* * *
“We don’t have to stay long, but I want to be there. I just want to leave these there. I need to show the world that we are Americans too. We can’t be afraid,” Naheed’s mother said. She was clutching a spray of orchids wrapped in clear cellophane. “There’s a fence surrounding the platform. We can’t get too close, but I know we can get there and leave these flowers.”
But Naheed was afraid. She understood what her parents were telling her, but she didn’t see why they had to come all the way to New York City to show it. In many ways she felt like she was constantly saying “I’m sorry” for something she didn’t do. Naheed and her family had as much in common with Islamic extremists as, well, nothing.
There was nothing about her religion that was like that of the terrorists who had done this, but no one really seemed to understand that. There had been community rallies and outcries against the violence, but that hadn’t changed anything. Wearing her hijab, which had once seemed an ordinary act, even if it sometimes got her unwanted attention, was now nothing less than a unifying act of faith and bravery.
Naheed had worn her hijab to school the very next day. “I am proud of you,” her father told her. “Courage is contagious: When one person of courage stands up, others are affected and stand up with him.”
It was one thing to wear her religion on her sleeve, so to speak, at school, in the town where she had lived all of her life, with kind teachers and a principal to help explain things, but coming here, to New York, to Ground Zero?
That was a whole other kind of courage.
Yet Naheed couldn’t help being moved by the sights around her, and she forgot what others might be thinking when they saw her. Their mother handed each of her daughters a stemmed blossom to slip into the chain-link fence. Naheed brought the flower to her face as she remembered that day, a year ago, when nothing else was important to her except fitting in, being like everyone else. Now when she looked around at the crowd of people, all sharing the same moment, the same sadness, not one person was like any other. If she squinted her eyes, everyone, every single person, melted into a mix of shapes and colors.
“What are you people doing here?”
A mix of shapes and colors, and a harsh, angry voice.
“Did you hear me? What are you people doing here?”
Was this voice talking to her? Naheed looked up.
He was white. He was big. He held an American flag in one hand. He stood directly in front of Naheed and her mother and sister, until her father stepped in front of his family.
Aimee heard it too. The angry voice. She couldn’t get down to where the stage was set up, but she had made her way to the tall fence where people had hung photos and flowers and stuffed animals. Anger sends out a strange energy, like a force field in a science fiction movie. It repels.
It destroys.
Aimee felt it.
“I said, what are you people doing here?”
She turned to see whom the voice was talking to, where his hostility was directed, to whom.
“We are here to honor those who died, just like you are,” a dark-skinned man answered. He spoke softly. He was with a woman and two girls, all three with those colorful veils on their heads.
“Well, we don’t want your kind here. Nobody does. Get out and take your A-rab wife and kids with you.”
* * *
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It was scary and it was racist. Will could hear the lady playing the flute and the names being read, slowly, one after the other in alphabetical order, behind him. But this was New York City, right? Nobody did anything for anyone else in New York City. People were rude and unfriendly here, even if he hadn’t experienced any of that himself, except that the man at the information booth at Penn Station had been pretty gruff.
Somebody should do something.
It’s not someone else’s job. His father had taught him that.
It’s all of our jobs.
This was just a family. Maybe they had lost someone. Maybe that’s why they were here. To let go. To heal, like everyone else.
Will turned to see if his mother had heard it too, but it didn’t look like she had. She was staring down at the proceedings and crying, not falling apart, but crying. The girls were on either side of her, holding her skirt.
* * *
Sergio noticed the father first, then he recognized the anger and the familiar sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. The anger was coming from the huge white man who was waving his flag around. The father wasn’t going to fight, anyone could tell that. Anyone who had ever been in a fight could see that. He was leaning back, pressing his body against his wife and holding his arms behind him, creating a space where his family would be safe. He wasn’t going to fight even if it came to that.
“We are not bothering anyone. We came here all the way from Ohio,” the father said. “To pay our respects.”
It wouldn’t be much of a fight, anyway. The father looked to be about five six, maybe 150 pounds, and this white dude could have been Ivan Drago from Rocky IV without the accent.
