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meet, joined Captain Buzz on the intercom in the afternoon to provide a series of updates about ship procedures and happenings. Because of his soothing, late-night radio delivery, we started calling him the Voice. A loud tone sounded to get our attention— bing bong —and then the Voice echoed through the entire ship.
    “Good afternoon, and welcome to your noon announcements,” he crooned, though he could have been saying, You’re listening to the Voice, with more music and less talk radio. . . . If Captain Buzz and the Voice weren’t worried, neither were we.
    *  *  *
    For nearly two weeks we endured clattering silverware and sliding chairs as the waters grew rougher. Just before sunrise on ourthirteenth day at sea, about seven hundred miles off the coast of Alaska, as I was deep in an Ambien-induced haze, our ship sailed directly into three major storm systems. Shortly after I awoke, the Voice crackled across the speaker system.
    Bing bong .
    “Good morning.” The Voice sounded as if he hadn’t slept all night. “We are encountering severe weather, so we’re asking everyone to put on your life jackets and stay in your rooms. We’re experiencing extremely large swells, so this is merely a precaution to ensure the safety of all passengers. Once again, we are asking you to put on your life jackets and stay in your rooms.”
    Jaret and I looked at each other, smiled nervously, and searched the closet for our clunky, neon life jackets. The night we’d left Vancouver, all students had gathered for a drill at our assigned “muster stations,” where we’d congregate in the event of an emergency. From there we practiced boarding the lifeboats hooked outside the ship walls. Dressed in our life jackets, we playfully turned on their blinking lights and poked one another, as we struggled to seem cool on the voyage’s first night. It was like freshman year all over again, and nobody paid much attention to the instructions we were given.
    This time it wasn’t a drill, though we still didn’t take the instructions seriously. Once Jaret and I strapped on our life jackets, we stood on our mattresses and watched through the porthole window as the waves rose higher and higher. We rode the ship’s ebb and flow for an hour, like cowboys straddling a bucking bronco at the state fair—until we felt the entire boat shudder.
    “Something’s wrong,” Jaret said.
    We didn’t know it yet, but the combined force of the three storms had created a sixty-foot rogue wave that charged across the ocean toward our ship. It smashed into the vessel head-on. And asthe wall of water rushed over the bow, it shattered the bulletproof windows of the ship’s bridge and flooded the main power supply. The icy water shorted the electronic controls, which caused the engines to die and the navigational equipment to shut down.
    Bing bong .
    The Voice sounded as if he’d just sprinted a marathon. He gasped for air between each urgent statement.
    “Ladies and gentlemen. Get to the fifth floor or higher! Stay out of the elevators. Help the women and children up the stairs. Keep your life jackets on, and get to your muster stations immediately! ”
    I coughed out a single breath as the weight of realization struck my chest. Bile from my stomach rose into my throat, my legs went wobbly, and I lost all strength to stand.
    From what I could remember from our drills, the dangling lifeboats were our only way off the ship. Given the conditions, there was no way we could get outside to board them, and any inflatable rafts would flip almost instantly. There was no good plan of escape.
    I’m going to die today, I thought. I’m going to drown in freezing waters within the next two hours. I was in free fall. How was this possible?
    This ship is definitely going down, I thought, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I could feel the panic rising within me. But why? Is this what my time here was meant for? For me to perish in the middle of the ocean?