Free Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan Page B

doesn’t spell a single thing.
    I keep going. The rain returns and becomes more insistent. I guard my candle, and when it runs too low, I borrow another one. I don’t try to relight the ones I’ve lit that have gone out again. I just keep going. At certain points I’m aware people are watching, but then I go back to reciting the names, lighting the candles. There are so many of them. I have to keep going. What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met. I light candle after candle after candle.
    It’s pointless, but it’s the only thing I can do.

THE DROWN OF THINGS AND THE
SWIM OF THINGS
     

(Part Three)

TURN
Peter
    I’m brought back to life by Travis. Not a guy named Travis. No—the band Travis. Musically, they may be a blip on the Britpop radar—but in September 2001, they are big enough to sell out Radio City Music Hall. The only question is: Will the concert actually happen?
    It’s not looking good. In the week after 9/11, New York City becomes something it hasn’t been since the days before the steamship: isolated. Even after the bridges and tunnels and airports open again, most of the people who are using them are making a return voyage. The tourists disappear. Bands do not show up. Concerts are canceled left and right. Museums are empty. New York is full of … New Yorkers.
    Nobody knows what will happen.
    School starts again on Monday, six days after. It starts with an assembly and a minute of silence for Jill Breslin’s dad and all the others who lost their lives. Then we’re told that we need to try to go back to normal, or as close to normal as we can get. Classes will resume. Activities will resume. Life will resume forthe living. Counselors are available if we have problems with that.
    Because I wasn’t here when it happened—because I was skipping study hall to stand outside Tower Records and didn’t show up until after everything had been destroyed—I wondered if it would be weird, like there was something I wasn’t going to share with everyone else. But now I see that’s not true. Because I did see most of my classmates that day. And even the ones I didn’t, we were all here, we were all a part of it. And suddenly I’m feeling this—I guess you could call it tenderness—for people I never even liked before. It’s yet another unexpected aftershock—that I can look at Carly Fisher chewing her gum, rolling her eyes, and even though I have never been able to muster up anything more than annoyance when it comes to her, suddenly there’s this base level of caring. And the people I care about, suddenly I care about them a little more, in this existential way. Like my best friend, John, who actually went to Tower on the twelfth and bought me a copy of Love and Theft instead of just burning me a copy of the one he bought for himself. Or Claire, who is telling everyone they should go out and volunteer—not for one of the 9/11 charities, but for all the other charities that are going to be hit hard because everyone’s going to give to the 9/11 charities now. Or Aiden, the first boy I kissed, who probably went clubbing this weekend and managed to forget everything that happened, if only for the length of a song. I am full of this wide gladness that they’re all okay. Flawed and miserable and sleepless. But alive.
    It doesn’t feel like normal, though. It’s not just caring that’s been added—there’s also fear. Every time there’s a siren in the street. Every time the PA coughs to life, even if it ends up being the announcement of a food drive. Every time we remember, which is constant.
    At lunch, John asks me how the date with Jasper717 went, and I tell him I can’t even begin to explain it. It feels like it was all some kind of twisted dream, the kind where your bedroom door leads to Paris and your mother doesn’t remember you’re her son, so she insists that you have to run a marathon