* * *
Maybe the dad, who was there with his family, thought the other, bigger man would back away if he identified himself as being from Ohio; like Aimee was from California. We are all Americans here.
“We’re from Ohio,” the father said again. “I’m a physician.”
But the other guy didn’t seem to care and he didn’t back away. He took another menacing step toward the family. Aimee looked back to see if her mother and father were watching. Could they see?
Was somebody going to help?
Was anybody going to do something?
And suddenly there were two boys, a white boy and a black boy, standing in front of the family; and then a whole bunch of firemen in their blue FDNY T-shirts seemed to come out of nowhere to stand next to the boys; and then a young mother, with her baby strapped to the front of her body, joined them; and then an old man and old woman in matching plaid shirts pinned with ribbons and buttons that said NEVER FORGET stood next to them; until there were so many people standing in front of the family that Aimee couldn’t see them anymore.
All she could see was a sea of people, who could not be more different but could not be more the same, standing together. And what she could hear, releasing into the air with the sounds of the flute, were the names of those who had died, in this very spot, remembered always, floating on the music of a warm September wind.
Author’s Note
Like most everyone else over a certain age, I can remember exactly where I was when I first began hearing the news about the events of September 11, 2001. I had gone to the YMCA early that morning to swim laps, and on my way home I was listening to public radio out of New York City. The early report was that a small plane had accidentally crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I was driving down Route 7 in Wilton, Connecticut. I looked up at the sky. It was the clearest blue, with the calmest air, the most perfect temperature. I had just swum my seventy-two laps and I felt wonderful, while the voices on the radio were trying to make sense of how this could have happened. It’s not like someone could just bump into the World Trade Center. Maybe the pilot was ill. Maybe the small plane had lost control. They bantered about it my entire drive, about seven minutes.
My two boys, eleven and fourteen, were at school, but my husband was still home, about to leave for work. By the time I walked into the bedroom, where the TV news was on, a second plane—and they were now both identified as commercial airliners—had just crashed into the second tower. It became instantly, if not understandably, clear to everyone that this was intentional. My husband and I stood transfixed, as I imagine most of the country was, staring at the screen. We watched as the towers burst into flames. We watched when they began to fall. My husband didn’t go to work that day. Everything shut down.
After that my memory is fuzzy. We live about an hour outside of New York City, and many of our friends, and parents of our children’s friends, work in
the financial district, where the World Trade Center once stood. My younger sister lived in the East Village of Manhattan. The son of my husband’s college roommate lived in Brooklyn. My best friend’s husband was scheduled for a meeting that morning in the Twin Towers themselves. And so on and so on.
After an assembly at my older son’s high school, during which the principal gave out just enough information to panic everyone, it was bedlam in the halls. Later we would hear stories. One Muslim girl in ninth grade, fearing for her safety, called her parents and asked to be picked up, but not before she was intimidated by angry comments. My son’s baseball coach jumped into his car and made his way toward New York City to find his son. When the roads were blocked with fifty miles still to go, he got out and walked.
My younger son, who was in middle school, had been kept in the dark all day. They had been told only that something bad had happened in New York City. He didn’t understand how bad until he saw me standing at the front door, anxiously waiting for him to get off the bus, my face streaked with tears. I could not stop crying.
In one beautiful clear-blue morning the whole world had suddenly changed. In the following days we walked around in shock, trying to figure out how to adjust, how to live in this new order of things. New words leaped into our vernacular, like “terrorism,” “Homeland Security,” “al-Qaeda,” “Ground Zero.” And they have remained.
For young students today there is no “before 9/11.” I think that’s why I wanted to write this story. When I was in school, I learned about historic events like the Holocaust and Pearl Harbor as things that had happened in the past, long ago. And as much as I was aware that these terrible events had altered the global consciousness, I had never lived through one. I didn’t know what that really meant. Now I had witnessed another seismic shift, when the world in which I was raising my children stood, for one long day, completely and horrifically still, and we all wondered how, or if, we were ever going to be the same again.
