Exodus
By Wendy Manwarren

"The Towers are going to fall over," one guy shouted. "We need to run and jump into the harbor to save our lives!"

I didn’t think the towers would fall. I wasn’t going to jump into the river. But I knew my roommates and I had to get as far north as we could. I kept trying my cell phone to reach my mother in Arizona. But my phone was dead.

Seven blocks away we found a working pay phone. The line of people waiting to use it wrapped around the block. My roommates were crying.

Rumors began to fly. Another hijacked plane was on its way to Manhattan, someone shouted. My roommates and I got in line for the pay phone. We waited for thirty minutes before we could use it.

I heard a huge crash, and everyone around me started to run. I ran too, but I didn’t know what I was running from. "A third plane crashed!" someone yelled. "They’re shooting at us!" someone else screamed. This was the first time in my life that I felt utter fear. I thought I was going to die right there on some unknown block with my roommates.

But then there was silence. White soot covered the sky, the cars, our bodies. Some guy grabbed my roommates and me and pulled us into the nearest building to safety.

The building turned out to be the offices of Goldman Sachs. Someone led us into the basement, along with Goldman Sachs employees and civilians from the street, and told us that Tower Two was now rubble.

The basement also housed a gym. Along with workout equipment, there were fifteen televisions. Staring at the screens, we watched the second tower fall and the New York skyline change forever.

Two hours passed. Someone asked us to leave the building so that the employees of Goldman Sachs could get back to work. I was appalled.

A woman, a stranger, tied a T-shirt around my head to serve as a mask. Be careful, she told my roommates and me as we headed back to the streets. There, a police officer escorted us to the Brooklyn Bridge. But it was engulfed with smoke. So he took us to the Manhattan Bridge and told us to walk across it.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon when we got to Brooklyn. My feet were bleeding.

My boyfriend works in Bay Ridge, so my roommates and I decided to go there, a 150-block walk from the bridge. Along the way, strangers gave us water and bags of chips.

After about thirty blocks, I spotted a flatbed tow truck with a few people on the back. I asked the people where they were going. When they said Bay Ridge, my roommates and I hopped on too. The truck driver dropped us off at 65th and Fourth Avenue. No charge, he told us.

My roommates and I walked the rest of the way to my boyfriend’s office. When we arrived, we were hungry, tired and covered in dirt: as if we had been in a war zone.

Wendy Manwarren is a graduate student in journalism at NYU.