It was a Tuesday morning in September. Third grade had just started barely two weeks earlier and I was getting used to my new teacher, Mrs. Crowe. She had long red curls and big brown eyes. When she talked, any topic she brought up was bright and cheery. She made math sound like the happiest thing in the world. Walking around as we worked on our workbooks, enthusing about how “math was the key to everything” and telling us if “we could multiply and divide, you could do anything” in that happy, cheery voice of hers. Some days, I believed what she said to be true.
My best friend, Malayna, and I were sitting at our table doing our spelling for the morning. We were working on cursive letters, which were quite difficult as it was our first week practicing each letter by itself until we eventually would get the words all together and correct. This week, it happened to be the multiple curves of the “q” that we had to master. My struggles only came with the uppercase “Q”, to which I had the utmost trouble doing it perfectly, which was something I strived to do.
Mrs. Crowe was especially frantic this morning, answering her phone more than usual. People in the class were worried because she was known for being the quiet and laid back teacher. This was nowhere near laid back, the way she was looking around and pacing while we did our morning work. Her hands were clasped behind her back and her hazel eyes wide and worried, something unlike any other morning yet to come.
It was around nine in the morning and the class phone rang again. I looked over and Malayna stopped what she was doing too.
“Are you sure? The second one?” Mrs. Crowe’s face turned pale and she looked down, putting her free hand to her forehead. She muttered something under her breath and didn’t say another word.
Principal Cook cleared his throat on the intercom.
“All students are going to be picked up at 10:30 AM by a parent or guardian and will go home for the day. School will resume tomorrow. Thank you for your patience.” We went crazy. Everyone was cheering and laughing. It was like a snow day except there wasn’t any snow! Malayna and I rushed over to our backpacks, stuffing them full with our books and our homework pages. I slipped my jacket on and tossed my backpack on my shoulder, following everyone out to the hallway. Even with the excitement of the day’s events so far, the older kids waiting with us were silent, glancing at us giggling. I could tell by their looks that us laughing wasn’t appropriate. I was happy five minutes later after fiddling with my thumbs when I heard my name and my brother’s name called to go to the cars outside.
My mother picked me up, her eyes red and bloodshot.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked her. Jimmy, my brother, from the left of me asked her the same thing. She sighed, putting a hand over her pregnant belly and looked to the two of us.
“In New York City today, two towers were hit by planes. They are saying over a thousand people died, guys,” my mom said and turned down the radio. My brother, Jimmy, and I were silent for a moment.
“What do you mean towers?” My brother asked her.
“The Twin Towers, the picture Dad has above his desk in the office,” Mom elaborated. I remembered the two gray towers on the river as part of the New York City skyline. Then I pictured them, gone and faded from the frame.
“Really?” I asked.
Mom nodded.
“That’s why you were pulled out of school. The government wants everyone to be safe.”
My brother and I spent the rest of the day sitting and finishing our homework and playing on the PlayStation. Neither of us mentioned a word about the twin towers, but we both knew that it must have been bad if security was heightened all the way to Wisconsin.
Whenever my parents would discuss it in passing when they walked through the room, Jimmy and I would look to each other and shrug, press play on our video game again and resort to our previous activities.
“I can’t believe this. Both of them are down,” Dad says to Mom. She would shake her head, rubbing her temples, and give my father a concerned look before walking through the living room to make lunch: grilled cheese and macaroni and cheese.
Despite how much we enjoyed being able to hear the sounds of the Hot Wheels cars on the screen, we didn’t like the worrisome silence my parents produced. They didn’t have to watch the news in private. We wanted to see it too. Instead, we were only shown YouTube clips by my dad, who blabbered on about conspiracy theory and the American government.
“There’s no way that there isn’t a connection. You see?” Dad asked us with excitement in his eyes. Jimmy shook his head, sitting back on the couch. I sighed, trying to see my dad’s point, but I couldn’t. The look in his eyes when he realized we didn’t see it like he did was saddening. A look of defeat that matched the pictures of broken buildings Mrs. Crowe showed our class of the aftermath two weeks later.
The next day at school, we did a memorial service and made flags on construction paper for the 9/11 memorial. My class was quiet because even though we were all barely eight years old, we knew that the effects of the events from what our parents had said would be drastic and change the world we would grow up in. And we were right.
