by Wendy Mills
Travis bursts through the bathroom door, and I follow right behind him.
“Stop!” I cry as I see him heading for the dark, ragged hole in the wall where we had slithered out just a few minutes ago. “You can’t go back in there!”
But he is already wriggling headfirst through the hole, grunting with the effort, and then he disappears back into the elevator car we fought so hard to get out of.
“Travis!” I cry.
I hear him cursing inside, and I rush to the hole and press my face to it. I pull back immediately, because it is hot and smoky and I can hear Travis coughing.
“What are you doing?” I yell furiously.
I take a deep breath and put my face to the hole again, and see Travis scrabbling around with the lighter in his hand. He finds something on the floor and stuffs it into his pocket. He is coughing badly, and as he comes back out of the hole, his eyes are streaming.
“What are you doing?” I shout at him.
He won’t look at me.
“Come on, we need to get out of here,” he mumbles as he heads toward the door to the corridor.
“That’s what I said,” I say, but he’s already gone.
Out in the hallway, Travis finds a stairwell door and yanks it open. The first thing I hear is running water, like someone decided to run a nice hot bath. Then I see the people, and my heart leaps with joy. Somehow I’d half convinced myself that we were the last people left in the building.
Travis is standing like a stupid statue in the doorway, and when I push by him impatiently, I see why.
It’s dark and hot, and water is sliding down walls from the ceiling and pouring down the steps. It’s smoky, like maybe there’s a bonfire close by that you could char some nice halal marshmallows on, but it’s not like any fire I’ve ever smelled. The stench is rotten, thick with chemicals.
People walk by, barely glancing at us. One man is injured and being helped down by a few of the others.
“What’s going on?” I ask loudly.
“We don’t know,” a man carrying a briefcase says.
For some reason I thought once we found people that everything was going to be all right. But these people, these adults, don’t seem to know anything more than we do.
We join the crowd going down, slipping on stairs made slick from all the water.
“How long is this going to take?” I ask.
“This is a piece of cake compared to ’93,” says an older man with dark strands of hair combed over his bald, freckled head. “When the bomb in the van blew up, a bunch of cars in the parking garage caught fire and it sent this thick, black oily smoke up the stairwells.”
A lady with square blue glasses and a pretty dress glances over her shoulder. “I almost stayed in my office, because it took me ten hours to get out last time.” She shakes her head. “But this is different. I don’t know what’s going on, but this is different. At least they put in the emergency lights and these”—she points down at the stairs—“so we can see. Last time it was so dark you couldn’t see anything.”
I hadn’t even really noticed the glowing stripes of paint on the stair treads, and I try to imagine what it would have been like to go down these narrow steps in complete darkness. No wonder some people decided to stay in their offices the last time.
“Hey, what’s the holdup?” someone yells from behind us, and I realize that we have slowed to a stop.
“The door’s stuck,” someone calls back, and the crowd around us begins murmuring and jostling.
“What door?” the same voice yells. It’s a young guy in a suit with an arrogant face and eyes full of fear.
“Calm down, big boy,” the older man with the freckled head says. “We’re going to get out of here—we just need to stay calm.”
“I am calm,” the young guy yells back, not sounding calm at all.
As we crowd down the stairs, it’s so tight that I’m having trouble breathing.
Travis and I have made it to a landing, and below we see a few men beating on a door that inexplicably bars the way.
“What the heck?” someone says. “Why’s there a door in the middle of the stairwell?”
“And why’s it locked?” a woman asks in a wavering voice, holding a hand to the baby bump of her belly. “Did someone lock it on purpose?”
“It’s not locked, it’s stuck,” a person nearer the door calls back.
“Watch out!” someone yells, and a big man takes a few running steps at the door with a fire extinguisher in his hands. It slams against the door, and white foam spurts out, soaking the people directly behind him and floating up the stairs like a white mist of snow.
But the door doesn’t budge.
A woman starts crying.
“Wait, I know another way,” someone says, and all of a sudden everyone is turning around. Then we are going up, which feels wrong.
“It’ll be okay,” Travis says, sliding his eyes at me, but he doesn’t look like he believes his own words.
We go up and out another door. Small fires are flickering in the ceiling. Pieces of drywall and debris litter the floor, and wires hang from the ceiling like skinny black snakes curling above our heads.
“Don’t touch anything,” someone says, and I find myself pressing up against Travis as we edge down the hall, the fires burning almost merrily over our heads. Ahead, we see a man with another fire extinguisher dousing the flames. Clouds of fine spray drift down the hall.
“Where are we going?” a woman shouts, but nobody answers.
Another door with an exit sign appears through the smoke, and people speed up as the flames begin to flare again.
“Go!” the guy with the extinguisher cries, but instead of following his own advice, he waits until Travis and I are past and then turns back to the flames.
I turn to look at him just before I go through the door into the stairwell. He continues to spray the fire, stopping only long enough for people to pass. His fire extinguisher is the only thing that is keeping this path to freedom passable.
