I was ten years old on September 11, 2001. I had learned in history class that the 90’s was special. We were lucky, we learned, that we were growing up in peacetime. I was ten, and I remember vaguely knowing that peace doesn’t last forever, but I also remember thinking “war won’t happen to *us*…” I was at a homeschool bowling league. I had just bowled a strike, and I backed up to see the congratulatory animation on the TV above the lane. Instead there was a picture of the twin towers burning. There were a hundred lanes in the bowling alley, each with a TV above it, and each TV showed the same picture, the twin towers burning, the camera shaking because the person holding it kept being bumped by people running. There wasn’t any sound, only a couple of the TVs had speakers, and the ones at our end of the alley didn’t. It was silent, everyone standing, staring, nobody knowing what was going on. Some of the parents complained that they didn’t want their kids seeing the news footage, but it was too late. Eventually the score screen came back up, and the news was only at the one end of the alley that had sound, but we wouldn’t go back to bowling, just stood, watching the news. We were watching when the second plane hit. We were watching when footage of the Pentagon came up. We were watching when they reported the plane going down in Pennsylvania. The adults were all on the phone, nobody was getting through, they all kept trying. My Mom did eventually get an email from my Dad, who worked in DC. He could see the Pentagon burning from the cafeteria window. The next day, the Washington Post asked kids to write in with their stories about 9/11. My story got published. I cut out the article, and taped it to the side of the TV, which was on for the next week straight. We were ten years old, and our bubble had just burst.