Chapter One
Stuck in the FenceEast Greenbush, New York, is a suburb of Albany. Middle-class and about as average as it gets. The work was steady, the incomes were suitable, and the kids at Columbia High School were wannabes. They wanted to be rich. They wanted to be hot. They wanted to be tough. They wanted to be too cool for the kids who wanted to be rich, hot, and tough.
Picture me: the average teenage boy. Blond hair and blue eyes, smaller than average build, and I'll admit, a little dorky. I sat in third-period lunch with friends wearing my brand-new Aéropostale T-shirt and backward hat, wanting to be self-confident. The smells of greasy school lunches filled the air. We were at one of the identical fold-out tables. We were talking, but my thoughts were on my girlfriend, Heather. She was a senior this year and would finally be done. I was a junior and had two more years to go. What a drag.
I had turned sixteen less than a month ago, and so far being sixteen was boring as hell. I remembered watching shows like Saved by the Bell and Welcome Freshmen when I was a kid. How amazingly cool high school had seemed in those shows.
I remembered coming to the high school in fifth grade for a district-wide band concert. I marveled at these independent creatures who had their own cars and girlfriends and after-school jobs and holes in their jeans. They were free in the truest sense of the word.
And then, overnight it seemed, I was sitting in Columbia doing all the "independent" and "wild" things that teenagers did. What a joke. High school was so typical and predictable. Everyone here was so occupied with discovering the definition of cool.
To some, cool was Abercrombie and popped collars. Some thought cool was playing sports. Some thought cool was drinking before the homecoming dance. And others swore that cool was not trying to be cool: nonconformists with black nail polish, leather boots, and oversized safety pins in their ears.
Our free expression was in so many ways just a restriction of our identities. All of us trying to be something we weren't. Even the nonconformists were conforming.
High school, I guessed, was just a chapter, something standing in the way of real freedom. High school didn't even seem real. It seemed so fake.
A friend of mine came into the cafeteria and sat down next to me.
"You hear?" he asked us.
"What?"
"A plane crashed into the World Trade Center."
"That sucks," I said.
The conversation picked back up and we talked about sex or drugs or something equally as interesting. It wasn't that we didn't care about the Trade Center. We shook it off as an accident. We assumed some drunk or stupid pilot had misjudged, clipped a wing, or something, and we shook it off. Shit happens.
The bell rang and the hallways exploded with raucous, horny teenagers. I visited Heather in the hallway, walked her to her class, and went to fourth period, Trigonometry. My math teacher, being pretty obsessive-compulsive, said that we weren't going to watch CNN all period. We were going to learn trig. She mentioned something about the crash but quickly moved on to the isosceles triangle. None of us realized the magnitude of it all yet. Otherwise we would have watched CNN all period.
It wasn't until fifth period, American History, that I understood what happened. During math class, the second plane had crashed, and I walked into History to see a TV showing the now infamous news footage: two enormous twin towers that smoked from their tops, one plume a bit higher than the other.
I walked to my seat and sat down, eyes never leaving the television. I took off my hat, but I didn't open my notebook. I didn't take out my pencil or assume the slumped note-taking position. I knew we weren't going to be taking notes in American History class that day.
The class was abnormally silent. It was high school, and things were usually done in a loud, disrespectful manner. Our teacher, Mr. Barret, motioned to the television and said something I'll never forget.
"You guys are living history."
I never thought of myself as living history before 9/11. History was something that had already happened, something I studied in school. It came out of a textbook. It was hearsay, not real enough to count.
My mind tried to tell me I was watching a movie. It was on TV, after all, and everyone knows you can't believe everything you see on TV. We watched in horror as the first tower collapsed into itself like it was being demolished. This was real, terrifyingly real. The sort of real that makes you lose hope. The atypical, unpredictable kind of real that you never see coming.
That night I called Heather and we talked for a long time about how shocking the attacks were.
"This is probably how people felt after Pearl Harbor," said Heather.
"Probably," I said. "Makes you realize some things."
"Like how crazy the world can be," she said. "It's scary. This is going to cause a war."
"I know."
The next day at school Heather told me she'd had a dream we were attacked. Right in Albany, she said. You could see the city exploding from Denny's, where we worked. Since then, once in a while, she had these dreams. They were always different scenarios related to terrorism, but we were always together .
"They feel like the world is ending," she said about the dreams.
But, contrary to her dreams, life went on. Wrestling season started and was filled with all the hard work, sweat, and pain of my first two seasons.
On nights and weekends I continued working at Denny's as a dishwasher. And Heather worked as a server.
Excerpted from Ghosts of War by Ryan Smithson Copyright © 2009 by Ryan Smithson. Excerpted by permission.
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