[christiangirl]

I was getting ready for school when I found out. That day marked my being 16 for exactly two weeks, so I was a little excited (but also grumpy because being 16 had sucked so far). I had a club meeting before class so I was rushing my dad. My mom ran out in her underwear, yelling at us to turn on the tv...something about a plane crash and a building. Unfortunately, when I was 16, I was extremely selfish. If it didn't revolve around me, I didn't care. Plus, I was still embarassed about seeing people in their underwear, so I fussed at my mom to go back in her room and put some clothes on. Even though I caught a few glimpses of fire on the TV, I didn't stop to watch because I didn't want to be late to my meeting. It was the African American Student Union, my favorite club. I dragged my dad out the door, but when I got to the room my meeting was in, everyone was silent and staring at the tv. I knew something was up--we'd always begged our teachers to let us watch TV if there was nothing left to do in class, but it'd never been allowed. That's when I found out exactly what happened. I was shocked and scared. The reporter was saying something about "acts of war." War was something we read about in textbooks...something really old people went off on tangents about...it wasn't something that happened anymore. A war couldn't really be coming, could it? The thought terrified me and blew my mind. All my classmates with family in NY were crying and asking people to pray. I went to Catholic school, so we prayed multiple times during the day. If my memory serves me correctly, we had an emergency mass that day. We weren't allowed to donate blood because we were teens...we didn't have any money to buy supplies to give. We all felt so helpless...like little kids even though we were almost adults, we should've been able to do something. All we could do was pray...