I’m late to this. I was late to it the first time around, too.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I and roughly 25 other girls in my theology class were the last in our 1,000-person school to learn the World Trade Center had been attacked. By the time we emerged from the only classroom in the building that did not have a television (it was the chapel, technically, but space constraints meant classes were held there daily, with students and teacher seated on lumpy, hand-sewn pillows) both Towers had been hit, though they had not yet fallen. Two planes is not an accident, and so we had to learn both what had happened and what it meant.

This is what anxious parents of freshmen, at an open house the night before designed to welcome them to the world of their teenage daughters, had been told about block scheduling: it allows for hands-on learning, for varied lesson plans, for an in-depth biology experiment and a lecture on cell structure in the course of just one period. Your girls will have less homework, but it will be more purposeful homework. Block scheduling allows for focus, for concentration. Time will not be wasted.

This is what happened during A Block, 8:05-9:40 a.m., 9/11/01, according to the Associated Press guide that has been sitting on my desk for the past week:

• 8:46 a.m. — American Flight 11 crashes into north tower of World Trade Center.
• 9:03 a.m. — United Flight 175 crashes into south tower.
• 9:08 a.m. — FAA bans all takeoffs nationwide for flights going to or through its New York Center airspace.
• 9:21 a.m. — All bridges and tunnels into Manhattan are closed.
• 9:24 a.m. — FAA notifies NORAD about suspected hijacking of American Flight 77.
• 9:26 a.m. — FAA bans takeoffs of all civilian aircraft.
• 9:31 a.m. — President Bush, in Florida, calls crashes an “apparent terrorist attack on our country.”
• 9:40 a.m. — American Flight 77 crashes into Pentagon.

We had been freshmen for three weeks. The first day of high school, a half-day, we were each assigned a “big sister,” an upperclasswoman who would take us out to lunch and then check in with us throughout the year. An unspoken rule of the first day was that everyone would get hazed — a collective celebration of embarrassment, fanned out across the city — and that those who survived the hazing would be spared for the rest of the year.

This was not to be taken lightly. A big sister could be an ally. Give you copies of old tests from the teachers who had been here too long to give a shit about mixing up the question bank. Get you elected to Student Council. Help you get an abortion if you needed one. The mere idea of initiating sex seemed so foreign to me that I could not begin to imagine cleaning up its consequences, and I took in these stories with the same mix of curiosity and remove with which I would watch episodes of Maury at my grandmother’s house on a sick day. (It is hard to believe that little more than a year later I would be buying my first pregnancy test, but that is another story.)

This year was different, though. Our school had received too many annoyed phone calls from the boys’ schools, where seniors would take their little sisters to humiliate them as boys filed out of class. We were loitering in their parking lots. We were creating legal liabilities. We were maligning their reputation, and our own. This last accusation tapped a nerve, and starting my freshman year big sisters were hit not just with the threat of suspension but with a massive campaign, in true Catholic-PR-machine fashion, about the responsibility more mature women have toward their young charges.

My big sister and her three friends, as it turned out, were the only girls in the school who decided to disregard the suggestion of an ice cream social. Ten minutes after school let out, they lined four of us up, put pillowcases over our heads, and shoved us into the backseat of an old Honda. We ended up in a nearby public high school parking lot, an educational no-man’s-land where my father had once kept his head down as desegregation unfolded, had shoved his skinny elbows through black power demonstrations to get to eighth-grade English. We were girls in kilts. Our silly stunts — crawling around in adult diapers like babies, asking strangers to sign a petition saying they would marry us, holding signs that said, “I’m from Assumption; assume the position” — barely registered. 

Two of my grade school friends, whose parents couldn’t afford the increased tuition burden of Catholic high schools, drove by, slumped in the passenger seats of their moms’ minivans as always. We were in different worlds now, and although I was the one being humiliated I felt power over them. It was, perhaps, the day in my life when my privilege became real. I accepted rules that could not have made sense from the outside. I saw that they were arbitrary but didn’t care.

But what I come back to now is the freedom of being in the backseat of that Honda. The windows down, the stifling August-in-Kentucky air beating through them in waves, like being smothered with a warm pillow. The light brush of cotton against my face, eyes closed. The idea of four hooded teenage girls seems unthinkable now; at best, we were an Amber Alert in the making. At worst, we were a symbol of unspeakable horror and shame, a symbol the country hadn’t yet found a meaning for. But I wasn’t ashamed or even worried. Nothing bad had ever happened. Nothing bad ever would.

One of the first things we learned in that religion class with no television was the difference between a symbol and a sign, the signifier and the signified. (Why they started us at semester one with semiotics, I have no idea. Perhaps they were smarter than I remember: after all, Catholicism doesn’t really translate to modern ways of thinking, so the gloss of a little systematic logic couldn’t have hurt.)  A symbol doesn’t indicate what is signified. Society must agree on what the signifier represents. Would four teenage girls in loose hoods have meant anything in August 2001? Maybe it would have; it was the South. But it didn’t feel like anything.

We were not at a crossroads, we were at the beginning. We hadn’t yet studied geometry or calculus. We hadn’t read Sophocles or Shakespeare or Eliot. We hadn’t flipped idly through our art history textbooks dreaming of fingering the rough frescoes in Pompeii and wondering if they still smelled like ash (remembering from the photos, of course, what such ash would look like). Donne hadn’t made us think about fleas and sex and violence. Of course symbols existed before 9/11, but for us they didn’t. Who can say that everything didn’t change? Who can say that it wouldn’t have anyway?

And so it was that I found myself talking to the president of the greatest university in the world yesterday about 9/11, about the importance of making meaning. I took down her words and walked across a 375-year-old campus and went past a security clearance and took an elevator ten stories up to my office and typed them into a computer and published them. I tried to make meaning, because that is what I do. Observe, record, report, process, write. Repeat.

I have no desire to write about the loss and grief and horror of that day, about the sickness that I felt for weeks after the event despite having no connection to it, the unmoored feeling that was some kind of spiritual equivalent of getting your first period. Of having to meet with the school guidance counselor a week later as a routine freshman matter, and crying despite myself, and worse, realizing by the look on her face that I was the only one who had cried. Of hating that woman for the next four years. Of becoming very smart and very hard for a very long time. Of still not owning a working television or a smartphone, of still usually being the last to know. But I want to remember that it did really feel like something.

Image of a tea set photographed 9/19/01 by Edward Keating/The New York Times