MY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY starts with breakfast in bed: pain perdu — New Orleans French toast — with homemade marmalade and a cloud of uncertainty on the side. Something is nagging at me, like a pebble in my shoe. I would automatically think it was Mandy, but she’s not here — she went off to the diner with Mama first thing. Daddy’s been out shrimping all night and won’t be back until the evening. It’s only Mamere and me at home.

She’s sitting on the porch staring off toward the levee when I come out on my way to pick up my schedule for school, which starts Monday. “There’s a bad storm coming. Listen. No birds. That’s what happened before Camille.”

I vaguely remember a news report yesterday afternoon about yet another hurricane somewhere in Florida.

“Even the crickets. No crickets. Hear that?”

All I can hear are the eighteen-wheelers rumbling down Highway 23. “Sure, Mamere. Thanks for breakfast.” I kiss her good-bye, put in my earbuds, turn on my music, and walk off to school. Mamere has all these Cajun folk beliefs, like hens not laying eggs and cows not giving milk before a storm, and dogs howling when they see death coming down the road. There’s something to it, I know. I’ve noticed the pelicans disappearing before a big storm. But I’ve got too much other stuff on my mind to worry about it right now.

I think back to my conversation in the hammock. Maybe Kendra’s right. Maybe I really am ready for love. More than a sloppy kiss at a party or an awkward slow dance. Something real. An image drifts into my mind. Tru’s smile.

The image takes me so far away, I practically step out into the road without looking, an eighteen-wheeler whizzing by, its horn blasting me back to reality.

School has that first-day-back energy, even though we’re just picking up schedules and classes don’t start until Monday. There are people with new shoes, new haircuts, summer tans, braces finally removed. No one is in a uniform, and we can all see what we’d wear if we ever had the choice. I wave as I see Danielle, looking, as usual, like she’s wearing the clothes she slept in, a style I like but that my mother and sister judge her for. She’s carrying a balloon and something wrapped in tinfoil.

She runs up to me. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Evangeline. Happy birthday to you,” she sings in a goofy voice.

“Oh, thanks, you always know how to publicly embarrass me!” I say, unwrapping the tinfoil to find a giant cookie with a smiley face of chocolate icing.

“It’s from a roll of cookie dough from the freezer section of the grocery store,” she says. “I peeled off the wrapping all by myself.” We have an ongoing joke about my insistence on cooking from scratch and her reliance on food from boxes.

“I can tell that. Thank you! It’s beautiful. Mmm, just smell the preservatives!” I say. The balloon suddenly pops with a bang.

“I don’t think I got my twenty cents’ worth out of that balloon.” Danielle shrugs. “Sorry about that. Oh, and I almost forgot this.” She pulls something wrapped in newspaper from her purse. “Your present!”

I unwrap it, revealing a skein of cotton yarn.

“For your new hobby!”

I’ve taken up knitting to pass the downtime in the summer when I’m out shrimping with Daddy. “Just enough to make you something for your birthday.” I pass her a gooey piece of cookie. “Everything OK?”

“OK,” she says. “She got up in time for the bus this morning.”

“That’s a good sign.” Desiree started a new job at the Home Depot outside Bellvoir, and Danielle has been holding her breath that it works out so they’ll have some steady income.

“Have you seen Evan LaSalle’s buzz cut?” she says, changing the subject. I get it. Sometimes she just wants to forget about it for a while.

We get in line in the gym to register, making small talk. Will Amber actually come talk to us? She completely dumped us at the beginning of the summer when she started going out with Taylor. Danielle and I don’t really belong to any group. We just ease in and out of the little clusters of people. Not outcasts, but not popular, like Mandy and her friends, who I can see from across the gym. Sort of in the middle, like Kaye Pham and Elly Reynolds, who are standing in front of us. There’s nothing particularly wrong about them, but nothing particularly right, either.

