Everything in
front of me just shriveled down to nothing. It feels like there's nothing
left. So many emotions were flying through my mind. What happens next?
It was a crisp
fall morning in New York when I heard my alarm clock buzz. I looked at my clock;
it was 7:02am. I realized I should probably get out of bed. I walked sluggishly
to my bathroom, dragging my feet in front me. I could hear my mom in the shower
listening to some old 80’s music. My mom has always been a more bubbly person,
where my dad's more chill and laid back. I’ve always been more like my dad.
After getting ready, I walked downstairs and could smell my mom's pancakes. We
lived in a pretty spacious New York apartment. Three bedrooms and one bathroom.
We’ve lived here my whole life; my parents moved in after they got married
because it was so close to my mom's bakery and my dad's station.
“Good morning, Sunshine,” my mom
said in her cheerful voice as always.
“Morning,” I said, sitting down next
to my dad at the kitchen table. He looked
tired as always, a fireman at the local station, and he got called in late at
night a lot, so he never really slept well. I felt bad until I realized how
much he really did like helping people. My mom owned a bakery down the street
and worked whenever she felt like it, really. I went to school at City Knoll
Middle School. I hated it. I always had. When I was young my dad would take me
out of school to get ice cream because he knew how much I hated being there.
“Ready for school?” Dad said.
“Ready as ever,” I said more
sarcastically than I meant to.
It was only my second week of eighth
grade, and I already hated it. After being an only child my whole life, I was
more mature than the kids in my grade, and I found almost everyone there
childish and annoying. But I stuck through it and went.
It was 7:45 now. Everyday at the
same time, we all walk down the apartment building together and to the parking
garage. Dad left for work to the station a few miles away in his big black
truck, and Mom and I got in her little white Chevy, and she drove me to school.
It was about 8:00 when I got to
school.
“Have a great day at school, Honey,
I love you.”
“Love you.”
I walked into school, passing all
the loud kids near their lockers getting ready to start the day. About 45
minutes boring minutes went by while I was in study hall; suddenly, the
classroom phone rang. My teacher got up to answer it, and we continued working,
thinking nothing of it. A few seconds went by and I looked up at her, face
turning pale.
I turned to my friend in class. “What
is happening?” I whispered, hearing sirens roar from miles away.
The teacher turnen back at us. The
silence in the room made my stomach hurt.
“There’s been an emergency at the World Trade Center.” Because of living
so close, I thought of all the people my parents and I know that work there.
“What kind of emergency?”
“A plane crashed into one of the
towers,” my teacher
bellowed,
her voice shaking.
She dragged the TV over with the
cart and put on the news. There was debris and smoke everywhere.
Seeing all the fire trucks and
police men surrounding the building couldn't help but make me think of my dad.
I knew he was there somewhere; he worked at the closest station. There's no
way he's not there. 15 minutes passed, and the only thing you could hear
was the TV. We were all silent. Then suddenly, a scream of terror reached
through the TV screen. Another plane crashed into the North Tower.
People were crying and screaming.
There was smoke everywhere. It felt like watching a horror movie. But no, this
was real.
There's no way this was an accident;
we're under attack.
11:30, when we were in the passing
block, there was nothing but buzz in the hallway about what was possibly
happening. I was in complete denial. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening
and what could be happening to my dad. A few minutes after settling into my new
class, my teacher got a call. What could this possibly be, how could this
get worse? What I wasn't expecting was him to say my name.
“Abby, you’re getting picked up, you
are excused.”
The whole class stared at me as I
packed up my things and walked out.
As I was walking, so many thoughts
were rushing through my head; Who is picking me up? Is everyone okay? Is
this another attack?
I reached the office doors, and I
saw my mom standing out there. I felt both relief and terror. Her face looked
pale like she had been sick. I walked to her, and she said nothing, so I waited
until we got in the car, the same little white Honda she drove me in that
morning when the only thing I had to worry about was school.
“So.. what's this about?” I said,
trying to break the horrorizing silence.
“Jim called me,” my mom said,
holding her tears back. Jim was my dad's
best friend and had been for longer than I’d even thought in his life; they
worked at the same station together.
“After the planes had hit the
station split up and no one has seen your father since.”
A lump in my throat formed, and we
both let out sobs, still sitting in my school parking lot. It felt like I was
about to pass out. Five minutes passed when my mom finally spoke up, breaking
the silence.
“I have hope that he is somewhere
and didn't tell anyone,”my mom says, rubbing the tears off her face.
“We should get home.”
My mom and I sat for hours, waiting
for my dad to come home. We looked outside and saw smoke still roam the air.
People were picking up debris, but none of them had the familiar face we were
looking for. It was 3 AM now, and he should have been home eight hours before.
I fell asleep eventually, but I knew my mom was up all night waiting for him.
The next morning we didn't even
bother excusing my absence from school. My mom and I drove to what we used to
call the World Trade Center, but it was now what looked like a war zone. People
had stayed up all night cleaning, but there was debris everywhere and smoke was
still traveling through the air, burning my lungs. We walked around, hoping for
a miracle that my father was one of the hundreds of people here helping, but I
looked through all of them; none of them
were him. With disappointment, my mom and I headed back home, waiting for him
to come to the door.
Two hours of silence and waiting for
the doorbell, my mom jumped up onto her toes like her seat was on fire to
answer the door. She opened it, and I recognized the man from my dad's station.
“Come in, Come in,” my mom said
quietly, hands shaking, closing the door behind him.
“Mrs. Hanson, I’m so sorry, but your
husband did not return after entering the North Tower. It is to our belief that
he was on a higher level as the building collapsed.”
The tall, dark-haired man looked
down at his feet as my mother fell to the ground. I didn’t know what to feel.
Sadness, confusinon, and emptiness all ran through my body. He grabbed my mom's hands and sat for a minute.
I didn’t know what to think.
He was really gone. Anger flowed
through me. How could these people do this much damage to all of these
innocent people? No one, especially my father, deserved this.
As the days and weeks went by, I
missed my dad a lot, but the little things reminded me of him and proved that
he was still here. Once every couple of weeks, my mom picks me up from school
early and brings me to that same ice cream shop that my dad did. Sometimes, it
feels like he’s not even gone.
-Danielle M.
The amount of detail and emotion in this story is crazy,I lost my dad when I was 4 years old and I didn’t really know that he was gone til I got older. I can connect to this line “Sometimes, it feels like he’s not even gone.”
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ReplyDeleteNone of the allusions in the story required me to research them. The allusion I am most familiar with is the World Trade Center and the North Tower. The history in the story came alive in this line, "My mom and I drove to what we used to call the World Trade Center, but it was now what looked like a war zone." It shows how the main character walked through the now destroyed World Trade Center soon after the planes crashed into it.
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ReplyDeleteThe way that you attached the reader to the story emotionally truly brought the historical fiction alive. At the beginning of the story when you subtly talk about the character's dad and how he brings her to go get ice cream, it attaches you to him and because of that it makes you want to keep reading and find out what happened to him.
The central Idea in this story is to hope that her dad was still alive by waiting, and waiting for her dad to ring the doorbell. I liked when you used mature vocabulary when you expressed your teacher's reaction when the first plane hit the towers. “A plane crashed into one of the towers,” my teacher bellowed, her voice shaking.
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