Remembering 9/11 as a HS Sophomore

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands at the Pentagon, World Trade Center, and in a field in Shanksville, Penn.

Check Patch every day this week for new 9/11 stories from Fairfax City council members, school officials, religious and business leaders. Share your 9/11 stories with Patch by emailing whitney@patch.com.

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Before Sept. 11, 2001 I didn't know the World Trade Center existed. I'd heard it mentioned in passing, probably saw it in movies, but back then I didn't have a reason to acknowledge it as something more than a really big building up in a city somewhere. 

I'd just started my sophomore year at Robinson Secondary School when terrorists flew planes into the towers. We were told to go to our classes per usual, where our teachers stood, hands on their hips, staring at the tvs near small crowds of excited students. 

No one taught. Teachers abandoned stacks of blank quizzes on their desks. Kids met up with friends and roamed the halls. The locker bays filled with antics and nervous laughter. 

The mood changed after a plane hit the Pentagon. Crying students made for the pay phones. Thick lines stretched from the phones to the front doors to the Robinson Drama Booth and back down the main hallway. Kids waited for their chance to drop two quarters and get their parents on the phone, to make sure they were still alive.

We convinced each other that Robinson was next. We had told ourselves this during Columbine and would do so again with the sniper attacks.

Even now my mind can't quite grasp what happened.

I find it difficult to accept that the towers ever existed. My only memories of them are smoking, crumbling on live news. Now they appear ghost-like, suddenly, in the Sopranos' opening credits (but only the first three seasons), in conversation, on my friends' Facebook walls and randomly in my thoughts. A few years ago I went to New York, to Church and Liberty, to see what was left of the towers. I left empty, no closer to comprehending what I saw on that school tv.

I think about that day and my feelings rush up, tightening into a knot in my chest. They're wound too tightly. If I try to untangle one thread of emotion, say, the rage I feel when I remember that day, they all overwhelm me.

I remember watching those kids sob into the receiver, smack the pay phone and search their pockets for more quarters. And I doubt I'll ever be ever able to understand how that memory makes me feel.

Whitney Rhodes
Editor, Fairfax City Patch