In the winter of 2011, there had just been a horrible snowstorm and inches of freezing rain for a couple of days, so the roads were inch-thick sheets of slick, glistening ice, covered with snow. School cancelled until the snow was cleared. Once the snow was gone, it was purely ice on the roads, and we had to go to school on the dangerous, icy roads.

Since Ryan, my older brother, always drove cautiously, I trusted him driving me around everywhere and to school on that particular morning. Because the roads were terribly icy, he drove slowly, for he was supposed to in order to be as safe as possible. As he drove down the terrifying road that is famous for having a treacherous valley as a ditch, the both of us noticed some cars ahead stopped, and one car had put on its brakes fairly hard in order to not rear-end the stopped cars ahead and somehow kept control. Since I had noticed that, I did not worry about my brother being able to safely come to a gradual stop just by tapping on his brakes. Before I knew it, I was wrong, and the car lost control and started sliding and swerving back and forth on the road as he tried to regain control. ‘I’m going to die.’ I was absolutely terrified and sat there motionless and speechless, not knowing what to do, because cars were stopped in front of us, coming from behind us, and coming towards us in the other lane that we kept swerving into.

I figured that, no matter what, something bad would happen. Whether we hit a car or flipped into the ditch, I was almost positive that it wasn’t going to be anything good.

As we swerved, hundreds of thoughts raced through my head, and I thought to myself, ‘Is this really happening? What do I do?’ As countless thoughts rushed through my head, Ryan regained control and stopped the car in the correct lane. Even though this had only lasted about a short ten seconds, it felt like it was an agonizing hour. Once I realized what happened and we knew we were okay, my body went numb and tingly and became extremely hot because it hit me that we were very lucky to be unharmed.

Red faced, both of us looked at each other and didn’t say a word; although, it was like we had a silent, wordless conversation between ourselves from the expressions on our faces and the looks in our eyes. After it all, Ryan cautiously took off and started heading towards the school, and I was glad to be able to say, for once, that I was at school that very day.