I was in school, suburbia NY. During my second period break I heard someone say that s plane had hit the WTC. I didn't know what to think, I had no idea what was really going on. A couple minutes later someone said another plane had hit the WTC. I remember laughing and saying, "What the hell kind of retarded pilots are they?"

Halfway through third period everyone in the school was out of classes, everyone was talking, saying it wasn't a small thing, that it was a massive attack, that the Pentagon had also been hit, that it was terrorists. The administration rolled out TVs under the covered breezeways connecting the buildings. I watched both towers collapse.

Fourth period came and my math teacher rounded up all the kids he could for that class. He said, "I know there's lots of other things going on in the world today, but we should just set it aside for the next 45 minutes and focus on Derivatives and calculus." A girl in the back row behind me was crying all class because her mom worked at the WTC. Her mom had escaped. One kid right in the middle worked all period, asked questions about calculus, paid rapt attention to Derivatives. Next period he found out his dad had died.

Me and a bunch of my friends didn't really feel like going to school past 5th period. We ditched out, along with more than half the school. I still couldn't get in touch with my mom, who works on the 43rd Floor of a skyscraper right across from the UN. The cell phones circuits were all busy.

We watched TV. I saw the towers collapse again, and again, and again. I saw the explosions for the first times and all the other footage. We ordered pizza because my parents' friends weren't home. We watched Arab people cheer when they heard the news.

I went home. My parents wanted us all to have a family prayer time. I had stopped really believing in all that, but we did it anyway. I didn't do any homework, or watch TV. I went to bed pretty early.

The next day we had an assembly at school. We listened to Bush's speech in my American history class. I remember thinking that he should have stopped it. Then thinking that whoever had done this would have to pay, no matter what the cost. My math teacher marked me off for not having done my Calculus homework.