United We Stand by Eric Walters

light of the train coming down the tracks.
    “Just make sure you keep checking in … What is that sound?” She could obviously hear the train coming, and it was getting louder and louder.
    For a split second I thought about trying to make something up, but then I decided I’d try to be honest for as long as I could.
    “It’s a train,” I said. “We’re by the train station. I’ve really got to go. Bye, I love you.”
    I hung up the phone before she could say anything else.
    The train squealed into the station, and James suddenly appeared at my side. When the train doors huffed open we climbed in and took the first set of seats. It wasn’t like we were going to have to fight for them. There were only a few other people on the whole car.
    “Any problems with your mom?” I asked James. He’d been calling home at the same time I was.
    “Nothing. She just wanted to make sure she could get hold of me. I told her my phone was on if she needed to call. What did you tell your parents?”
    “It was my mom. I just told her that I was with you and we were walking around.”
    “That’s not a complete lie. We will be walking, as soon as we get off the train.”
    The train started to move, and I felt a shiver go up my spine. I knew that going to the city was wrong, but I knew it would be even more wrong to let James goby himself. There was no sense in even thinking about it now, though—we were on the train and heading downtown. Well, I could always get off at the next station if I really wanted … No, I couldn’t do that. We’d go downtown, find out that we couldn’t get anywhere close to Ground Zero, and then we’d head back. And really, what was the difference between us walking around there and walking around here? Not that my mother was likely to see it that way.
    I looked at my watch. It was just a few minutes past one. If everything went the way it should we’d be back by four, five at the latest. We’d be back before any -body could discover where we’d been. There was no way I wanted my parents to find out. Especially not my mother. I knew that she’d be worried about my going into the city even under normal circumstances. But really, what could happen? It wasn’t like the towers were going to fall down again.
    “Thanks for coming with me,” James said.
    I changed seats so that I was sitting opposite, facing him. “You’d do the same for me.”
    “I would. But you must be trying to figure out why I want to do this,” he said. “You must think I’m crazy.”
    “I don’t think you’re crazy.”
    “That’s good, because I don’t think I could explain it to you, you know, put it into words.”
    “I think maybe I know why you need to go.”
    “You do?”
    I nodded my head. “I think so.”
    “So?”
    I took a deep breath before starting. I wanted to make sure I said it right. “I was down there yesterday,” I began. “I was
in
the building. I almost died, and now, today, I’m watching it on the TV and it doesn’t seem real. It’s like some bad made- for-TV movie.” I paused again and thought carefully about what to say next. “You need to go down there because for you
none
of it seems real.”
    “None of it,” he agreed. His voice was barely audible above the noise of the train.
    “You need to go down there to see.”
    For a split second I almost mentioned what my mother had said about open caskets to see the dead person, but I caught myself in time. There was no point in talking about dead people or caskets or funerals.
    The train started to slow down as we came into the first station. There were only a few people waiting on the platform. It came to a stop, the doors opened, and we waited as nobody got onto our car.
    “I’ve never seen it like this,” James said. “You know, almost nobody on the train.”
    “Yeah, it is pretty empty.”
    The doors closed and the train once again started moving. I stared out the window. It was then I noticed that it wasn’t just the train