It was the second week of school. The teachers were corralling students in the auditorium for a school assembly.
Eve had the idea to sneak out for the afternoon, and it was easy. The hallways were packed and noisy, and she could slip out of the crowd without ever being seen. She had to pull Marcus by the arm, he was always reluctant about cutting class. Somehow, his mother seemed to have a way of finding out about it.
They snuck out through the back way. Once they hit the sidewalk, she raced him to the open field across from the Dairy Queen. It was a working farm, but the farmhouse was several miles in, so they probably wouldn’t be spotted if they were careful.
“Hurry up!” She yelled, running her legs off as fast as she could. Marcus was slowing down to a walking pace already. When they got to the field, she lifted open a section of the barbed wire fence, high enough so Marcus could sneak through.
It was a 10-minute walk to get to their favorite spot, a shaded tree area where the cows sometimes collected when it was too hot. She brought a Marlboro cigarette she found at school, lit it up so they could take turns at it. It was already past sundown when they wore themselves out sword fighting with long wooden sticks.
When Eve walked into the door, the living room was packed with people, all fixated on the television.
Eve stood in the back of the couch, trying to see what everyone was watching. It looked like a movie, seeing the footage of the planes crashing into the towers. She couldn’t believe it.
Eve’s father was sitting in the center of the couch. He was dead silent, while the rest of the room was crazed with angry and racist rants about why we shouldn’t be letting Middle Easterners into the country, or ugly sobbing tears of disbelief.
“I can’t get through, I’m not getting anything!” Her mother frantically was redialing on her cell phone, and too hysterical to scold Eve for being gone for hours, while no one knew where she had been. The phone circuits were down, she’s trying to reach Uncle Frank. He traveled all the time, and they don’t know if he’s in New York now or not.
At the time, Eve couldn’t comprehend the gravity of this day. But now it’s a day she keeps coming back to. It was a moment that changed the course of everything. She wonders, what her father had been thinking when it happened, or why he enlisted the first time. Perhaps their lives could’ve turned out so different.
