It was a Tuesday, normally my favorite day of the week as I only had one class that day and it wasn’t ‘til 3 in the afternoon. That meant I could safely roll out of bed around 10am and head across the hall to the showers before going downstairs for lunch.

            Normally I took the stairs down to the lobby (it was only nine stories), but I was feeling lazy that day. The wait for the elevator wasn’t that long, and only one other person was with me on the way down (though he was technically going up, you never where you were going on a Stanford elevator).

            “Class is cancelled today,” the thin, blond haired kid said.

            “How do you know, some kinda holiday I don’t know about?”

            “I work for The Hurricane,” he said cryptically.

            The door opens and he gets off at Ross-10. I continue down to the bottom floor, and find the lobby unusually quiet – even the normally active desk area stood in somber silence.

            Who died?

The whiteboard wasn’t talking, but it did have a smeared “frowny face” drawn on that was barely visible through the old black\red residue from previous messages. I reach for a copy of The Hurricane from the bin by the entryway, but it didn’t mention anything about classes being cancelled.

I could have gone into the cafeteria, but I decided to try the still unnamed coffee shop that had just opened across from Sbarros. I took the short path along the lake, past the School of Music and into the back end of the UC.

Bam! Suddenly I find the missing 21,987 missing students all crammed into the building’s already awkward lower lounge with their jaws collectively agape. I stop to watch the same TV that everyone else is crowded around.

It’s a ten second clip of an airplane crashing into a smoking tower, and it’s being looped while the anchors are talking. It’s hard to hear what is being said over the crying mass trying desperately to console one another.

I head off to get coffee and a sandwich from the unnamed shop around the corner. The staff there is glued to the same cable newscast the people in the lounge are watching and are definitely not concentrating on my sandwich. There are maybe two other customers in the store and few kids in what was then a small arcade.

I continue reading the paper, and then go back to watch the TV for a few moments (maybe longer) before going back to the room. I get to the lobby and the whiteboard now reads “CLASSES CANCELLED” under the big frowny face, and a second board near the RM’s apartment announces “walk-in news\support all day.”

 I didn’t have a TV anymore as my roommate took it with him when he dropped out (less than two weeks into the semester), so I started to work on my computer. I figured it might be my parents.

It was my friend Sean from Northern California. It was the first time I’d heard from him in several months, and the last I’ve heard from him since.

“Yeah, I watched a few seconds of it," he said indifferently. "But then it got boring and I turned it off.”

I got back to my coursework, and then I switched subjects twice before laying back on that uncomfortable plastic mattress (my usual semi-nonproductive routine for Tuesday afternoons).

The cafeteria was crowded, but eerily quiet as if the whole building was put on “mute.” Unfortunately, the food tasted exactly the same.

I checked my e-mail and a found a scathing letter from President Shalala chastising her students for “senseless harassment” pertaining to an incident earlier with a pair of Muslim students outside of Hecht.

I pretended to do reading, and then went to bed. It was then that I remembered that Hecht and Stanford are the twin towers of UM.