I close my eyes and pray for him as I follow Travis down the stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jesse
I listen to Travis’s message over and over again.
I make out a few more words after a while, but it’s so hard to understand what Travis is saying with all the static and background noise.
At some point I send Hank a message:
Who’s the girl?
But he doesn’t answer. He’s probably out in the field, and who knows how long it will take for him to get my message?
I listen to the last part over and over again. I have a feeling that Travis says the girl’s name when he says, “That’s … with me.”
Who was with him? Who was the girl who sounded so desperate and young? Did she die with Travis, or did she make it out?
I’m shaken by her voice. She sounds like one of my friends. She sounds like me.
Why was she in the World Trade Center with Travis that day?
I hit Play so many times that by three in the morning when I finally give up, my finger is hurting.
When I wake the next morning, I know who I need to call, even though I have no idea whether she will talk to me.
I walk into Starbucks and see her sitting at our favorite table, the one by the window. She is sipping on a coffee, her finger dancing across her tablet screen.
I sit down.
“Hi, Emi,” I say.
“Hello, Jesse,” she says warily, fiddling with the rings in her ear and sitting up straight, the way she always does when she’s nervous.
“I, uh, need help, and I don’t have anyone else to ask. I know we’re really not friends anymore, and I get it. I wouldn’t want to be friends with me either if I were you. All I can say is I’m sorry. And … I need your help.” I shut up and try to read her expression, but her face remains blank, like an empty page loading for too long.
“I never said I didn’t want to be friends with you,” she says afte
r a moment. “You pretty much made that choice.”
“I was messed up in the head, Emi. I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. Everything got so weird with the tagging, and all the secrets, it just seemed easier not to talk to you guys. I didn’t know what to say to you.”
“The truth,” she says simply.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I begin. If you say something too much, does it become as meaningless as pennies thrown on the ground? Because this apology is worth a billion pennies, this one I mean with all my heart. “You’ll never know how sorry I am, Emi. I don’t want to lose you, and Teeny and Myra. I have no explanation, no excuses. But I’m trying to do something good now, and I need help.”
“They put my great-grandparents in a camp, you know,” she says, and I stare at her in confusion.
“What?”
“My mom told me. During World War II. They rounded up a bunch of Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Not because they did anything wrong, just because of what they were.”
“What?” I say again, because while I’ve heard about this in some class or another, I have no idea why she’s telling me about it now.
“And when my grandmother was growing up, she remembers her next-door neighbor calling her a Jap and telling her he wished America had nuked all of us, not just those two cities.”
She looks at me seriously. “If you don’t like Muslims so much, how do you feel about the Japanese?” Which, of course, slashes to the bloody friendship-heart of why she’s still mad at me.
“I don’t hate Muslims. I don’t hate the Japanese. I don’t hate you.” I pull at my ponytail, knowing I deserve this, but desperate for her to believe me. “Why would I have been friends with you for all these years if I didn’t like you?”
“I’ve asked myself that more than once,” she answers. “I never could come up with an answer. But what you did … writing those ugly words … that wasn’t who I thought you were. I’m not sure I could ever be friends with that person.”
I know I should say something, to explain, but I can’t, and I stare down at my lap, defeated.
I wait for her to get up and leave, but she doesn’t. After a while, I lift my head and see her calmly watching me.
“What do you need?” she asks.
“This thing is ancient,” Emi says, holding up a microcassette tape from inside the answering machine. “Wow.”
She shakes her head. I sit on her bed as she turns the machine over in her hands, mutters to herself something that sounds like, “Where’s the outgoing jack? Really?” and then she goes to a shelf over her computer and starts rummaging through neatly labeled boxes.
“Ha!” she says, pulling out a small rectangular device.
“What is that?” I stare at it curiously.
“It’s a voice recorder. I used it in school before I got my phone and could record lectures on that.”
Of course she did. In the fifth grade. I sigh, happy to be back in Emi’s crazy-simple world.
She pops the cassette from the answering machine into the voice recorder and runs a wire from it to her computer. She’s just sitting down at her desk when Teeny and Myra come in. They stop when they see me.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Teeny says, yanking her dark hair over her shoulder with a small fist. “Slumming with the minorities, Jesse?”
Myra just glances at me, and then starts typing furiously on her phone, maybe “What to say to your ex-friend when you just wish she’d go the hell away.”
“I’m sorry,” I say to all of them. “I know what I did was terrible, but you know I’m not like that. Okay, maybe I was like that, but it was the worst feeling ever. I don’t hate anybody. I screwed up royally. I made a stupid, terrible decision. But we’ve been friends for a long time, and I hope that if you screwed up as majorly as I did, that I’d at least give you one more chance.”
They stare at me in surprise.
“Holy heck, chica, what got into you?” Teeny says. “Your time in the slammer turn you into a woman?”
“Oh shut up,” I say grumpily.
“Why didn’t you just talk to us?” Myra asks. “Why didn’t you tell us what was going on?”
“Somehow I thought I couldn’t,” I say.
