High School- Junior Year

Junior year was completely different from the previous school year. Two weeks into the year, I was in my third period criminal justice class. We had a guest speaker, a NYC police officer. He was telling us stories from working in the police department and telling us about it as a career. He resembled Robert from Everyone Loves Raymond, except he was a lot more outgoing and vibrant. The principle came on the loud speaker, immediately the officer (who is very familiar with our school and how much our principle loves to talk on the loud speaker) rolls his eyes spins a chair around in front of him and sits down with a sigh. The principle then informs us that two planes had flown into the twin towers in NYC only 30 miles from where we were. He asked that anyone with family working in the towers report to the guidance office to attempt to contact those family members. He also said that we would remain in the class that we were in until future notice. The officer stands with tears flowing from his eyes, knowing this wasn't good but trying to not panic us, he asks one of the boys in the class to walk with him to the main office so he could call his station to find out where he needed to go. My teacher was in and out of the classroom trying to find out what was going on. The difference between now and then was the speed at which we get information, back then we relied on TV news, radio, and internet, now we would have been all on our smart phones getting second by second updates. The next announcement was that both towers had collapsed and that anyone with family working in the city should report to guidance. Shortly after my teacher walked in the room to report that the pentagon was hit. That was the point I decided to leave. My uncle (Mr. Perfect*) was NYFD and an uncle on my father's side worked in the pentagon, I knew I needed to get in contact with my mother to find out what was going on. My cousin, Mr. Perfect's son and I went to school together. I walked out of my classroom and out of the school, it took me a half hour of trying to call my mother from my cell phone to get a hold of her. Once I finally got a hold of my mother she informed me that Mr. Perfect was at home when it all happened. He had actually switched to have that day off, my aunt was in Florida starting her vacation a few days before his and he was supposed to fly out that afternoon with both of my cousins to meet her. Had he not been off that day he would have been in the tower when it collapsed as was all of his station that was working that day. My mother didn't have any information on my other uncle since he was my father's brother. I began searching the school for my friends and cousin. We all gathered up and walked off campus. My happened to live not far from the school, so we spent the rest of the day at her house watching the news. Over and over agin watching the footage of the planes going into the towers and then the towers collapsing. It was all so overwhelming and there was a huge fear of more things happening. We each sat there and waited, some of us getting calls from family members checking on each other, some of us hoping our phones would ring. I felt so helpless, I wanted to do something but there was nothing I could do. Over the next couple weeks my uncle worked crazy hours going into the city trying to put out fires and searching for any remains. It is something he never talks about anymore and I know it changed him in many ways. You would hear stories of the near misses, my uncle having the day off. My friend's father was in one of the towers earlier that morning but was there too early and was asked to come back later that day. Then there were the stories of the missing, the fireman with two young children who lived down the street from me. A teacher in my school getting a call from her husband who was trapped above where the planes hit before the towers collapsed just to tell her he loved her. Seeing all this loss and senseless trauma I took a conservative stand, which was very different from many of my close friends and actually started our growing apart. In school we would sit and talk, our teachers were very supportive and even as adults lost with their emotions. I think we really all helped each other get on with life.
Life got back to "normal" slowly, it would never be the same, it truly took away a sense of security I always had being an American and stole the innocence of so many children. I started working at an indoor pool, would work almost 7 days a week just to be out of my house. When I wasn't working or at school I was out with friends or in my room at home. I kept good grades in school and my bosses loved me at work.
Sometime after Christmas my mother decided to try and set me up with the son (Heart Breaker, HB) of a guy she worked with. The guy she worked with was someone she knew for many years and he had even worked with my father who had worked there before moving away. HB and I started talking on the phone and then went out on a date. He was gorgeous; average height, dark hair (crewcut), blue eyes, tan, manly, and respectful. I was so confused as to why he would be interested in me. I was overweight, ugly and clearly unlikeable. He was very shy, a year older than me and I was his first girlfriend. We started spending time together every weekend, he lived about an hour away and didn't have a car yet (was saving for college) so I always had to drive to him after work or school. He had a very close family, two older brothers and his parents were still together. They always had big family dinners and there were always people in his house. I loved it, completely opposite of what I grew up with and I loved it. I think I fell in love with his family more than anything, I ignored all the things I didn't like about him. He truly wasn't that smart, he had very different priorities then me, he really didn't have an interest in a long term committed relationship, he had very different goals for his life, and he pictured his future very different from mine. I looked past all that and was blinded by my physical attraction to him and my desire for normalcy in my family life. Once everything happened with my dad (check out early posts) he started to back away from me. We went to my prom together and after that he made a lot of excuses to not see me. A couple weeks later was a family get together for my little brother's birthday, he had agreed to come over for it, I would go get him and bring him home after. The morning of I called him to make sure we were still on and he backed out. He told me that he was going away to school at the end of the summer and didn't want to go away with a girlfriend back home. He said that he wouldn't be able to spend as much time with me that summer because he wanted the time with his friends and to relax and get things ready for school. I was crushed, in anger I said well then I would rather it be over then to know we were wasting a summer together. I got off the phone with him cried my eyes out, put myself back together and went to my brother's birthday party like nothing was wrong. At that point I was so used to being told to hide things and not let anyone know that I was completely broken/destroyed on the inside that it was second nature to me. The next day I had some finals at school and then I called him and told him that I was wrong and that I wanted to spend any time together that we could. I never talked to him again, I would call and he would always be busy and never call me back. I waited to hear from him everyday. I lost my stepmom, my dad and a boyfriend all within a couple months. A couple years later my mother told me that she heard around work that his father pushed him to end things with me because of what was going on with my father.
People around me, of course that knew about what was going on, were on egg shells, on suicide watch. But I kept going. That summer I worked a lot and stayed away from my house even more than I had in the past. I gained 60 pounds in a year, and that was really the beginning of my major weight gain. I was never skinny but I was a steady weight. Between not eating normal healthy meals at home (my mother never really cooked normal meals), hiding my eating since my mother was pushing fad diets on me, and a horrible case of depression my weight started to spiral out of control.

*I call my uncle Mr. Perfect not in a sarcastic way but in the sense that that is always how I viewed him. I looked up to him, he was a hero, started out as a cop and became a fireman. He treated his wife like a queen and would never hurt anyone. In fifth grade I started liking the football team I like because it was his favorite. I wanted to become a police officer to be like him. He was truly a good guy and I was not surrounded by many growing up.