I closed my eyes. I hated traveling, which happened to be exactly what I was doing. Please don’t let me throw up! I thought.
"Uh, Faye? We’re at the hotel." I could tell by her voice that it was my best friend, Stefania, who had been staying with us since her parents died.
I looked up, my brown eyes meeting hers.
"Tu vas bien? You okay?" she asked. I nodded, standing up with the rest of my class. We walked into a hotel that you could say wasn’t San Francisco’s finest. The floor creaked, the paint was peeling, and it smelled like mold.
It’s gonna be a long field trip, I thought to myself.
That night, I didn’t fall asleep until midnight because of my worrying. It was my first overnight field trip. It was my first night away from my parents. Even after I finally fell asleep, I kept having nightmares, causing me to wake up at least three times in the middle of the night.
But just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, at 5:12 a.m., it did.
I woke up to the monstrous shaking of the walls. People were screaming. All around, things were coming off the walls. The bunk bed I was sleeping on the bottom of started to collapse. I jumped off just in time to watch it fall to the floor, Stefania still on top. We both screamed. I covered my ears, closed my eyes, and hugged my trembling knees. I was crying. I was thinking of a million things at once. How my brother was being baby-sat while both my parent were attending an important meeting a half hour away, how any of them could be dead, how the ceiling could collapse on me at any second.
I looked up to make sure it wasn’t. It probably would have fallen, but at that very second, the earthquake stopped. Everything was completely silent, until, as if on cue, everyone started talking at once. I panicked. I turned around, facing the bunk bed that could have killed me. Stefania was standing on the pile of rubble. I breathed a sigh of relief.
"Stefania!" I said after we had cleared out into the rubble- lined streets, "I have to go find my family!"
She nodded.
