Summary

Nine-year-old Brandon Chavez heads into Manhattan with his father who works in the Windows on the World, the toney restaurant atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It is a crisp September Tuesday in 2001. Brandon should be in school, but he has been suspended for punching a bully who took another kid’s toy Wolverine gloves. On the subway, Brandon’s father lectures his son. “There are rules…You punch somebody, you get suspended, no matter why you did it” (5). On the way into the Tower lobby, Brandon helps a Black man trying to get on the escalator and juggling three cups of coffee and his briefcase. When they get up to the restaurant, Brandon, bored helping his father arrange table settings, decides to slip out, head down the elevator to the underground mall, and replace the kid’s lost Wolverine...