And she went to him, my sister went to him, I don’t know what she was thinking, and I don’t know what he was thinking, staying by the window where nobody could get out, why he didn’t try to go to the stairs or the elevator, or try that terrible fire escape hardly anyone could go on, I don’t know, even though he wouldn’t have lived anyway if he did that, because so many girls tried that and they died, but I don’t know what he was thinking staying there by the window, not even trying. I called her, I called to my sister, but she didn’t hear me, and everyone was coughing and screaming so loud, and I tried to go closer and keep calling her name, but she didn’t hear me with all the screaming, and the noise was so terrible from the fire roaring and the little girls wailing, there were some little girls, nobody was helping them and they were burning, and they were coughing and gagging, it was pitiful, and they were crying with the smoke, the smoke made everybody cry, there was so much smoke, and I tried to get to my sister but the flames caught on my hair, and I was getting burned, and I had to go back, so I went back to that door Mr. Jacobs had unlocked, and he was gone, there was nobody else near me now and there was nothing behind me but flames, like a wall of fire, and I went through, and I fell down, but then I got up and I saw that you couldn’t go down the stairs with the fire so I went up the stairs to the tenth floor and there was nobody there, they had all saved themselves already.

It was full of smoke but I saw a ladder that was there, and it was going up to an opening in the ceiling and I went up that ladder to the roof, and there were firemen on the roof and when they saw me one of them said, “Here comes another one, must be the last one,” and then they grabbed me and shouted at me I had to crawl across a ladder over a big gap to a building on the Waverly Place side and they helped me climb up onto the ladder and I did this somehow with my dress burned and my hands burned, and I had broken ribs, it turns out, but I don’t know how that happened in the commotion, and I kept my eyes closed, and it was like another nightmare inside this nightmare, but I did it, and there were some students who helped me over the wall, and then they helped me stand up, and then I walked down the ten flights of stairs to the ground floor of that empty building, and I was by myself and it was like everything was normal and quiet for a minute. But then I went out on the street and a policeman ordered me across the street, like I was just a busybody, because there were bodies falling everywhere and he said I could be killed.