Free United We Stand by Eric Walters Page A

present. “Sorry, I was just watching.”
    “Hard not to watch. What will it be?” he asked.
    “Two coffees, black, with two sugars each.”
    “No problem. It is hard to take your eyes off it, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, hard.”
    “I’m just glad I was here and not there,” he said.
    “I was there.”
    “What?”
    “Yesterday. Me and my father.”
    “Hey, Sam,” he called out, and the other guy behind the counter turned to face us. “This guy was there yesterday.”
    “You were down in New York?” Sam asked. I didn’t really know him, but I knew he was the owner of the place.
    “Yeah, I was there.”
    “How close?” he asked.
    “Right there.”
    “You mean … ?”
    I nodded.
    “Right in the World Trade Center?” he asked, incredulous. Some of the people at the counter turned to look at me, and I suddenly wished I hadn’t said anything.
    “Yeah.”
    “You mean
by
the towers?” he asked.
    “In the South Tower, at my father’s office.”
    “Hey,” Sam called out, “you people hearing this? This kid was in the South Tower yesterday.”
    Now it wasn’t just a feeling; everybody
was
looking at me. The first man came back with the two coffees and put them down in front of me. I offered him a five-dollar bill.
    “Put your money away,” Sam said.
    “No, it’s okay, I can—”
    “Your money is no good here. What floor, kid … what floor is—was—your father’s office?”
    “Eighty- five.”
    “Isn’t that above where the plane crashed?” he asked.
    Before I could say anything, half a dozen people told him it was.
    “Wow … you are one lucky kid.”
    “If I was lucky I wouldn’t have been there to begin with.”
    “I mean you were lucky because you got out
before
the plane hit. That was really lucky.”
    “No,” I said, shaking my head. “We didn’t leave his floor until the plane crashed.”
    “What?”
    I really didn’t want to talk about any of this. Not here, not now, not to him, and not to this audience of strangers.
    “Are you telling me that you got down through those floors where the plane crashed?” he asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “
Nobody
got through those floors.”
    “Most of the people we saw did go up, but we didn’t … We went down.”
    “Yeah, right,” he said, and chuckled. “Look, kid, if you’re going to make something up you should try—”
    “I’m not making anything up!” I exclaimed. “I was there, in that building! And maybe it was luck or maybe it was something else, but I was there and now I’m here! And I don’t want your free coffee!”
    I threw the five- dollar bill at him, grabbed the coffees, and stomped out of the store, the coffees sloshing over the tops of the cups as I moved up the street.
    James wasn’t sitting on the bench. I skidded to a stop. Where had he gone now? I looked up and down the street. He was nowhere to be seen. I started to slowly walk and—
    “Will!”
    I turned. He was in an alley, leaning against a wall. I walked over and gave him his coffee.
    “I saw somebody I knew coming,” James said. “I just don’t want to talk to anybody.”
    “I can understand that,” I said. I was wishing I hadn’t said anything to those jerks behind the counter.
    “And I can’t sit still,” he said. “It feels like this isn’t the right place to be. That I shouldn’t be
here
.”
    “We don’t have to be here. We can go any place you want,” I offered.
    “It doesn’t matter. Wherever I am, I think I’ll still feel the same way. It’s … it’s … I can’t explain it.”
    I couldn’t find the words to tell him that I thought I understood what he meant, but I did. It was sort of like being lost and not knowing the way out.
    He started walking and I fell in beside him. We moved along the alley. It was probably a better place to be if we wanted to avoid meeting anybody. It was just us and the Dumpsters, garbage cans, and parked cars.
    We walked past an open door, the back entrance to a store, probably leading into the