Never cried so much writing something, but here’s the most miraculous story of my life!
By Nick Lerangis
… Through the window we watched as a small stream of foot traffic began to trickle up the West Side Highway and a flock of media and police helicopters flew straight at us, sending us ducking and cursing as it whooshed over our building. An announcement came over the PA system: the building was being locked down, it was unsafe to go outside, and that we’d all be given free lunch courtesy of the Board of Ed and transported home when the fires and debris were under control.
Then the lights in the room flickered and went dead. The building shook. CNN showed one of the towers collapsing in a gray plume. Our room went silent. Some of us put our heads down. Some of us cried. I sat in silence and thought about death. The room vibrated both with the aftershock and with the nervous energy of 30 teenagers and one middle-aged woman. I figured that if the north tower were to fall over, rather than implode like the first one had, we would all be in serious danger. Confirming my suspicions, another announcement instructed us all to calmly exit our classes and evacuate the building. All 3,200 of us — students and faculty — began organizing into groups and lines. Quietly and in order, we fell in line and exited the building.
The images on the way out will stick with me for my entire life. The gigantic bay window that extended from the second floor ceiling to the doors on the first floor was thick with white dust, and businesspeople were plastered to the window, looking out at their old workplace. As we got to the grand lobby of the Stuyvesant High School building, all in quiet lines, something burst through the south doors. It was a fireman, white from head to toe, staggering, face streaked with tears, chin and torso a tangle of dust, saliva, and vomit. His retching and sobbing was the only noise in the marble lobby, and it echoed off the back walls and filled our eerie procession with a crazed fear and a wash of gladness that we were inside, not out there.
Finally we burst out the doors. I was a speck in a crowd of tens of thousands of people, all of us walking away from the towers and toward something unknown.
As we walked, we talked about baseball, football, and girls, never mentioning the maelstrom of debris from which we were walking away. The Hudson River blinked in the sun at our left, the highway at our right was closed down, and all that we cared about was getting home. None of us knew how long it would take. None of us really cared. We talked in fragments, interrupting ourselves to glance back at the catastrophe and whisper, “Holy shit.”
I fell away from my friends and began walking alone, looking out at the river and losing myself in thought about the weather and the upcoming Mets season. Then a hand landed on top of my head. Someone was palming my head. I panicked for a moment, not knowing who was tall enough to do that, figuring maybe one of the Varsity guys was picking on me.
And then I turned.
