Once each year around 8:45 a.m., Thomas Panevino watches the clock and waits. It does not matter where he is or what he is doing. He could be at his apartment in Gainesville, where he's a student studying English at UF. Or he could be in Boca Raton, Fla., a place he's called home since 2004.
All that matters is the moment when the small hand moves from 45 to 46.
This is when he presses the phone to his ear and talks with his mother.
***
Ten years ago, at 8:46 a.m. on a Tuesday in September - when members of the terrorist group al Qaida flew a hijacked passenger airplane into one of the Twin Towers - Panevino was in his seventh-grade Spanish class in New York City, less than a mile from the World Trade Center.
It was the second day of school, and Panevino, now 21, remembers exactly how the morning unfolded. He and his classmates pressed their faces to the window, watching the fire kindle from the first tower. He remembers his middle school principal coming over the intercom, trying to pacify teachers and students by saying there had been an electrical accident.
Panevino remembers his father, who was getting breakfast at Pick A Bagel near the school, being one of the first parents from his class to pick him up after the airplane crashed.
He remembers the roaring sound of the airplane flying low to the ground and the engine revving just before slamming into the tower.
He remembers the smoke, the ash, the shower of burning white paper falling like confetti from the sky.
He remembers feeling numb.
***
When 8:46 a.m. rolls around each year on 9/11, Panevino calls his mother, an interior designer who used to get coffee at the World Trade Center each morning with a friend.
From the morning of Sept. 11 to the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, Panevino and his father, who worked as a graphic designer for L'Oreal, didn't hear from her.
When recounting that day, Panevino is objective.
He's told the story before, but the words come out slow, as if he's crawling through the memories.
Panevino denounces the media's "prepackaged" 9/11 story and the recycled iconic photos of the Twin Towers - the ones with the still-standing towers and the single airplane crashed into the first tower, the smoke just beginning to billow.
To him, all of the news stations tell the same story: "Planes hit, buildings come down, people are sad," he says.
"Half the things we saw - those things probably couldn't be seen on TV."
Panevino saw two people jump hand in hand from the first tower as ash mounted around his feet. He walked by the unusually silent doorman at his family's apartment, which was across the street from the World Trade Center, and picked up his poodle, Eddie.
His father left a note for his wife. "I have Thomas. We're OK."
That day, Panevino lost everything. Gone was his 30th-floor apartment in Battery Park City, which he found burned and gutted a few months after the attacks, along with his family's black Jeep.
Some of his friends never came home. Their families later left New York.
Today, he and his family have the Jeep's crinkled license plate and the note to his mother kept away in a cardboard box, and he keeps in touch with his friends from New York.
Panevino remembers fleeing the disaster. His father shielded him from ash as they crammed into a 10-person bathroom with 40 other people at a park at the tip of the Manhattan - a park where he used to play as a child.
He remembers sticking his hand into Eddie's carrier to make sure the 6-pound dog could still breathe among all the ash and smoke. He felt the warm lick of Eddie's tongue, and relief washed over him.
The only child among adults, he remembers being hoarded onto a flimsy raft made for about eight people with about 30 people. He remembers the engine almost died, and the tail end of the boat dragged beneath the surface of the Hudson River just before reaching Jersey City.
When he and his father boarded a bus to go stay with a friend, Panevino made the same call hundreds of times.
The next day, the phone lines opened. His mother finally picked up.
She had fled to her sister's apartment in uptown Manhattan.
***
Panevino's words don't drip with bitterness.
"The people who attacked ... I could very easily hate them," he says. "They blew up my home and all that."
Over the past 10 years, he says, some U.S. media outlets have perpetuated a negative image of the Middle East, and as a result, a new type of racism has surfaced.
"These are just a few people who wanted to do bad," he says. "[The media] want to make masses of people representative of a small group of crazy people - that's the only good thing of being there, really, is I didn't get that filtered view."
He met Jai Mirchandani, one of his friends from New York, when they were both about 6 months old. Their mothers walked them around in strollers in Battery Park City.
Mirchandani, who today studies international business at George Washington University, says Panevino holding a particular race accountable for the attacks would be "undermining what his principles stand for."
Although Panevino doesn't consider himself religious, he was always curious to learn more about Mirchandani's Indian culture.
"When my parents would have the [traditional Hindu] Diwali festival, Thomas would be there trying to understand the significance of the holiday itself - trying to understand what that means," Mirchandani says.
After 9/11, Mirchandani's mother warned him not to walk around the city alone. At that point, it wasn't uncommon for people who looked Middle Eastern to get jumped there.
"It struck me very quickly," Mirchandani says. "As a child, you don't experience a lot of racism - especially in New York."
Panevino says he's looked at everyday life differently over the past 10 years.
"After that day, there's, like, nothing to worry about. This class, this test - it means nothing. The people who were in that tower, they would wish for my problems. Life is good."
Sarah Deatherage, one of Panevino's friends at UF, says he has the ability to turn trivial problems upside down and make them funny.
"Essentially, he's just the happiest person I know," says Deatherage, a third-year psychology major. "I think he definitely sees beauty in the world in another way that other people don't.
"He tells me he thinks about [9/11] every day," Detherage says. "And it's kind of saddening because down here in Florida we don't think about it every day, and it's not part of our lives. And we forget - and he doesn't."
***
Growing up in Battery Park City, Panevino remembers the World Trade Center being the center of everything.
"I have home videos of me learning to walk in the World Trade Center," he says. "I could still walk through there with my eyes closed."
Panevino accepts the new New York, replete with police officers searching for bombs and the hordes of tourists that now visit Ground Zero.
But he doesn't want to move back.
"That time of my life is done," he says. "It's a whole lifestyle that I understand but I don't want to be a part of anymore."
After graduation in Spring 2012, he plans to attend graduate school for international communication and eventually work for a technology company.
His career aspirations and his life experiences, he says, are directly related.
"Those connections are what keep us human, and keep us real, and keep us away from a life that they want to take away," he says.
He's eager to visit and see how the rebuilding process of the World Trade Center - the "Freedom Tower" - is coming along.
"Another five, 10 years, it's going to be how it was that Tuesday morning," he says.
As for the 10-year anniversary of the attacks, he's looking forward to getting through the checkpoint.
"I'm gonna call my mom," he says. "It's always a hard day. I want to be at Ground Zero. You want to return and be as close to that spot as you can, but you can't.
"It's something I've thought a lot about after, but now it's something I accept," Panevino says. "It's not something that's so far into me now. Death was that day. Once you learn to accept that, you can start living."
