My 9/11 Story

It was my first week of high school, at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music, Art and the Performing Arts, on the Upper West Side. I was starting to make new friends, which made me feel a little more comfortable in this entirely new situation; everyone was talented, everyone was special, everyone was truly unique. I was sitting with some of my new friends at my strangely early lunch period (10:45am) when one of my new barely-friends came running in and told us that someone had blown up the World Trade Center. She said they were gone. “Impossible,” I thought, I had just been there the previous afternoon, meeting my mom after school. 

This news then brought a rush of emotions. I could feel the blood rushing to my face, the confusion building. I gathered my things and left the lunch room and somehow in my fog of confusion, I heard that there was an emergency room set up on one of the other floors for all of us whose parents were in the WTC area that morning. In 2001, cell phones still were not very popularly used, and my mom and I shared one very strange looking phone with a flip-out bottom, which I happened to have that day. I called her office, her friends’ offices, my aunts, and anyone else I could think of. For some reason, my phone was one of the only ones working in that emergency response room. I made friends with another freshman, who had just moved to NYC from Madrid to study ballet, and whose brother worked in the South Tower. I let her use my phone to call whoever she wanted. I saw one of my classmates from my vocal music classes sitting with her dad, both of them crying. All the while, I had not heard from my mom and I still did not know exactly what had happened downtown. 

We were made to go to our homerooms at some point to listen to the principal make an announcement that I’m sure he never imagined making during his career. He retired the next year. They told us that we could not leave to go home without a parent coming to pick us up— well, my single mother was unaccounted for, and I was not about to sleep over at my new school that I did not like very much. I called my mom’s friend from work who was now working at a new law firm uptown; miraculously, I got a hold of her and she agreed to come pick me up. I don’t really remember much of the rest of the day at school, but I imagine it was spent calling anyone and everyone I possibly could. I got calls from friends in Spain making sure we were okay— I told them I was fine but still had not heard from my mom. 

Eventually, around 3pm, my mom’s friend got to LaGuardia to pick me up and we started walking out of the building, not really knowing what to do. I saw a woman walking up the steps of the school and realized she was my mom. I ran over and hugged her; I had never realized until that moment how much I loved my mom. We shared stories of what had happened to us and she told us about the hell she had gone through that morning. She had seen things that no civilian should ever see. She saw an airplane wheel on the corner of her block, stood and watched the towers burning above her, hid from the dust clouds, and had walked all the way from the Financial District up to my school on the UWS. 

We all went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant a couple of blocks away and watched the news, trying to figure out how we would get home to Queens. We ended up walking down 57th Street and got on a bus (some buses were running, and all were free) as far East as we could go. We then found that the only way to Queens was to walk across the Queensboro Bridge. You never fully realize how long a bridge is until you’ve walked across it. We stood in the center of it for a few minutes, just looking at the cloud of ash and dust that had formed over where the beautiful World Trade Center once stood. It didn’t sink in, what had happened that day. We continued our walk home, in disbelief and shock, confused and scared about what the future would bring, but happy that we had our family.