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car rides with my parents, and as soon as I fell asleep, they’d pop the CD out and the car would be full of the news, repeating every half hour, only now it’s like it’s repeating every half second, and to hear anything else would be wrong. So my headphones stay around my throat as I stumble away. I know if I press play, the song will never be able to work for me again, because instead of the song playing under the moment, the moment will weigh on top of the song, and I am never going to want to remember this, I am never going to want to be here again, so I walk without anyone else’s words in my ears, and all the music falls away from the world, because how can you have music on a day like today? White noise is not the same as silence. White noise is different because you know white noise is deliberate, composed to cancel everything out. It is the opposite of music, and it is all that I can hear and all that I can imagine hearing right now. I keep going back to that first moment—seeing the black hole on the tower, seeing the site of the crash. That image, that one image, is what I am picturing right now. That tower is our history, our lives, all the minutiae and security and hope. And that black hole is what I’m feeling. It is what has happened. It will affect me in ways I can’t even begin to get my mind around. This day is a dark crater. There is no room for songs. The songs are wrong. Every song is wrong. And I don’t know what to do without music.

THE NEXT HOURS AND
THE NEXT DAYS
     

(Part Two)

THE DATE
Peter
    After two days of being at home and not having school and not being able to go anywhere, I’m ready to leave the apartment. I tell my parents I’m going to stay over at John’s house, because that’s easier than the truth, and John’s told me if it doesn’t work out with Jasper717, then I can always show up late at night at his place, because his parents will assume it’s Nicole sneaking in. John calls him Jasper717 because that’s his email name, but I call him Jasper, and I’m really excited to see him, even though Mitchell’s party seems like it was a long time ago, not this past Saturday. I’m nervous because I’m doing a lot of things I never do, such as (a) lying to my parents, (b) having a date with a boy who’s in college, (c) leaving Manhattan, (d) wearing a deliberately tight T-shirt. This last one, (d), is because that’s what I wore to Mitchell’s party, and the first thing that Jasper said to me was, “Hey, that’s a pretty tight T-shirt”—and at first I was all embarrassed, and then he said, “No, that’s a good thing.” The only people who flirt with me are usually the people who flirt with everyone, so I just thought, oh, he’s playing a game. But every time he’d leave me for something—to get a drink, to talkto someone else—he’d always loop his way back. When I went to Mitchell and asked who he was, Mitchell said, “Good—he asked who you were about fifteen minutes ago, and I’ve been waiting for you to catch up.” I thought maybe it was my lucky night for once, because he seemed really nice, or at least like he knew what he was doing. Even when people started to leave, we kept talking—he was trying to tell me to apply to his school, and kept saying he’d love to host me for a visit, and I still wasn’t convinced that he was really interested in me, and then he sat on my lap, which is about as unambiguous as it gets (other than actual sexual contact). I started to wonder if something was going to happen that very night, but when it got to be two in the morning, John and Veronica said they had to go, and Jasper said he was from Brooklyn, and I didn’t know where he was staying, but I couldn’t really ask him to stay at my place (because of my parents), and it didn’t feel right trying to stay later at Mitchell’s, because he’d started to gather all the bottles and glasses, which is a pretty obvious sign for everyone to go home and go to