story2229.xml

story2229.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

I was sleeping in my second hour class, as usual, when a student quietly knocked on the door and asked to see Mr. Fletcher. He was immediately given an audience with our teacher, and when he had left our teacher quickly strode up to the television and turned it on. The second plane had just collided with the tower...and newsmen were amazed. They were still wondering whether it was an accident.
The people in my class were so shocked...we all tried to pass our feelings of with humour. I thought that this must be some cruel joke, it couldn't be true, we hadn't been attacked like this since Pearl Harbor. Immediately after class we went straight to our friends. I remember telling Lauren bleakly, "Two planes crashed into the twin towers in New York." She wouldn't believe me.
In third hour, all of us sat around the television, transfixed with horror. The Pentagon was hit. I wondered if the terrorists would leave our country anything. A lot of our teachers wouldn't let us watch the news, I guess they thought we might brood. At lunch, that was all we could talk about. We watched people cry in the halls. It was really depressing, and I kind of wished that we could leave the school, which by now was filled with halfbaked rumors and stuff.
My mom excused my sister from school, along with my cousin and I. We were joined by my sister's best friend, who had a waver that hour. We drove down to the coffee house, bought some coffee and hot chocolate, and talked for three straight hours. We talked about how scared we were, and how when it happened, we hadn't believed it. "I burst out laughing when I saw it," Valerie related.
Ylinne, my sister, told us how one of her classmates had started crying when he recieved a telephone message from the office. His grandma, who lived in New York, was safe. She had just called.
After that, we went home. Our cleaning lady Marcel was there, and the television was on. But it was old, stale news...we grew tired of watching the horrors happen, and hearing speculations about how many people had died. We turned the television off, but that left a void. I felt cut off.
I remembered how people had cried at school, and many anchors had broken down while reporting. I was unable to cry, and that lack of grief was horrendous to me. I felt like a monster, like I didn't have any emotions at all. I still can't cry.
My sister started to cry at dinner, when we watched the Palestinian children rejoicing in the streets. It seemed disgusting that others hated us that much.
Afterwords, I went to the Internet and looked up all the stuff I could find on the World Trade Center. A message board had been placed at the site where we could vent our feelings about what had happened. I remember reading one man's comment that New Yorkers sucked and they deserved it. How can you watch a person having to make a choice between death by fire and death by air and come out unchanged? I was blinded with anger.
Another man voiced his bigoted opinions about Muslims. I was really disgusted. Having heard echoes of his voice in the innocent voices of my classmates made me extremely angry. It was bigots like him that made our world so scary.