No-one really believed her. People were laughing and everything.

Then a few teachers came down the hall and told us they had heard that too.

From the classroom I was in, I could see all the ambulances coming down the street and there were a lot of cop cars everywhere.

Eventually they told us that instead of keeping us inside the building, where they had previous thought it would be safe, they were evacuating the building. They wanted to make sure that if the towers collapsed, we wouldn’t get hurt.

We were supposed to be going homeroom by homeroom, floor by floor.

But all of them left at the same time because the teachers kind of panicked. It took us a really long time to actually leave the building.

'It didn't seem real'

People kept turning around and taking pictures and trying to get better looks at it.

But I think it just wasn’t really sinking in for me. It didn’t seem real. It hadn’t really hit me.

We walked pretty far. The girl that I was walking with, she lived in uptown Manhattan. I had no way to get home and she was really nice and she offered to let me stay there for the night so my dad could pick me up the next day.

After a while I managed to call my house saying where I was. My dad called back later that night.

Both my parents work in downtown Manhattan, pretty close to the site. So we were all in the area and none of us could contact each other. So they just walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge.

For about a month afterwards I felt really uncomfortable going to sleep. I had trouble actually thinking about it and none of it seemed all that real to me until the news started going away.

'I saw people jump'

They kept broadcasting the same pictures over and over of people falling out of buildings or the buildings collapsing.

It was horrifying. I couldn’t understand why they want to keeping showing the same footage over and over when they kept talking about how everyone needed to rebuild and reconstruct and feel better about it.

I was in a classroom where I got a pretty good view of what was going on before I was evacuated and I didn’t want to have to watch it over and over.

I saw people jumping out and a lot of smoke and fire. I saw one of the planes kind of hanging out of the building.