Bad Fortune

Bad Fortune: The Worst Day Of 2001 Through The Lens Of A Fourth Grader

I was in Mrs. Garrison’s fourth grade classroom. We were working on a morning math warm-up in groups—or at least we were supposed to be. Courtney and Ashley were making a fortune teller with notebook paper and Mr. Sketch scented markers. The smell of watermelon still makes my stomach hurt.

“Okay Court, pick a color,” Ashley said.

“Pink.”

“P-I-N-K,” she spelled, moving the fortune teller like a puppet with her fingers. Inside, she’d written random numbers on the flaps of the paper. “Pick a number.”

“Hmm… six.”

“You can’t pick six,” Mikey said. He was always butting in when he wasn’t supposed to.

“I can pick whatever number I want,” Courtney said, rolling her eyes.

“Don’t you want a GOOD fortune? My grandma says that six is an evil number. It’s the devil’s number.”

“Too late Mikey, she already picked it,” Ashley said. “1-2-3-4-5-6.” The fortune teller moved so much quicker that time.

“Don’t I have to pick another number now anyway?” Courtney asked.

“Yep. Whatever number you pick now will have your fortune on it.”

“Okay. Three.”

Ashley lifted the flap on number three. Her jaw dropped, but then it turned into a grin.

“Oh my gosh, he’s a psychic! It literally says you’re going to have bad luck.”

“What?!” Courtney shrieked. “You’re lying. Let me see it.”

And sure enough, there it was written in purple gel pen, “You will have bad luck!” complete with two tiny hearts dotted over the “i” and under the exclamation point. Courtney’s mouth hung wide open.

“Come on. Pick a color.”

Before I could even say “blue,” I saw Mrs. Garrison’s face turn green. Her and Mrs. Rogers, the other fourth grade teacher from down the hall, were talking in whispers at the front of the classroom. Something was wrong.

“Mrs. Garrison? Can I go to the bathroom?” Mikey asked, his hand shooting straight up. He always raised his hand after asking the question.

“Is it an emergency?” Mrs. Garrison said. She never asked that. Usually if someone needed to go to the bathroom, she’d just tell us to take the hall pass and go.

“Hey, I’ll walk with him,” Mrs. Rogers said to her. “They’ll probably call us all to the auditorium soon. Stay with your class.”

I remember Mrs. Rogers squeezing Mrs. Garrison’s hand. Mrs. Garrison squeezed it back.

“Okay. Yeah. Mikey, go with Mrs. Rogers,” Mrs. Garrison said. “Best behavior, please. And come straight back.”

“I knew it!” Mikey said. “Haha!”

“Okay, Ellen,” Ashley said, turning to me. “Your turn.”

“Heck no,” I told her. “I don’t trust that thing.”

That’s when my stomach really started to twist and turn. The auditorium? For what? Did something happen? I wanted to ask, but it seemed bad. Maybe it was so bad that asking about it would make it worse.

The intercom jingle started playing, then we heard the scratchy voice of the school secretary from the little box near the ceiling. “Teachers, please bring your students to the auditorium at this time.”

“Do we have an assembly today?” someone behind me asked.

“Um, not exactly,” Mrs. Garrison said. “We’re having an early release day from school today. We’re all going to watch a movie in the auditorium until your parents can come pick you up.”

“Why?” Courtney asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Must be that bad luck,” Ashley whispered.

“Everything’s going to be okay, Courtney,” Mrs. Garrison said. “There was an accident in the city this morning, but everything is going to be okay. We’re just sending you guys home a little early today to make sure that everyone is safe, okay?”

“Where in the city?” a girl named Destiny asked. “My dad works in the city. Can I call him? Is he okay?”

“Can everyone line up for me, please?” Mrs. Garrison said. It was the quickest single-file line that we formed all year. “Destiny, come up front for me. Everything’s okay. We’re all going to the auditorium, and I’ll help you find a phone once the movie starts, okay?” don’t think I’d ever seen that many at one time before, not even on the first day of school. As we pushed our way to the auditorium, everything felt weird. Some teachers were whispering. Some kids were crying.

Once the auditorium was filled, our principal rolled in a TV and popped Toy Story into the VHS. The teachers were all huddled behind another TV in the back, watching something else. I couldn’t really hear Toy Story from where I was sitting; but I saw my younger sister, Avery, sitting in the second row with her kindergarten class. Mom put her long blonde hair into two braids that morning. I tried to get her attention to wave at her, but she couldn’t see me. Her eyes were glued on Buzz Lightyear.

Mikey slipped into the empty seat beside me. “Ellen,” he whispered. “This is so much worse than bad luck. This is horrible luck.”

“Do you know what happened in the city?” I whispered back.

“There was a plane crash,” he told me. “Or two, I don’t know. Some kids from Mr. Reed’s class said they saw the whole thing from the window. It sounded pretty scary.”

My heart sank. “From the window? What window?”

“The window in their classroom, I guess?”

The hallways were jam packed. Teachers were trying to get everyone to the auditorium, all at once, but there were so many of us that it was almost hard to move. All I could see were JanSport and L.L. Bean backpacks in front of me—blue and orange and purple and red—I

“No, I know,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Is it the window that looks out at the playground? Like, can they see the playground from Mr. Reed’s class?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Oh my god.” I felt like I was going to throw up. “This is bad.”

