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Around this time, Hilary arrived home from school with a poem she had written in class. Until Sept. 11, she had been a prolific writer. She had always kept several diaries going and even had one of her fifth-grade poems published in a national anthology. But whenever she tried to write about her father, she felt either blocked or distracted. At long last, the words had come:
My Dad I see a face, a face of God He's smiling down on me and my mom. My dad is up there smiling too. When his tower collapsed he was trapped Inside a fiery inferno with nowhere to go Except heaven.
Since she had accepted that her father was not returning, Hilary had been thinking more about him. She summoned memories of him--the time the previous August when he finally agreed to go boogie boarding, their trips to Philadelphia to hear the symphony orchestra--and replayed them in her head. And she thought a lot about what he was doing now. "In heaven he has everything he's ever wanted," she says. "There's no work and lots of golf, and I'm sure there's a beach. And he spends his time doing all the dangerous things he never let me do, like jumping up and down on a trampoline."
While privately Hilary was having what she calls "moments of realization about my dad," she was more conflicted about her public role. She and Ginny had gone on an all-expenses-paid trip sponsored by the rock band Creed to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. She met Brian Boitano and Senator Orrin Hatch and was even serenaded by Creed onstage. When NBC was looking to interview someone about the trip, Hilary's hand shot up. Back in Avon, she went from charity case to celebrity. In no time the whole school had seen the tape of her interview. "Everyone started sucking up to me and telling me how cool I was for getting to do these things and how they wish they'd gotten to go too," she says. They likened it to winning a radio call-in contest. The pangs of guilt returned: What was she doing profiting from her father's death? "They didn't understand the price," she said.
By spring she was out of synch with her friends. Not only could she still not be candid about the one thing on her mind, but while her world had disassembled, everyone else's was seamlessly pressing forward. Some girls had discovered boys, but she still saw herself as kind of a tomboy. One of her closest confidants was a 32-year-old FBI agent she had met at bereavement camp. Hilary had never before cared about social machinations because she had never had to. Now she was suddenly self-conscious and wondering why she had chosen this moment to worry about what other people thought.
Her peers were not the only ones who could make her feel ill at ease. Sanderson, her teacher, clearly had only the best intentions, but sometimes he was no better than the news anchors who kept harping on Sept. 11. During the last week of May, he brought a TV into class so that everyone could see the ceremony marking the completion of the ground-zero cleanup. Hilary wore her brave face and watched along with everyone else. Afterward, Sanderson asked if he could see her in the hallway. "You're my hero," he said. "You've just been so outstanding in front of your peers all year. I want to cry right now." So did she--out of utter embarrassment.