After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  Greg refused to join his friends to go out for lunch when we were first given the option and brought our permission slips in. They tried to convince him to go out with them, telling him he was being a pussy, that he was ridiculous. They assured him nothing bad would happen to him. So he did, and nothing did happen.

  The next day, he was jumped.

  The environment inside of the O’Henry Learning Center wasn’t much better. There were kids from three other schools inside: the Lab School, which had both a middle school and a high school, and the Museum School. There was barely enough room for them, and not a lot of room for us.

  All of our classes were scattered in random classrooms on different floors. The building seemed to have seven different staircases, and we could never keep them straight; sometimes our classes got relocated, and we wandered through the maze, showing up late and nervous. A few “mock” classrooms were created by putting up partitions, and there was often confusion about which room which school or class was supposed to have. Sometimes we looked for alternate space, and a couple of times, we just merged classes. Our school office was the size of a dressing room, and music class was held in a storage closet.

  The O’Henry kids made it clear right away that they didn’t want us there.

  “Get out of our school!” they shouted at us in the hallways.

  Everyone was watching us, looking at us. Older students threw things at us in the cafeteria, beat kids up, chased us around the block, didn’t want us hanging out in their parks, didn’t like us sitting at their lunch tables, didn’t want us eating their lunch food. If we needed to wait for a classroom to open up, we sat down in the hallway and pushed ourselves as close to the wall as we could get, trying not to get pummeled by backpacks or have our fingers stepped on.

  They thought that because we were from downtown, we thought we were “special.” They had no idea how wrong they were. We wanted to be regular kids, regular students, just like them, but our world was so much different than theirs.

  Soon, within the school, a new division surfaced between kids who lived downtown and kids who lived anywhere above Canal Street, outside of the disaster zone; between kids who had been caught in everything and those who got out; between the people who literally lost their homes and those who didn’t.

  “The other kids can hang out after school,” said Sarah, one of Charles’s friends. “They don’t need to move from one place to another, figuring out where to go next, nowhere to cook, using an ice bucket for a refrigerator.”

  Sarah was tall and very thin, wore long skirts with t-shirts, round spectacles, and the same long, skinny brown braid over her shoulder, which she usually fidgeted with. One day, Sarah’s father came to pick her up in a gas mask, and all of the other kids made fun of him. Sarah began carrying a little over-the-shoulder suede purse with fringe on the bottom around with her everywhere. I thought it was weird until I got to high school and I started doing the same thing.

  I need to have everything with me, just in case.

  Everything we needed consisted of pocket money, a student MetroCard, some Tylenol, a lipgloss, and a cell phone. Sarah had a cell phone long before I did, and called her mother anytime she heard a plane flying overhead, watching it until it flew out of sight. Her eyes were always darting, her neck always craning. She scanned her surroundings at all times.

  That looks suspicious.

  Is that supposed to be here?

  What was that sound?

  What is that guy doing?

  Why is there a cop here?

  And it also became personal, as it did for me:

  Why is she looking at me like that?

  What are they saying about me?

  What are they going to do about it?

  She stayed locked in her room whenever she wasn’t in school. She began carrying a flashlight everywhere in her bag too. For her, it was school, home, school, home. She avoided crowds at all costs, and, in the stairway at school, she often waited on the edge of her seat for the bell, hoping to beat the rush. Becca was beginning to have panic attacks in those crowds, though she didn’t know exactly what was happening. When I saw her in the stairwell, jostled between hordes of stinky, sweaty older kids shouting and rough housing, she looked like a lost toddler in a crowded department store.

  “Rebecca, go to the nurse!” Reena shouted as she hurried to class, being carried by the sea of writhing bodies, clutching her books while people shouted at her to get the hell out of their way. Reena, who was a year older than us, had begun clutching everything she owned, because now she owned very little. She lost her Gateway Plaza home and lived in a shelter along with other Battery Park City residents. She didn’t have any of her things, like her Walkman, her DVDs, her sweatshirts, her books. Soon, she would return to Gateway to see men throwing everything she owned into a dumpster. Her Mickey Mouse doll, her childhood books, so many of her clothes were all gone. She slept in the clothes she did have from that day on, refusing to wear pajamas, believing the terrorists would strike again while everyone was asleep.

  Reena asked to see a guidance counselor (apparently, at the time, we had one, but I don’t remember being informed of her existence), who ended up leaving us after a couple of months (because, she said, she saw too much and wouldn’t be able to bring herself to go back when we returned to the building).

  Reena’s father had his own ideas about his daughter’s ability to “just bounce back,” and his misconceptions were the misconceptions of many parents and teachers.

  “Children are naturally resilient,” he told her. “Everyone should stop coddling you guys. Just move on.”

  Whoever started that rumor was undoubtedly the same person who came up with, “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never hurt me,” looking for yet another way to invalidate the very real feelings of young, impressionable people.

  And yet what else could we do but try to move on? What did moving on really mean? Putting one foot in front of the other, listening to adults, doing what we had been trained to do, just show up?