“I just had this weird feeling,” I overhear Kaye saying. “When he said he had boat trouble when we were at the Blessing. I just had this feeling he was with someone else.”

“Don’t be paranoid,” says Elly. “It’s a turnoff. You’re not going to get much further if you start acting needy. Did he say he’d call you?”

“No, he doesn’t have a phone. But he’s on JD’s soccer team. So I thought maybe I would get a ride up with Hip next time they’re having a game.”

“I’ll come with you,” Elly says. “That makes it seem less like you’re stalking him.”

“I’m not stalking him!” Kaye exclaims. “He could have said no when Hip suggested we meet.”

“I’m just kidding!” says Elly. “It’s going to be so cool when you get to vote for him on American Idol!”

A sick feeling trickles through me. Because I know who they are talking about: Tru. And he was with someone else. He was with me. I start to blush. Because I had been thinking for the past few days — more often than I’d like to admit — that maybe he liked me. Maybe there was something there. But he came down here to go out with Kaye Pham.

The conversation goes on, speculating on why he could have been gone for so long and whether he seemed as interested when he came back. I stand there in silent misery until they finally get their schedules and move away.

“What’s up?” says Danielle when we’ve got ours. “You look like you’re going to puke. Was it my cookie?”

“The guy I told you about the other day,” I say frantically. “From the Blessing? From St. Bernard? That’s who they were talking about. He’s going out with Kaye.”

“I thought you said he was cool.”

“He was. I thought he was.”

“Clearly you need to rethink that.”

“Why? There’s nothing really wrong with Kaye. I could sort of see how he’d like her.”

“She’s just so ordinary,” says Danielle.

“So am I.”

“Yeah, right,” says Danielle. “Superstar badass fishing champion. Fleet Queen.”

But that conversation becomes a black cloud hovering around me all day. So far, being sixteen is not off to a great start.

Daddy wears a serious expression as he sits down at the dinner table for my birthday dinner. “Just got off the phone with Cal,” he says. “They’re saying the hurricane that was supposed to hit the Panhandle is moving west. They’re projecting a Category Three.”

Mama looks annoyed, flips on the TV, and goes straight to the Weather Channel.

Projected to make landfall sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning as far west as the Mississippi-Louisiana border.

Mandy rolls her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

“This one’s no joke,” says Mamere. There’s a seriousness in her voice. The same way she sounded this morning when she was talking about the birds. When Mamere sounds like that, everyone listens. “We need to go.”

Mama does that thing she does when she thinks Mamere is overreacting. Her voice turns all high and sweet. “Mama, let’s wait and see. It’s Evangeline’s birthday. We don’t need to think about it until tomorrow.”

“Sitting on I-10 for eighteen hours Sunday, you’re gonna be wishin’ you thought about it tonight,” Mamere warns.

“I think Mamere’s right. I think we’re going to need to go,” Daddy says firmly. This is a surprise. Leaving means losing money. Losing money is what he always avoids. His face is grim. I know he’s serious.

We’re not leavers. We’re certainly not the type to leave early. I can’t believe we’re even talking about this. It’s my birthday. We haven’t had cake yet.

“If we’re gonna go, we should do it right,” Daddy continues. “We should get out of here by afternoon tomorrow if we’re going to beat the traffic.”

Mama sighs and frowns. “We’ll never find a place in Baton Rouge. Everything’ll be booked.”

Mamere tilts her head back like she always does when she knows she’s about to say something that Mama won’t like. It’s like she’s trying to get some distance between herself and the words that she knows Mama will hurl at her. “There’s no reason on earth we can’t stay by your cousin Kenny. Five bedrooms in that house.”

Mamere’s three sisters still live in and around St. Martinville — Tante Sadie, Tante Marie, and Tante Fifi. Most of their kids stayed in the area, but my mom’s cousin Kenny is a lawyer in Baton Rouge and we used to stay with him whenever we did evacuate. Mama hates it, though. She doesn’t like his wife and she feels poor in his house. She shakes her head. “I’m not showing up at that woman’s house so she can lord her money over me. I’d rather sleep in the car.”