“I know. I can’t believe some kids actually saw it—”

“Mikey, the kindergartners saw it. My sister can see the playground from her classroom, too.” back. She’s my little sister.”

“Daddy,” I heard Evie whine from the living room. “No more American TV, Daddy.”

I looked up. Dad’s eyes wouldn’t pull away from the news. He was watching an American flag wave in the wind.

“Daddy,” she said again, tugging on his khakis. “Blue’s Clues. I wanna watch Blue’s Clues!”

The second that we got back home, I actually wished I was back at school. I didn’t think that things could get any worse, but they did.

Dad picked us up as soon as he could. He’d already picked up Evie, our baby sister, from preschool. She was all strapped up in her car seat, kicking her chunky little legs back and forth. On the drive back, Dad told us that something bad happened, and that Mommy was really upset.

The TV was on when we got home. Dad always made sure that it was turned off when no one was watching it, so that we could save electricity. But he didn’t want to miss even a second of the news coverage that day.

The news wasn’t the first thing that I heard when I walked in the front door. It was Mom, sobbing in the kitchen. I think she was trying to hide from us so that we wouldn’t worry. The landline was hung up on the wall, but the spiral telephone cord trailing underneath the pantry door showed us exactly where she was.

“Her name is Bethany Carter,” I heard her cry into the phone. “She has short blonde hair and green eyes… I think she’s 5-foot-4… if you find her—if you hear anything—please call me

She started to cry. I wished she wouldn’t. I liked seeing the American flag on TV. I didn’t like seeing the planes hit the Twin Towers over and over and over again.

“Hey, shhh,” he told Evie, picking her up and carrying her to her crib. “I think it’s nap time, okay?”

Evie screamed and cried and kicked her chunky little legs even harder. I looked for Avery, but she’d already disappeared into our bedroom.

So, I did what I do best. I pulled out the big plastic box of Barbie stuff from our closet and just dumped it on the floor. Avery smiled. Our spotless beige carpet soon turned into a sea of pink tulle dresses, tiny doll shoes, and matted blonde hair. We sat criss cross applesauce in the middle of it all.

“I wanna play with Stacy 2!” Avery told me, picking up a blonde doll in a yellow dress. We had too many Barbie dolls, but not enough names. There were 5 Stacys, 3 Katies, 2 Kens— and, of course, 8 Barbie dolls named Barbie.

“Hey, guess what I saved from my lunchbox today?” I said, reaching into the big pocket of my hoodie.

“What? What is it?”

“Close your eyes.”

She closed them, and I placed a Cosmic Brownie, her favorite, in her lap.

“Okay Ave, open them.”

It was the first real smile—from her or from anyone—that I’d seen that day. I think that’s why it stood out to me so much. It was such a hard day to smile, and Avery still found a reason to.

“Ellen! Thank you!”

“You’re welcome. I know it was kind of a crazy day today, huh?”

“Yeah,” Avery said, unwrapping the brownie and taking a bite. “Super crazy.”

“Like, I need a vacation after a day like today,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. A vacation!”

“What if we took the Barbies on a vacation away from New York? Where should we go?”

“The beach,” Avery said. “The beach sounds way better than here.”

“Do you see any Barbie bathing suits where you’re sitting?”

“Here’s a pink one!” she said, tossing a tiny bikini set towards my foot. “Let’s bring Barbie, Stacy 2, and one of the Kens.”

“Which Barbie?” I asked, reaching for one with a scrunchie in her hair. “I think she’s Barbie 4? 5?”

“She’s Barbie 5. She can come to the beach with us! We can come back for Barbie 4 later.”

“We have to figure out which beach to go to,” I told her as I pulled a pair of purple swim trunks over Ken’s legs. “There are so many. There’s Malibu, there’s Florida, there’s Hawaii…"

“Ooo, Hawaii! Let’s go to Hawaii!” Avery said. She found the Barbie Jeep, stuck Stacy 2 in the driver’s seat, and pushed it to me so that I could load up Ken and Barbie 5.

“You can’t drive to Hawaii, silly,” I said. “You’ll drown."

“So, we have to take the Barbie Jet?”

“I think. Or we have to wait until Christmas to see if Santa will bring us the Barbie Dream Boat.”

Avery stared at the brownie in her lap. “Ellen, I don’t want to go to Hawaii anymore.”

“What? Come on. Hawaii will be fun!”

She was quiet for a minute. “Will the Barbies die if they go on the plane?” she asked me.

I wanted to give her an answer. I wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about, that we had nothing to worry about, that Americans had nothing to worry about. I wanted to mean it. I wasn’t sure.

Avery was only 5. She thought that I had all the answers—she still thinks that sometimes—but I was only 9. I’d never even been on a plane before. How was I supposed to know?

“The Barbies will be okay, Ave,” I told her. “And one day, we’ll be okay, too.”

WRITTEN BY STEPHANIE DEJAK

ILLUSTRATED BY YOKIZ XI