  I got myself dressed, I put on pink Bonne Belle lip gloss, painted my nails, and wore Versace perfume for girls, but on the inside, I was becoming a neurotic adult. There was no concentrating about anything while cymbals were banging together in my brain. I couldn’t make them stop, so my insides danced to this music, flipping and kicking and punching wildly. I spent entire school days nervously looking out of the window and biting my nails, then my cuticles, making my fingers bleed, shaking my foot like I had a motor running, and chewing up my gums. I picked up other people’s reactions as if they were contagious. The room was too small, the noise was too loud, and I was looking for an escape I couldn’t find, one that wasn’t there, like a mouse in a maze that had been set on fire.

  I started feeling dizzy, then nauseous, losing my breath, losing, it felt like, control of myself.

  On the outside, we looked like any other group of kids. We weren’t wearing our pain on our bodies in any obvious way.

  But when we heard the whir of planes overhead, it was clear that breath was being held as we all waited for the sound of the crash.

  If we were outside, and not in a classroom, some of us started running, in no particular direction. Obviously, other kids didn’t run anywhere.

  “Oh my God, what’s wrong with you?” they laughed and pointed.

  What part of “war” didn’t people understand?

  They were fools, all of them.

  “We just know better,” said Sarah. “What do planes do in wars? They drop bombs on people. They don’t get it.”

  In case it wasn’t obvious enough already, it became very clear that there was something different about us and the other kids in the O’Henry Learning Center the day the truck tire popped.

  We were all in the schoolyard for recess when we heard a huge booming noise that echoed across the concrete yard. Everyone stopped what they were doing, but the I.S. 89ers hit the ground or ran around searching for teachers, sobb
ing and hyperventilating.

  The other kids just stared at us like we were crazy.

  “It was just a truck,” said one of the adults overseeing the yard activity.

  None of us believed her, and, that night, I had a dream that I was forced to watch footage of people being crushed in the World Trade Center on the news.

  After that, it became more clear that teachers were dealing with more easily distracted children. People who never used to call out, like Greg, started cracking jokes, getting up and walking around, impulsively banging on the table, wired up, vibrating with hostile energy, and, at the same time, just plain exhausted. Becca’s brother, Ivan, always kept talking, or singing, or banging on the desk when Mr. H asked for three minutes of silence. We’d have to start the time over and over, until we were being dismissed fifteen minutes late every single day.

  Sometime in those first couple of weeks back, a bowling party was thrown for us at Chelsea Piers, a sporting complex off the West Side Highway on 23rd Street that had an ice skating rink, indoor soccer field, batting cages, and golf range, the only place like it in Manhattan. Outside were all of the boats people took to cruise around the harbor, dance, and drink too much.

  I didn’t go, because it was still too difficult to get in and out of the neighborhood.

  Becca was able to walk over from her apartment on 28th Street—she wouldn’t have gone otherwise, since she refused to get on any form of public transportation. She lived in an apartment building complex in Chelsea not unlike ours, which was rent-controlled and had a colorful mix of residents.

  “How was it?” I asked her the next day.

  She shrugged.

  “Bowling alleys are loud,” she said.

  “But did you have fun?”

  “They had a big banner that said Welcome I.S. 89. I think it was supposed to make us feel safe, like it was a safe place.”

  “Did it work?”

  She looked at me as if I had asked her if she believed in Santa Clause.

  “No.”

  * * *

  Charles always reported new threats as we traveled to school.

  “These aren’t people we can declare war on and eliminate. They hide within borders. This is an international organization that spans from Algeria to the Philippines. They’re more serious of a threat than I first thought. They’ll get us, and of course it’ll be New York again.”

  Seek out the danger before it catches you off guard.

  But once I catch it, what do I do?

  The Internet was a dangerous place for a twelve-year-old back in 2001, even more so than it is now, and it was full of false information. Very few news organizations had begun to develop websites, many did not yet have one at all. There was no way to check the reputability of what was up there, but many of us, not just Charles, had this insatiable need to know everything. Along the way, we found out a lot of really terrible other things that happened to people, in the city, in the country, in the rest of the world. In our own country, people killed other people and weren’t even sorry about it. They sexually abused kids, children like my dad’s special-ed students. They robbed and hurt innocent old people. Children were shot. Just going outside could get you killed, especially in New York. They hurt animals and left them to die.

  The more I opened my eyes to the news of the world, the more awful it seemed.

  Like my father, Charles sometimes didn’t know how to talk without practically shouting, even if you were standing right next to him. As a result, Charles was no stranger to being bullied. Other kids saw him as weak. They taunted him in the hallways and during lunch, calling him gay, threatening to hurt him. Even in elementary school, a group of Italian boys who lived in our neighborhood ruthlessly bullied him, forcing him to find a new way to walk home. My mom told me Charles would be “protecting me,” but really, I felt like I was the one protecting Charles. I tried to look out for him when we took the train together after school, but it made me nervous to be alone with him because he was like a moving bulls-eye, and I was tiny.

  On top of the terror report Charles delivered daily on our subway rides, there were the actual last minute MTA transit changes, rerouted trains, delays, policy investigations, and I had no idea how to navigate them. Months ago, whenever the conductor had come on over the loudspeaker on the subway, I had always ignored it, since I was with my mom anyway, or I chuckled, because I couldn’t understand a word he said. Now, I jumped every time, and panicked if I couldn’t understand what he said. What if my life depended on it?

