's youth to life, Zhang worked traditionally, starting with pencil sketches. She then used black ink for the line work and gouache paint for the color on large pieces of paper. “I like to work bigger than the book is actually published,” Zhang explains. “So that the image is not enlarged when scanning, but rather reduced.”

Her guiding light for the color palette, the feeling of the book, was another staple of the 90s: the windbreaker. You know the kind. Shiny, swoosh. Bright, saturated colors.

“For every book I work on, I like to focus on a specific feeling or object that I want to evoke,” she explains. “This story has almost – think of ’90s sitcom show colors. That informed a lot of the clothing that the characters wear.

For research, Zhang also did some – gentle – stalking of Matias' childhood photos on the Internet. And Matias sent along some photos of his neighborhood – Corona, Queens.

Emergency quarters

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Queens is colorful—and detailed—in Zhang’s paintings. The streets are bustling, the arcade has purple-checkered floors, the umbrellas of Señora Mayra’s fruit stand are a tropical blue, public telephones (of course) dot the landscape, and you can almost hear the 7 train running through the neighborhood.

“I live in New York and I'm very particular about the images of subway trains,” Zhang says. “I spent way too much time making sure I had the right train — the model of the train, the line.”

“Something people always say who are from Queens is, 'Oh my god, The Lemon Ice King, the Dominican chip shop restaurants,” says Matias. “So the fact that they were actually there, these famous places, that was pretty cool.”

On Monday, Ernesto and his friends visit Señor José's bodega. His friends buy cheese puffs and gummy worms, but Ernesto saves his makeshift quarters. On Tuesday, they go to Manny's Video Games, but Ernesto doesn't play any games. That night, he asks his mother why he doesn't have as many quarters as his friends. She tells him that fewer quarters means that each one is special—kind of like limited-edition baseball cards.

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“On Wednesday morning he feels his quarters jingling in his pocket all the way to school,” Matias writes.

“¡Jugos de frutas! Seventy-five cents!” Ernesto loves Señora Mayra's fruit juices; they make him big and strong.

“Hello! How about chinola, Ernesto?”

The clear tropical drink reminds Ernesto of summers in the Dominican Republic.

“Thanks, Señora Mayra, but I'm keeping these limited edition quarters.”

“Such restraint at a young age,” laughs illustrator Gracey Zhang. “My mother wouldn’t trust me with coins. I would just want to rummage around the house for some extra coins to buy myself my own snacks.

Still, Zhang says she felt a connection with Ernesto. Before living in New York City, she grew up in a small town outside Vancouver, Canada, where she also walked to school alone, just like Ernesto. Only, they didn't even walk to have any pay phones. “There was a period where kids almost had less distractions,” she says. “So this kind of young independence really appealed to me.”

“That's true,” says author Carlos Matias. But – he emphasizes – what Ernesto has is actually the best of both worlds. Because, as he writes in the book, the mother is never far away. Ernesto can be independent and experience the world while also knowing that his parents are just an emergency call away.

And if it's an empanada emergency…