“What about Fifi’s house, then? I’d like to see my sister.”

Tante Fifi has a little house by herself in St. Martinville. I’ve always loved to go there because I get to see the Evangeline Oak, this beautiful, noble, hundreds-of-years-old oak tree that’s supposed to be the place where the girl who inspired the poem “Evangeline” met her true love, Gabriel. We would go there when I was little, and Grandpere used to say, “You’re pretty special, your Mamere and you. You got a tree named after you.” I love St. Martinville, so if we have to go there, it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s only a few hours away. But Mama is digging in.

“No. If Baton Rouge evacuates, too, Kenny will end up at Fifi’s. Let’s just go to a hotel.”

“Hotels cost money,” says Mamere.

Mama glares at her. “I know that, Mama. But I’d rather drive all the way to Cel’s than end up packed in with Kenny and that wife of his.”

Mama’s sister, my aunt Cel, went to LSU and never came back to Bayou Perdu. She got a job in the accounting department of this fast-food chain in New Orleans, and when they relocated to Atlanta in the ’80s, she went, too.

Now she’s a bigwig vice president of something. She was married, but she and Uncle Jim got divorced a long time ago. Her daughter, Ami, lives in Washington, D.C. now.

The conversation goes back and forth. Whether to go. If we go, when do we go, where do we go? Is it worth it? Is it necessary? It’s an expense we can’t really afford right now.

“Wait a second,” says Mamere. “Aren’t we forgetting something?” She tilts her head toward me.

Mama goes in the kitchen and comes back a few minutes later with a glowing cake. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Evangeline. Happy birthday to you,” they sing. I huff out the candles, and there are a few half hearted claps.

Mamere slides the presents across the table and I open them half heartedly, too. A flip phone. I can’t believe it. Kendra has one, but Danielle doesn’t. Mandy has a phone, but she had to earn it working at the diner. I know it’s a stretch financially for my parents. I know exactly how many pounds of shrimp we had to sell to get that phone. My arms practically feel sore remembering hauling all those shrimp.

“You worked real hard this summer, baby,” Daddy says. “You deserve it.”

I get up and hug both of them. “Thank you,” I say. “This means a lot to me.” It makes me feel more like I’m on par with Mandy, who gives me a compact with a bunch of different kinds of eye shadow and blush in it.

“Just try it,” she says defensively. “That’s all I ask.”

It’s just like her to give me something she would like. But she did get me something. She’s trying, I guess. “I will,” I say. “Maybe just in the bathroom. With the door closed.”

Mamere has given me her copy of Evangeline, the family heirloom that I’ve always loved, with the beautiful gold-leaf letters on the front and the woodblock illustrations. “For a girl who’s got a poem named after her,” she says.

I grasp her hand. “Merci bien,” I say. “I’ve always wanted this.” I know it’s a signal that she thinks I’m really a grown-up now.

After dinner, I listen as Mama calls a million places between Mississippi and Florida looking for a hotel room. “None available? Thanks, bye. Dammit. Yes, do you have any rooms? Nothing. OK, good-bye. Unbelievable. The whole state of Alabama is already sold out.” Around eleven, she finally finds a hotel in some place called Bainbridge, Georgia, that still has rooms and free continental breakfast. It’s about five hours away if we beat the traffic. Double that time if we don’t. So if we leave tomorrow after we finish lunch service, we should be OK. Unless things change, we’re going. But we could wake up tomorrow and the hurricane could be headed to Texas. That happens all the time.

Before bed, I’m starting on a scarf with my new skein of yarn from Danielle when Mandy stands in my door in her sweatpants, musing. “Missing the first day of school is not bad,” she says. “What would be really bad is if this happened next weekend. It’s the senior ring dance and the Orange Queen court selection. If it’s bad and the electricity is still down then, they’ll have to postpone it.” She is deep in thought. I’m pretty sure she’s thinking about whether her tan will last that long or if the delay will mean she’s going to have to go up to the tanning salon in Bellvoir to refresh it.