“We would’ve knocked some sense into you. Or tied you up. Something,” Teeny says. “You know how many people tell me I need to go back to Mexico? Like that makes any freaking sense. I was born here, and my mom is Guatemalan, but some people aren’t the sharpest crayons in the box. So what you did … it hurt.”
I nod, and fix my gaze on the bedspread. “I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”
“One more thing,” Teeny says, and there’s something in her voice that makes me look up. “I just think you should know that you might be vanilla-white with a pedigree from the freaking Mayflower, but you still can’t dance.”
I look at all of them, my gorgeous friends with hearts open as they smile at me, and know I should have realized that true friendship is big enough to leave room for mistakes. Things might not be completely straight between us but they are infinitely better than they were.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” Emi says, turning back to the computer. “I downloaded some free software that’s supposed to help us clean up the recording. We’ll see.” Her fingers fly over the keyboard.
“What’s going on?” Teeny asks.
I explain, and Myra says, “Wow, that’s sad, and cool, all at the same time.”
Teeny curls up on the bed beside me. “So, let’s hear it.”
Emi types furiously, and we can see graphs on her screen with lines going up and down. “I’m going to try to reduce the background noise,” she says as Travis’s first words play over and over again.
Hello? … there? I’m … World Trade Center.
Hello? Is … there? I’m … World Trade Center.
Hello? Is … there? I’m in … World Trade Center.
Each time it gets clearer.
“You’re a genius,” I exclaim.
“I know. My mother had me tested,” Emi says, and her mouth quirks.
“See if you can hear what he says at the end. When he says the girl’s name.”
Emi nods and turns back to the computer. We sit in silence as she continues to work.
“Okay,” she says finally. “Let’s see what we have.”
She hits the button, and Travis’s voice fills the air from her powerful speakers.
It’s still static-y and fuzzy, still missing a lot of words, but when we get to the end, when Travis says, “That’s … with me,” this time we can make out the name.
Alia.
That’s Alia with me.
My brother was in the towers with a girl named Alia.
“What was she doing in the towers with your brother?” Teeny asks.
“I don’t even know why Travis was in the towers,” I say.
Myra has been busy on her phone, and she looks up. “If I’m spelling it right, ‘Alia’ means sublime, lofty, or exalted. Whatever the heck that means. And get this, the name is either Jewish or Muslim.”
We stare at her in surprise.
“You’ve never talked about your brother before,” Emi says slowly. “You told me when we were kids that he died on 9/11, but you didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so I never asked any questions.”
“Why now?” Teeny asks. “What makes you decide to talk about your brother Travis after all these years?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I say honestly, because how do I explain the barbed wire around my heart that trapped everything in and kept them out? “Everything is so messed up with my family, and it has been for a long time, but it’s like I never even noticed, because I didn’t know anything different. Travis is dead, but I’m still alive, though my parents don’t seem to get that. Now they’re getting a divorce, or something, and … somehow I feel like if I figure out what happened to Travis, maybe it’ll help. I know, it’s stupid.” I twirl my hair and
stare determinedly at a wall because I can’t meet their eyes.
There’s a long silence, and when I finally glance up, the three of them are exchanging a look they all seem to understand.
“As long as you don’t go batcrap crazy again, we’ll help you,” Teeny says. “We want to forgive you, we really do. But what you did was some pretty serious stuff.”
“I missed you guys,” I say quietly. “I missed you guys so much.”
“I prayed that you would come back to us,” Teeny says matter-of-factly. She doesn’t make a big deal about religion, but the thought of Teeny-prayers coming my way makes me smile, makes me feel stronger.
“Just talk to us when things start going sideways, okay?” Myra says.
“We’re here,” Emi says simply.
I turn my head so they can’t see my tears, but then they pile on for a group hug, and somehow we’re all crying, even Emi.
When we finally unwind, Teeny says, “Speaking of batcrap crazy … What about your dad? Does he know you’ve gone all Nancy Drew on your brother?”
“No,” I say. “I’m pretty sure if he found out what I was doing, he wouldn’t speak to me again. Ever.”
At this point, I am the only person in our family that Dad is speaking to.
I wonder how long that will last.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Alia
We run into more people in the stairwell, and most people seem calm, one lady even joking that she should have worn her running shoes. It’s hot though, and the rank, dirty-smelling smoke burns the back of my throat. I pull my shirt over my nose again, and wish I’d thought to bring the half-full bottle of Coke still back in the elevator. I am so thirsty.
Just one sip, one swallow of Coke.
Travis is checking stairwell doors as we pass, and many of them are locked, though a few open. He lets them swing shut, and nods to himself.
A woman ahead of us is having some sort of panic attack. She stops in the middle of the stairs, just crying, and saying, “I can’t go any farther. I just can’t.”
Her friends are urging her along, while people squeeze by on her left and continue their downward trudge, some with their hands on the shoulders of the people in front of them. The woman in front of me pats the crying lady on the arm as she passes and says, “It gonna be all right, okay, honey? Just keep goin’.”
