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I peeled myself off my bed — found a shirt huddled in a compressed pile on the floor. Slumping out the door, I waited at the bus stop with my brain still clawing for sleep.

The bus’s brakes squeezed to a stop. I got in line and walked like a worker up metal stairs. After I sat down on a worn cushion, our teenage bodies jolted forward to a Kansas public school education. 

In first-period biology, we ventured outside to find tadpoles in their natural environment. An autumn wind propped me awake. As I knelt down to scoop a tailed larva into a cup, I overheard some clipped language about planes crashing into towers. This wiggled in my ears as my captive sought escape.

We didn’t talk about dead bodies from thousands of years ago in second-period anthropology. Instead, we saw new bodies burning in distant towers splayed on a TV screen. I was no longer tired 

once I watched smoke spew into a blue Manhattan sky — I watched the south tower fall: black steel morphed into a Tuesday morning grave — I watched the grave grow when the bell rang, a rattle in my head like a baby shaking joy.

In the hallway, I found joy burned along with the bodies who didn’t return breathing to their families. I couldn’t bury joy’s carcass when I had a test on the reproductive system reproducing grief into the young arms of the twenty-first century.

On the last page, I wrote with a lead pencil I want to eat my pencil for extra credit. Then I would know the shockwave of lead intake inflicted upon a human body. I want to feel a little pain today.

At lunch, my burnt chicken skin made me jump to seeing a businessman’s charred skin.

In sixth-period English, my teacher’s face gaped back as if Flight 93 flew into her eyes and burned up all the blood inside. 

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