"Where were you when Kennedy was shot?"

She heard her father's Kennedy assassination story hundreds of times as a kid. It often played like a movie in her head. A black-and-white, devoid-of-music sequence directed by Alfred Hitchcock. An old nun in a habit, rapping the chalkboard with a pointer, drilling her second-graders on the multiplication table. The November sun shining through the window, dust dancing in the beams. The class twitchy and anxious to get home for Thanksgiving break. And then another nun walked into the room, she didn't even bother knocking and Sister Mary Margaret looks ready to spit nails until she sees the look on Sister Catherine's face. Tears are splashing and this is where the film goes into slow motion. The words "they've shot the President" come out in echoes. Fade to black.

Her mother would always follow up that tale with one of her own, of the way they sat down to watch the news that night at home and how it's the first thing that comes to mind when she thinks of what television was like when she was a kid. Special Report. Those words. Those damned words. Walter Cronkite fighting back tears.

She figures those stories will always be just stories. She thinks that maybe if she becomes a writer one day, she'll put them down on paper. She thinks that if she makes movies, she'll film that sequence in the Catholic school with the nuns.

She never thinks she'll have one of her own stories to tell.

*

Where were you when Bartlet was shot?

She was in the library. She was reading about gun control and crime prevention. She was trying to write a paper that didn't betray her politics, because her professor told them he would dock points for bias. She was thinking she'd rather be working this research into a speech and how she couldn't wait to graduate so she could do that and get paid for it.

Libraries are quiet places. They're shut off from the world, insular and cold and dry. When someone shouts, there's an echo. You can't be anywhere in the library and not hear it.

She stood up to see if she could find who was shouting. A lot of people had done that, and more than one book had dropped on the floor. It was a quick succession of dull thuds, but altogether it sounded like a shot. In that dry, dusty space, the noise bounced off the walls and vibrated in her heart.

Because the shout had been horrible and it had to be someone's cruel idea of a joke. Some joker from the College Republicans that had just given her a great column for next week's newspaper.

"The president's been shot!"

*

"This is an ABC News Special Report. And now, Peter Jennings."

It was after eleven o'clock. His face was haggard. It was like he didn't believe that he was having to give this report. This Special Report.

So she got the second part of her story. She was in the library, downstairs in the lobby where the media center televisions had been dragged in on carts and hastily plugged into the wall.

She'd heard those words before. She remembered the Challenger exploding. That was her first time.

She watched Peter Jennings talk and she picked out phrases and words like "Rosslyn," "undisclosed location," "unidentified member of the president's staff." She heard "gunshot" and "wound." She was pretty sure that if the president was dead, she'd hear the whole sentence.

The people around her were blurry shapes reflecting shock and fear. There was the guy who had written something criticizing President Bartlet for the paper just yesterday. She could swear he had tear stains on his cheeks.

She hadn't cried yet, herself. She pinched her cheeks, realizing she was pretty numb, a little cold. Had she left her sweater in her dorm again? Or was it back at her chair? Come to think of it, where was her backpack?

She took a step back, as if she might turn around and go find her things, but Peter Jennings was still talking, and now the words "Deputy Chief of Staff" and "chest wound" had penetrated the fog she was in.

She didn't move again for at least fifteen minutes, maybe more. She never did figure out that part of the story when she told it.

*

"Where were you when Bartlet was shot?"

In a week, everyone would have told their stories. I was asleep, I was at work, I was at a bar, I was with my girlfriend.

The stories all sound the same. In the same tone of voice that can only be described as shocked, hurt, slightly confused. Everyone was somewhere and no one forgets where they were. She knew some people told elaborate, dramatic tales, and others told mundane, almost boring tales. But it was always in the same tone of voice.

As for the Special Report, it would always make her stop whatever she was doing and stand stock-still, like an animal in a forest hearing what might be friendly but is just as likely to be a predator.

And she never forgot her sweater in the dorm again.