It was my school's Homecoming week and I was on the homecoming parade committee, so I was manning a booth in the main hallway of the high school registering students for the car parade. One of my friends walked past and called out "hey, did you know a plane hit the World Trade Center?" He said it with kind of an incredulously amused tone of voice - he had assumed that the plane was a small single person aircraft and that the pilot was stupid or drunk or both. Kind of "Darwin Awards" scenario. This was just before 8am (I'm an hour behind the east coast). I took down the booth as class was getting ready to start and went into my biology teacher's room, which functioned as an informal gathering place for students before school started (our bio teacher was really cool). He had a TV in his room and CNN was on. It was there I learned that the plane hadn't been a small plane at all, but a big jetliner - then the second one hit and we knew something was horribly wrong.

I made my way to my first period class about 15 minutes late, but my Calculus teacher also had the TV on and we didn't bother with lessons that day. We watched as reports came in of a plane hitting the Pentagon, and a fourth crashing in Pennsylvania. So much in such a little time - I think that's when it really hit me that this would be one of the most historically significant days I'd ever live through. The first tower collapsed just as the bell rang to adjourn us for second period. No one went to class. My chemistry teacher tried to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was going on and held a quiz, but only three kids showed up. I wasn't one of them.

I remember almost every detail about that day but I don't remember who won our homecoming game that Friday.