All We Have Left

The other tower fell, it fell straight down like a waterfall of concrete and steel, and, oh God, please help me, because is this one going to fall too?

Travis tightens his arms around me, shielding me as parts of the ceiling fall. It doesn’t feel like it will ever end, and I hold on to him with all my strength.

Eventually the terrible roaring, clanking noises subside, and Travis unwinds his arms. I sit up, coughing and spitting. The smoke has begun to clear, and I can make out the corner of the desk, and then the chair, and then bookcases farther away as the smoke continues to spiral out the window. I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands, and Travis coughs, his forehead on his knees.

“No, no, no, no, no,” I keep saying, but I’m not sure if I’m saying it out loud or if it’s in my head. I feel numb, and somehow unattached from myself, as if my mind has floated free like a balloon.

There’s Alia in her favorite yellow shirt, sitting next to a boy with mismatched eyes who reaches for her hand because she looks like she is going to shake apart, just fall into a million pieces.

The smoke above us swirls slowly out the broken windows. We are hundreds of feet in the air, and as much as I wish I could just fly out the window, I’m not a superhero, and the only way I’m going to survive is to get up and walk down hundreds of steps.

“Gramps always used to say that they would never fall,” Travis says, but he’s not really talking to me.

I remember when I was a kid writing notes to God and hiding them around the house, little things like
Please let Nenek get better soon
and
If it’s your will, I would like those pink shoes with sequins for Eid
. If I could, I would write a thousand, a million, notes to God right now saying,
Please, please, God, let us get out of this office alive
, and hide them in drawers, under the mouse pad, inside the pages of the splashy brochure flapping wildly on the desk.

Travis starts crawling across the floor, pulling me with him. He is leaving tracks of blood on the floor, and when I glance down at my hands, I see my palms are speckled with glass. I don’t feel any pain.

“We need to get out,” Travis says. “If the other tower fell, this one could too.”

I crawl faster, trying to keep my head below the smoke, but it’s still so thick that I have to stop every couple of seconds to cough. Travis reaches up to a desk and grabs a vase. He yanks out the flowers and, before I can protest, puts a hand to my hijab.

“What—? No!” I grab the ends of the scarf and clutch it to my head.

“You need to wrap it around your face so you can breathe,” he says hoarsely.

I shake my head back and forth, tears spilling down my cheeks.

It seems forever ago that I put it on, even though it was only a few hours ago. I’d give anything to go back to earlier this morning when my biggest worry was what to
wear
, before planes started crashing into towers, and entire buildings dropped out of the sky.

Without speaking, Travis lets go of the scarf and dumps the water at the bottom of the vase over the front of my shirt.

“Pull it up over your face, then,” he says, his voice husky with smoke. “Come on. We’re going to get out of here alive, okay? We’re going to make it.”

2016
Jesse

The car comes closer, and I dig my feet and fingers into the crumbling brick wall and freeze. A stupid voice in my head whispers,
If you don’t move, they can’t see you.

The car continues down the road, and, holy crap, maybe Nick is right. Maybe we
are
invisible. People see what they want to see, and it’s not a girl hanging on the side of a building at two in the morning.

“Jesse, you need to hurry!” Nick’s standing in the alley below me, his hood pulled over his dark hair as he stares up at me.

“I told you she was all talk,” Hailey says. “She’s chickening out. I told you she would.”

I look down at the two of them and have the almost uncontrollable urge to squawk like a chicken, but I know it’s just nerves.

I pull out the first spray paint can. My fingers are so cold I can barely hold it. It may be the end of March, almost spring, but tonight it still feels like the cold, dead middle of winter.

I push my feet into cracks between the bricks, take a deep breath, and sweep the paint can down the wall. The smell of paint clouds the air around me.

I finish the first letter,
N
, and it’s big and bubbly, the way Nick does it. Stretching one foot over to the right to find another foothold, I start on the next letter. My arm is already shaking, but this one’s easier, and soon I have the
O
. As I move over for the next letter, my rope jerks, and I immediately grab for the wall, the paint can falling to the pavement with a loud clatter.

I clutch at the bricks, feeling their coldness seep into my numb fingers. A dog yaps, but no one comes running outside yelling,
Hey, what are you doing up there?
Moving slowly, I look up and see that one of the carabiners making up my anchor is dangling loose.

“You can do it,” Nick whispers, and when I look down at him, I see the promise in his eyes from late last night when I’d shown up crying at his house:
No matter what, I won’t leave you hanging. Get it? Hanging?
He’d laughed, and I’d felt hurt, because I needed him to be serious. He’d pulled me in for a hard kiss and said, “I won’t leave you. Ever.” I’d been so upset with Nick after what had happened after the pep rally, but at that moment he was the only one who understood the anger that was burning me from the inside out.

Gingerly, I tug on the rope, but the other two anchor points seem to be holding. I move over for the next letter.

By the time I’ve worked my way to the corner of the building, I’ve dropped two empty cans of paint into my backpack and I’m on the last letter. I didn’t judge my wall canvas accurately so my letters are like a kindergartener’s first attempt at writing, lopsided and all squished up at the end of the page.

I do the last stroke on the
G
, grab the rope, and lean back away from the wall so I can see the whole tag.

NOTHING

It’s just a word, but it’s our name, mine and Nick’s, and Dave’s, and even Hailey’s. It’s what we have painted on the side of dozens of buildings across town in the last six weeks. The word feels exactly right, like it comes from that place squashed down at the very core of me, where all the unsayable things are written in invisible ink on a crumpled sheet of my heart.

The streetlight begins fizzing with snow, and I shiver as I pull myself back to the wall, and grab a handhold.

“What about the rest?” Nick calls.

I shake the can, and then, quickly, without thinking about it too much, I write the next words just the way we talked about. They aren’t bubbly, and pretty, but I’m running out of time. I try not to think too much as I paint the
hard-edged letters, but I can’t help it. This is about me, my father, 9/11, my dead brother, all that hurt and anger spilling out of me onto the wall. It feels good and bad at the same time, like screaming until you’re hoarse inside a stadium of empty seats.

I lean back again to see what I’ve written.

Terrorists go home

“Cops!” Dave yells from where he’s standing at the road as lookout. They’ve stepped up patrols lately. Looking for us. For
us.

“Come on, Jesse!” Nick yells.

I drop the paint can and let the rope through the belay device, grabbing at it to control my descent as the blue police lights wash over me in a skittering spray of light.

Even as I slide toward the ground, I see a police officer is already running toward me, and I know I’m not going to make it.

September 11, 2001

Events at the World Trade Center

8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 hits the north tower

9:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 hits the south tower

9:59 a.m. The south tower collapses

10:28 a.m. The north tower collapses