But instead of cyborgs, we should’ve been preparing to fight terrorists. Mrs. Geiger pulled Karl and me out of school early on September 11, 2001, before anyone else at Glenwood knew what had happened. I remember she was walking so quickly that I—the fastest kid in school—could barely keep up. Karl and I didn’t know what was going on. It wasn’t either of our birthdays, and my parents only let me miss school if I was sick: “We don’t pay these taxes for you to sit at home,” my mother would say.
“We’ve been attacked,” Mrs. Geiger said as we followed the pavement to the Jeep parked in front of the school. At the time I didn’t know what she meant, but I figured any “attack” warranted us cutting across the grass. In 2001 I was made a Safety, against my will, but I turned a blind eye to the “no grass” rule to avoid becoming a hypocrite—a term Karl taught me.
I pictured an invading army launching flaming boulders from catapults into Washington D.C., shirtless, with long hair, wielding axes and circular shields like the Visigoths sacking Rome.
“Two planes were flown into the Twin Towers. Your father didn’t go into the office today,” she said to Karl. “Vic, your mother is at our house.”
I remember my parents and Mr. and Mrs. Geiger standing around the television; my mother was crying. They kept replaying the footage of this plane—it honestly looked so tiny as it pierced through the air—crashing into one of the towers and disappearing into a cloud of orange and black.
Teachers would say we would always remember where we were, who we were with, what we did that day—they compared it to the day President Kennedy was shot. In the Geigers’ basement with Karl, sucking down Stewart’s Root Beer and swapping turns at the desktop to play a Warcraft campaign, didn’t seem like the poignant story I’d want to tell my children one day.
Brad Knight’s father died on 9/11. It didn’t matter then that Brad was a malignant; I felt bad for him still. Actually, eight other parents died in the attack, but I didn’t know their kids. Mr. Geiger didn’t go to work that day or he could’ve been the ninth.
I didn’t see Karl as much when I started sixth grade at Millburn Middle School. My school-day started earlier in the morning and I had to take the bus to downtown Millburn. I instantly missed getting dropped off at Alfonso’s corner to walk downhill and turn underneath the train-track overpass with Karl, bursting out on the fringes of Glenwood’s lush front lawn.
But the corner of West Road and Lakeview—where Nero (rest in peace, my friend) jumped into that lake in front of the retired tennis player’s house—was a cold and barren place. My mom started coming out to wait with me on the corner because a seventh-grader up the block had the school pick him up right in front of his house.
“There it is,” she said as the bus came barreling down West Road. “Another Short Hills kid getting an exception in life.”
The five Millburn Township elementary schools funneled into the middle school, and on the first day we were all thrown into the auditorium to fend for ourselves. Before I got on the bus, my mother told me that today I could start over, that I should make new friends and avoid the kids who gave me trouble at Glenwood. I didn’t want new friends, but I didn’t have a choice.
Lenny moved to a town in Somerset County where his mother could afford a house and they didn’t have to live in an apartment anymore. Maine Ogden went to a private school called Pingry—I’d only see him at Little League now. Andrius went to Lithuania one summer and never came back—I never saw my first love again. And Karl was still at Glenwood, where I had been told the regime adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward the trading of Pokémon cards, as the fervor had mostly died down by 2002.
I did look forward to seeing Kader again, as Hartshorn kids and Glenwood kids would finally engage in educational cross-pollination. But as I stood in the auditorium growing steadily more saturated with newly minted sixth-graders, I couldn’t find him. I would discover that Kader and his family moved shortly after 9/11 to somewhere in the Midwest, where there would be plenty of room for the Kalans’ horses—I pictured Kader as a dark-skinned cowboy wielding one of those Ali Baba swords that hung in their house. I had asked my mom if Iraq attacked us on 9/11.
“Sorta,” she said.
I felt like the new kid all over again, like some type of barbarian—Visigoth, Ostrogoth, Vandal, Hun, you name it.
“Hey Vic! Vic, over here.” Paxton waved me over to a row full of malignants and kids I had never seen before—potential malignants, I suppose. My mother had told me to start over, and I wanted to start sixth grade Paxton-free, but I had been standing in the aisle for far too long and took a seat in his row—at least Silas joined us too.
The ungodly hour at which I now had to wake up for school left me delirious; I didn’t notice Pierce Stone seated directly in front of me. I looked for an escape, but either side of me was filled with kids from Deerfield—the elementary school serving “new” Short Hills. George called it “B’nai Deerfield.”
All of the Deerfield kids spoke about a place of infinite joy, devoid of the auspices of parental guidance, where they had entire gangs of other friends from places like Colts Neck, White Plains, and even Livingston—when I
