‘We Didn’t Need Money. We Needed Paper Cranes.’

Darby Northington and his mom and younger brother had almost made it to school. They’d gotten a late start that morning; it was the beginning of the year at P.S. 234, an elementary school just north of the World Trade Center, where Darby was in third grade, and everyone was still getting into a new routine. They were about to cross Chambers Street when a plane flew directly overhead.

When Darby told me this story, on Zoom in late August, he looked toward the ceiling and held both his arms up in parallel, as though he were catching a basketball, to indicate the plane’s path. He remembered thinking, Whoa, this is the closest I’ve ever seen one of these. The plane was low and loud. When it hit the North Tower, everyone stood and stared. Darby said something to his mom about the accident they’d just witnessed. “She was like, ‘It’s not an accident,’” he recalled.

Darby is an investment banker now, with a reddish beard and a kind smile; he apologetically interrupted himself at one point to tell someone off camera that he’d already fed the cats their breakfast. I don’t think we’d met before, but it’s possible that our paths had crossed at some point. Though I wasn’t a student at P.S. 234, I was also a third grader in downtown Manhattan on 9/11, and some of Darby’s former classmates are acquaintances and friends with whom I’m still in touch. Recently, I talked with nine of them, and with their teacher, Kara Pranikoff, about that strange third-grade year and the two decades that have passed since.

The classmates already knew one another well in 2001; Pranikoff had been their second-grade teacher too, her first year at the school. “They come into third grade way more independent than second graders,” Pranikoff told me. “They’re really able to put things together. They can read fluently enough and they