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September 11th, 2001
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 my story
Posted by: Katie from Raleigh
Saturday March 09, 2002 @ 06:40 PST

this was the kind of thing that people never expect, but somehow brought us all closer together.
it was about one month since high school started for me, i was 14 years old and still a nervous freshman with a good amount of friends, although we weren't very close yet. my mom drove me to school because my dad had to go to atlanta for a business trip. i remember thinking how incredibly beautiful the sky looked as the sun came up above raleigh's few tall buildings (my school is just outside of the downtown area.)
not thinking anything was odd, i went to first period (computer applications). all we were doing was typing a large project up into powerpoint, which i had almost finished anyway. i downloaded some pictures, ran through and did some editing, and was done before the end of the period. what i did find disturbing was the fact that by the time the period ended at 9:25 to go to homeroom, people already had their tv's on for the morning announcements. this was way too soon.
when i walked from the 3rd floor to the basement, nobody had their tv's on the school's channel, but rather on cnn. i didn't really notice the picture until i walked into my classroom...and then i heard something very disturbing.
"there's been a plane crash on the world trade center", my teacher announced. but...she said that it was a commuter airline that crashed, not a boeing 767. i figured that it was some pilot who had just learned how to fly that scraped the side of the building with his little puddle jumper. and then the announcements came on, on the school's channel. the usually upbeat seniors that do the daily announcements looked depressed and somewhat in shock. they said that an american airlines plane had just crashed into the second wtc tower and to tune to cnn for more announcements. by the time we left homeroom, the entire school knew.
in math, my teacher was trying to make things seem normal, not to shelter us but rather to keep us focused on algebra. she shut the tv off for awhile, taught us some things and then, to give in to our pleas, turned it back on, just as one of the towers collapsed. all we could say was, "oh my god, oh my god." by the time second period ended, the pentagon was hit.
in spanish, my teacher was a nervous wreck. her spanish exchange students had flown into jfk two days earlier and their parents were worried that they never made it down to nc, so she gave us our test and in tears, walked in and out of the room to let them use the phone in the english conference room down the hall to make international calls.
because we had a test, my teacher didn't want us to have to go down to lunch and watch the tv's in the cafeteria and then have to come back and concentrate, so she let us go to third lunch. at this point, i hadn't met all the friends i eat with now, so i sat with heather and bushra, who happens to be bengali, and we all watched in horror as osama bin laden's picture kept flashing across screens displaying the burning remains of the now two collapsed buildings. bushra was so angry- every white person in the cafeteria had moved themselves away from our rather diverse population of asian and indian people. it was as if being arabic was becoming a stigma that people were afraid of.
fourth period simply consisted of watching the tv. we walked out, one by one at our health teacher's consent, to call our parents. my mom said she wasn't sure where dad was, or if he was coming home that night.
at the end of the day, i had no place to go. all after school clubs had been cancelled, so i sat with heather in the mcdonalds down the street and we ate mcflurries while we both tried to call our parents. my mom works in a special eduation class, so when she picked both of us up, we told her all the things that she never got to tell her class. tears came down her face and we simply sat quietly and stared out the window.
my father had been in the air, i learned later, when the planes hit the wtc. the pilot had to circle atlanta for half an hour and while they were landing, dad saw thousands of cars exiting. when he came into the airport, he was the last plane to be allowed to land and the busiest airport in the us was deserted. he went to the business by subway and they ordered a car for him. it was the last car that was on the lot to rent. he drove home and arrived just after midnight.
after that day, life seemed so serene. there were no white lines of condensation from planes in the sky. there was no music on the radio for a week, just news coverage.
i used to live in albany, ny. commuting to nyc was a way of life for many families. my friends knew people who had to wait a week or two to find their mom or dad.
...all i could think of was, one day i'll go back and see ground zero and remember how far we came in the weeks after 9/11/01, and how much respect the muslims earned in our school. we truly all became americans.