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slam the door in your face if you didn’t make it there on time.
    But as I rounded the corner, Mr. Phillips wasn’t at the door with his hand on the doorknob, waiting to shut me out of my educational experience.
    Instead, everyone sat quiet—motionless—and their eyes were focused on the TV mounted close to the ceiling in the corner of the room.
    Goosebumps covered my arms and a chill ran up my spine as I breached the opening provided by the door.
    I searched the room for Blane, finding him in his desk, exactly where he should have been. Except he too watched the TV, his face completely stoic. But his brown boot tapped the ground with rapid precision.
    That was when I started to get nervous.
    Blane Hunt didn’t waste energy. He channeled it into useful activity, or he didn’t use it. Period.
    Something was really, really wrong.
    God, I hoped it was everything going on with Franny.
    Please, God. Let it be about the baby.
    If you’d asked me yesterday, I never would have guessed that I’d be hoping for such a powerful heartache to be singular in its torture.
    I prayed and prayed, but as I watched the faces of several normally-exuberant students, I knew it had to be something more.
    Turning slowly to the TV, I let my eyes adjust to the scene in front of me.
    Unbelievably bright, brilliant blue sky, marred irrevocably by the carnage underneath it.
    The tops of the Twin Towers. On fire.
    A fucking inferno. Billowing smoke and dancing flames engulfing floors and floors of offices. People were in there.
    Blane’s dad was in there.
    He worked on the seventy-fourth floor of the South Tower for the investment company, Morgan Stanley. That job was the reason they moved here from Georgia.
    They’d moved around for most of Blane’s youth, never in one spot for more than a few years, but this job, this move, was the one that brought Blane’s charismatic charm into my life.
    I couldn’t stop the quiver of my lips as a salty tear ran down my face and settled at the corner of my mouth.
    “…definitely an act of terrorism of unprecedented proportions,” the reporter stated, an uncharacteristic shake in his normally steadfast voice.
    “At 8:46 this morning, a passenger jet crashed into the North Tower of World Trade Center.”
    Absolute dread settled into the deepest part of my stomach and started to churn.
    “And at 9:03 AM a second passenger plane struck the South Tower.”
    Oh my God.
    Bile rose in my throat, and the air in my lungs was stolen right out of my chest.
    My fingers covered my mouth to stop my scream.
    Forcefully tearing my eyes from the screen and focusing on Blane, I realized that he had no clue I was there. No clue that any of us were, such was the intensity of his focus.
    The flames of the fires were reflected in his irises, and by force of sheer willpower, his lids didn’t close.
    The look on his face would be burned in my mind forever.
    Disbelief. Agony. Determination. All swirled together to make one perfectly ugly storm.
    Limbs shaking, I turned my attention back to the TV and blindly settled myself into the seat assigned to me.
    My knuckles turned white as I gripped the front edge of my desk, eager to busy my hands but helpless to know what to do with them.
    Thoughts scrambled and scrapped for priority in my head, and despite the abundance of my emotions, I struggled to make sense of any of them.
    It was like I was having an out of body experience. My brain and heart were completely unwilling to accept the violence and carnage in front of me as reality, and the thrumming in my ears made it nearly impossible to hear any of the sounds around me.
    The clock at the bottom of the screen read 9:53 AM when the reporter’s voice regained my attention, the force of my concentration willing my heart to beat more quietly.
    “And we also have a report now that the…it was a plane that crashed into the Pentagon, and we have a fire at the Pentagon now as well.”
    The creak of my desk echoed into the quiet room