I was in my tenth grade history class. Our room didn't have a TV and no one had come in to to tell us what had happened. My teacher finished his lecture and when we filed out into the hallway, it was eerily quiet and deserted. There was always an odd feeling of having done something wrong or being somewhere I wasn't supposed to be when I found myself in an empty hallway. Puzzling at the absence of the usual inter-period cacophony and gridlock, my classmates and I sidled down the hall, peering into the adjacent classrooms. It wasn't long before the solemn expressions and images of plumes of smoke told us what we had been so blithely ignorant of moments before. While we were engrossed in European history, other classes had been interrupted by news of events that would come to dominate the tone of the following ten years.
The next hours were spent silently watching coverage of the attacks in chemistry. The silence was broken periodically by parents nervously plucking their child out of class, someone quietly sobbing into their desk, or a cellphone ringing louder than any phone had ever rung before. School was eventually dismissed early and I went home knowing everyone I knew was safe, but not how profoundly the world had just changed.
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