  “Why are we stopping?” I’d ask Charles, who had been stuck in the subway, underground, for an hour after the first plane hit.

  “I’ll bet it’s a bomb,” he’d say. After a moment, he’d thoughtfully add something like, “Maybe they hijacked a train. Maybe someone blew themselves up. Maybe our parents are dead.”

  Journal Entry, 10/7:

  I am pretty religious, but when I was running I thought to myself, if I die, am I going to heaven? I strongly believe in it, but what if something else happened?

  Today in class, Mary told us people kill abortion doctors. How do you stop murdering by murdering?

  I had my friends, Allison, Rose, and Charlotte, who I shared lunchtime with. Allison, like me, was pretty jumpy, but for the most part, they all seemed fine—living, respectively, in the West Village, on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, and in the Fashion District uptown. I called them from the cell phone my parents and I still shared to talk about whatever I had read in my Teen People magazine (when the mail started coming again), sharing some embarrassing story a girl had written in, or hair tip that I thought we should both try that night and check in on the next day. I ripped out pictures of boys and taped them to my wall with scotch tape, like I felt I was supposed to.

  But spontaneity, lightheartedness, joy, silliness, were slowly draining out of me, as if the part of me that was able to produce them had been deprived of blood and oxygen. When my family and I managed to travel uptown to the movie theater by Union Square, I tried to manage to lose myself in ten minutes of an entire movie, but the low rumbling in my seat caused by a train running underneath the theater brought me abruptly out of it. That cold hand of anxiety had found the back of my neck again, keeping a strong grip. Even if it was there for so long that it started to warm up, it never let go.

  Meanwhile, our neighborhood was still infiltrated with police cars and armed soldiers, new barricades and street closures. Cars couldn’t go through without having clearance. Police checkpoints were everywhere, and the cops were not friendly. They eyed large bags suspiciously, even if kids were the ones carrying them.

  At first, I found this insane.

  A twelve-year-old with a Macy’s bag? Really?

  Then I started wondering:

  What if they actually found a twelve-year-old to walk around with a bomb?

  It didn’t matter if police were now carrying bigger guns. A gun was not going to keep anyone safe from a plane, or stop a car bomb or an exploding backpack. They could be lurking anywhere, at any time, like bogeymen popping out from a dark corner of a haunted house.

  Journal Entry, 10/9

  If Afghanistan retaliates, what will happen?

  We’re on full alert so security is higher.

  I live by the bridge, what if a plane from Afghanistan flies into it and it’s too late?

  Chemical threats are scary (the ocean).

  The Pentagon is not as paid attention to.

  Bin Laden wants to destruct not negotiate.

  We’re getting nervous by the sounds of fire jets. We have to tell our minds they’re protecting us.

  Are any other countries considering hurting us? Why? Which ones? Will bin Laden encourage it? If his only problem is his opinion of our culture, we could’ve talked about it because that’s what the United Nations is for. I try not to show it, but I’m afraid of another 9/11 happening. It would be worse if I was alone.

  We should all just have a conference.

  We tried
to come back from Pathmark but couldn’t get through because there was a lockdown. Maybe something happened on the bridge. Stuyvesant High School is going back tomorrow. I don’t want to go back to our building. I just can’t. I’m nervous because I saw tapes on the news of Afghanistan burning flags. I’m a nervous wreck; my grandpa just fell and is in the hospital. The day after his birthday.

  I have changed my mind about the conference after the burning flags footage.

  Journal Entry, 10/10

  I gave a blind man on the subway $1. Even if he’s not really blind, he must be scared like everyone else but has nobody to make him feel better. Not that money will, but maybe he can buy a sandwich.

  Journal Entry, 10/11

  I just found out that an Islamic man knew a female friend of ours. He ran away with his bags, and she got a letter from him that said don’t go near the World Trade Center on September 11th or any malls on Halloween. Oh my God. Halloween? She sent it to the FBI. I am trying to study for my Spanish test.

  * * *

  The South Street Seaport had always been the main tourist attraction in our neighborhood. Now, there was Ground Zero.

  Tourists started coming downtown, which was technically “open” again, asking for directions to the World Trade Center.

  There is no World Trade Center, you fucking idiot.

  People weren’t at the site reflecting or crying. They lined up to take pictures in front of the pit, smiling and waving, and when green netting was put up around the fence to block people from seeing what was inside, people poked holes in it so they could stick their cameras in and get the shot anyway. Eventually, some sort of bridge was put up to give people a photo opp. They posed, family members with fanny packs and arms around each other, one, two, three, cheese, and it made our experience feel even less real.

  “I can’t believe they’re allowed to do this,” Sarah said.

  Soon, vendors were popping up on the surrounding streets, selling booklets like the ones my parents bought me at Broadway shows, magnets, cups, playing cards, all showing images of the Towers on fire and the planes crashing into them, of people running and screaming, of the collapse. They were mostly people from Chinatown.