My name is Adam Jackson Harris. Everybody calls me A. J. I don’t think a lot of them know my real name ... or forgot it. I’m in the 10th grade, and my life is pretty boring … school, eat, sleep, but girls like me and I love them! Nothing exciting ever happened to me until I went on a cruise with my mom and dad during Christmas break.

It was the first time I had ever been on a cruise. We flew to Florida heading to The Bahamas. We sailed at night, so by the next morning we were well out into the Atlantic. We awoke that first morning to see the most beautiful blue water I have ever seen. I live on the Gulf Coast of Texas, and the water in the Gulf of Mexico is brown. The Atlantic Ocean is just awesome.

The cruise was awesome. You see food … you eat it … all you want. I must have eaten 20 ice cream cones the first day. There were four or five pools of different sizes on the ship and a water slide! Plus, there were beautiful girls everywhere. I wished I could live on that ship.

On the second full day at sea, I was standing on the deck admiring the blue ocean water when I saw a giant explosion over the water. It was like a giant fireball high in the sky. I don’t know how far away it was, but it took about 3 or 4 seconds for the sound to reach us. People around me saw it, too. They were watching in amazement and wondering what it was.

Then, a voice came over the ships intercom telling everyone to take cover right away. They said that there was an explosion and there might be some shrapnel falling out of the sky. I stepped back into a door just behind me and actually heard something hitting our ship.

I saw a small object hit the deck and slide, landing on the other side of the door. I opened the door just enough to pick it up. It was an old ball point pen. The top part of the pen was flat and was made of silver colored plastic. I put it in my pocket.

After a few minutes, we were told to go to our cabins right away. I met my parents there. A cruise employee came on the T.V. in our cabin. He said that there had been a collision of two aircraft and we should stay in our cabins. He apologized for the inconvenience but said it was for our safety. He also said that if we saw any “foreign” object on the ship that we should not pick them up, but tell a crew member about it. My dad said that the ship was probably going toward the collision to see if there were any survivors. I started to tell him about the pen but decided not to tell anyone. I went into the restroom and got the pen out again to look at it. There were no markings on it. I wondered who it belonged to. Whoever the owner was … they were probably dead. I put the pen into my suitcase. I had a souvenir.

We were in our cabin for a very long time. When we came out the cruise had continued. We saw some U. S. Navy ships, but there was no sign of the airplanes or anything from them. I was kind of glad not to see any bodies floating in the water or anything. We learned later that there were no survivors on either plane involved in the crash.

When I got home, I put the pen in safe place in my room. Every once in a while, I look at it and wonder about the person who owned it before me. I guess I’ll never know anything about them except that they died in a fiery plane crash.

That makes me sad, but there’s nothing I can do about it.