In order to magnify the division between “before 9/11” and “after 9/11,” I chose to tell the story of four American children in just those forty-eight hours before each of their lives would be directly affected by the events of that day. I also made a choice that the characters in this story would not lose anyone that day, and although that might not be the most realistic way to encapsulate 9/11, it was something I felt I had to do. I chose the structure of this story to reflect a theme of interconnectivity in our society, in particular between children. I wanted to show how in the end this tragic, divisive event actually brought complete strangers together instead of tearing them apart, which is, I imagine, the ultimate goal of terrorism.
Acknowledgments
There are many people I need to acknowledge for their help in writing this book. For how the story evolved from the shape it was in at the beginning, I owe enormous gratitude to not only my editor—the intelligent, insightful, and meticulous Reka Simonsen—but to my agents, Marietta Zacker and Nancy Gallt.
Marietta had the unfortunate job of mucking through and addressing some very convoluted tangential plot lines and characterizations before Reka even saw my “first” (yeah, right) draft. I am deeply appreciative.
Reka, who wouldn’t let me off the hook for anything and who guided me to continue searching until I could truly speak for these four brave children—I cannot thank you enough.
To Erica Stahler, copyeditor extraordinaire, thank you for your amazing work at figuring out complicated time lines and geography, and for enforcing accuracy in order to honor a truth and a tragedy.
To Erin McGuire and Russell Gordon, thank you for the beautiful jacket, which I hope speaks for itself with its simplicity and depth, but personally, I was blown away by it.
To Stasha Gibb, the wonderful librarian at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, who is now a friend, for her help with the Muslim cultural details. I battered her with questions and then made her read the whole manuscript in its early form—thank you, Stasha.
To my dear friend, Homa Sadeghian, MD, who patiently supplied me with just the right Persian expressions. Thank you. Thank you to Reno Barkman, present-day principal of the Shanksville-Stonycreek middle and high schools. With suspicion at first (and why not? Shanksville is still the target of gawkers) and then incredible generosity, Mr. Barkman talked to me on the phone at length. He also put me in touch with two young men who were middle school students in Shanksville in 2001. Thank you, Jacob Miller and Jeffrey T. Berkey. You painted a picture for me of life in a very small town, turned upside down. Mr. Barkman also put me in touch with the truly heroic Connie Hummel, the principal in Shanksville on September 11, 2001. Her story deserves its own book.
Thank you to my old friend Wendy Mass, for giving me permission to write this ambitious story and then giving me the title, right there on the spot.
Thank you to my dear friend Elise Broach, who supports me in life and in writing, in more ways than she knows.
Thank you to all my friends who listened to me hash out this story and shared with me all their experiences from that day, including Susan, Batya, Jill, Dal, Gail, and my sons, Sam and Ben.
And thank you, thank you, thank you to Steve, for allowing me this wonderful life I lead. And for loving me.
Nora Raleigh Baskin is the ALA Schneider Family Book Award–winning author of Anything But Typical. She was chosen as a Publishers Weekly Flying Start for her debut novel, What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows, and has since written a number of novels for middle graders and teens, including The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah, The Summer Before Boys, Runt, and Ruby on the Outside. Nora lives with her family in Connecticut. Visit her at NoraBaskin.com.
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Also by Nora Raleigh Baskin
The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah
Anything But Typical
The Summer Before Boys
Runt
Ruby on the Outside
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ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS | An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division | 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 | www.SimonandSchuster.com | This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. | Text copyright © 2016 by Nora Raleigh Baskin | Jacket illustration copyright © 2016 by Erin McGuire | All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. | ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Atheneum logo is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. | For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. | The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. | Interior design by Mike Rosamilia, jacket design by Russell Gordon | The text for this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro. | Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data | Baskin, Nora Raleigh. | Nine, ten : a September 11 story / Nora Raleigh Baskin. —First edition. | pages cm | Summary: Relates how the lives of four children living in different parts of the country intersect and are affected by the events of September 11, 2001. | ISBN
978-1-4424-8506-8 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-4424-8508-2 (eBook) 1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Juvenile fiction. [1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Fiction.] I. Title. | PZ7.B29233Ni 2016 | [Fic]—dc22 2015011934
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