My day started off like any other day. I awoke to the sound of my parents blasting Queen’s newest hit “Another One Bites the Dust” at 7 in the morning to wake all of us kids up. Once I finally decided that it was time to get out of bed, I started to get ready for school. First things first - clothes. I decided that I wanted to wear my high-waisted acid wash jeans, a neon pink t-shirt, a jean jacket, and my Chuck Taylor All-Stars - my totally stellar school outfit. Next, I put my light brown hair up into a half ponytail. I decided that I wanted to skip out on makeup today. I attend school at Washington High School, which is located in the state of Washington. It’s a pretty basic high school with all of your normal stereotypes, which included the jocks, dweebs, the popular girls, and then the outcasts. In my opinion, the stereotypes are super lame and pointless. All they do is put people down. But the jocks and popular girls, on the other hand, find stereotypes very legit. Since I don’t care about stereotypes, I get made fun of, but I couldn’t care less about what they think of me. 

“Kimberly, come downstairs! You’re going to be late!” yelled my mom, Angela. 

“And now I’ve lost my train of thought,” I mumbled under my breath.

Once I grabbed my breakfast, I headed out the door to make my way to school. To get to school, I get to drive my rad new 1980 Buick GMC. But since I’m the only one of my siblings that can drive, that means that I also have to drive my siblings to school. I act like driving my siblings around gets on my nerves, but in reality, I enjoy spending the extra time with them. 

When I get to school, I immediately head to my first class. The first two hours of the school day go by very quickly. It was during the beginning of my third period class when something went horribly wrong. It was about halfway through class when we felt the shaking. It took everyone a second to realize what was happening. But then it all clicked. This was an earthquake. After the realization of the situation occurred, next came the announcement. 

“Attention students. This is not a drill. There is an active earthquake so get into earthquake      position and stay in that position until we are all clear.” 

After being in an earthquake position for roughly 10 minutes, we were cleared to finally come out from under our desks. Since everyone was so shaken up because of the event that just happened, we were dismissed to go home since there wasn’t much debris in the area and it was safe to drive. This was sick news. Now I get to go home and chill for the rest of the day. 

Once I picked my siblings up from school and got home, it was pretty chill. My parents ended up leaving work early too so that we could all be together just in case something else were to happen, which I highly doubted anything would happen after that massive earthquake.

“Kimberly, would you turn on the news for a second?” asked my dad, Darren. 

I proceeded to turn on News Channel 4 for my family so we could see if they were expecting anything else to happen. It turns out that we had something much bigger than an earthquake to worry about. And that was a volcanic eruption.

“Attention all viewers. This is an emergency. The earthquake that hit our town earlier has now caused Mount St. Helen to erupt. Get into cover. I repeat, get into cover and find somewhere safe. Do not leave the house. It is not safe outside so find shelter immediately.” 

After hearing this news, my family and I gathered the essentials that we had packed and went to the attic upstairs, which doesn’t have any windows. Once in the attic, we turned on the FM radio on our boombox to keep up with the destruction that was occurring right outside. You could hear the crumbling of buildings in the distance from the debris. The only thing that my family and I could do was wait out the destruction. 

My family and I had to stay in the attic for almost a full day. I had no clue what would happen to us or what would end up happening to the town. I would have never once thought that this would happen to us. In all honesty, I was terrified. Hours later, once we were in the clear to make our way outside, we were able to see how much destruction was caused in the city. Ashes and sediment from the eruption covered the ground in our city like snowfall. All you could see was crushed building and the color grey all throughout the city. No color was visible - the green grass was covered with grey ash, the blue sky was littered with grey dust floating in the air. When taking a look at our house, we were missing some siding and shingles, but everything else was in good condition. I couldn’t believe that all of this happened because of an earthquake. The eruption demolished everything in its path. Later on in the day, we found out that the eruption claimed 57 lives in total and destroyed much of the town. Since power lines were knocked down, there was no way for us to contact the rest of our family to see if they had made it. This was something that we would just have to wait out. 

The next day, most everyone in the community started cleaning up the debris left in the town. Cleaning up the debris was going to take several months, especially to reconstruct buildings, roads, and other structures. When we were finally able to make contact with the rest of my family, we learned that they were all okay and that my family and I got hit the worst out of everyone else. But we would be able to get through this. We had to.