It Was a Tuesday

At least, I think it was a Tuesday. I was in eighth grade, and was sitting in second hour, Advanced English.

Mrs. Bower, the gifted teacher, was in the room preparing things for the days' lesson; she came every Tuesday in class to do different activities with us. Sometimes we did projects, sometimes stories with holes, sometimes different writing assignments aside from what Mrs. Anderson was having us do. I don't remember what she had planned for that day.

Shortly after class had started, Mr. Young, the American History teacher for in the high school (the junior high was connected to the high school) popped his head into the room.

"Some idiot just ran a plane into the World Trade Center," he told Mrs. Bower and Mrs. Anderson.

Channel One, a news program we watched every day at the beginning of second hour, didn't have any news that day about the WTC. I knew it was because it was taped before anything actually happened in New York City. It wasn't until the next day that we saw anything related to the tragedy.

We watched the news in almost every class for the rest of the day. Mr. Thexton, my Earth Science teacher, snapped at our class when some of us weren't paying attention to what we were seeing on screen. Some people in my classes joked a little about it. I remember being horrified when I saw images of people running away from a train of billowing smoke down the street. And it continued to get worse, and I wondered this real thing that was actually happening would never end. That kind of thing only happened in movies.

At lunch, the teachers had set up a television on a rolling cart in the cafeteria and had turned on the news.   I sat at a round table close to where the t.v. set was, watching and trying to process what was happening as I waited for the rest of the group I sat with to arrive. Tessa and Leanne came, talking.

Bethany, one girl who I used to call my best friend (and I seemed to go through a lot of them), was one of the last of us to sit down. She walked up to the table in a mild rage, her feet attached to some invisible engine propelling her forward. She slammed her tray down, and looked at us all before taking her seat.

"I can't believe it," she said, her tone serious and tinged with snark. "I was going to visit the World Trade Center some day and now I can't even go because someone knocked it down."

I sat there, shocked. Was she really going to make this all about her? Did she not realize what had happened? How many lives were lost, from the employees inside the building to the people on the planes and then those who tried to save them? How many families were affected, including, as I would find out later that day, a distant cousin on my mom's side and his two daughters, who were much to young to fully grasp what had happened, who had lost a wife and mother that morning?

This was much bigger than that. It affected all of us.