“Do you know anything about Hip Tran?” I ask.

“Why? Do you like him?”

I give her my Seriously? look. “Do you know anything about his family?”

“Why are you asking me all these weird questions?” She comes and sits on the bed, more interested in me than usual.

“Nothing. I just met his cousin.”

“Is he a football player?”

“I don’t think so. He lives in St. Bernard.”

“Oh, so you’re doing that thing,” she says. “Being interested in someone out of town so people think you have a boyfriend, but you don’t really.”

“I’m not doing anything, Mandy. I just asked a question.”

“Long-distance relationships don’t work, Evangeline,” she warns. “Trust me.”

And so ends another very useful exchange with my sister. Head on pillow. Pebble in shoe. No sleep.

Everyone is glued to the TV at the diner in the morning. Projected landfall is New Orleans, with sustained winds of over 115 miles an hour. There’s a big white swirl on the screen, big enough to fill up the whole Gulf of Mexico. By midmorning they’re calling it Hurricane Katrina. It’s now a Category 5, the weatherman says. What if a Category 5 hurricane hits New Orleans? he asks. Devastation. The levees might not hold. Same things they always say. The things that never happen. Blah, blah, blah.

The announcer ticks down the list of things you should have to prepare for the hurricane: batteries, bottled water, matches, your medicine. So far, evacuation is voluntary. That means most people won’t.

“I heard that it’s supposed to make landfall right here. I mean right here,” says a man at the counter, probably on his way out from the refinery down the road. He taps his finger hard on the counter. “This is ground zero.”

“I heard it was s’posed to hit Mississippi,” says Bill, one of the truckers who’s in here all the time.

Mr. Kovich, the sheriff’s deputy, comes in at around ten, looking serious but with a bit of a swagger. He plants himself at the counter, puts his elbow down, and tips his hat. “Ms. Riley.”

“What’s the word, Tony?” Mama asks.

“Mandatory evacuation. The parish president is about to announce it.”

All the men at the counter look at him. A few groan.

“Oh, come on, Tony. Mandatory?”

“Could be Category Five. Everybody out.”

“They just want to scare us,” says Mr. Porter, who works at the processing plant. It’s his day off, and he always comes for breakfast on Saturday. “It’s because of the lawsuits. If they don’t warn you and somethin’ happens, they’re screwed.”

“At least we’ll get the day off work,” says his wife, Tammy.

“I don’t work, I don’t get paid,” says Mama, sliding a plate of eggs to them across the counter. I hate it when she says stuff like that. It makes her sound so bitter.

“I got nowhere to go. Gotta pay for a hotel. An’ my cats throw up every time I get them in the car,” says Mr. Landry, the mail carrier.

“You could leave them here and leave food for them,” I suggest.

“I done that last time. Didn’t see Puddy again for two months.”

I have to hold in a laugh. It’s funny to see a two-hundred-pound, tough-looking man talk about his cat like that.

Back in the kitchen, Mamere’s got the radio on. Mostly a traffic report. I-10 eastbound is still moving; 1-10 westbound to Baton Rouge is worse. The announcers are joking about it. They’re offering free Saints game tickets to whoever calls in with the best rant about the traffic — a rhyme or a poem or a song, no profanity, please.

After lunch the last of the stragglers are sitting at the counter, eyes glued to the TV. Mama’s in the kitchen cleaning out the fridge and tossing food in the Dumpster out back. “Damn waste,” she mutters.

At three o’clock, I swing the CLOSED sign around on the door of the diner, check the lock, and help Mama, Mandy, and Mamere carry out the coolers of food that we take home.

Everybody here knows the evacuation drill. Pull the cords out of all the electrical outlets. Get everything up off the floor, into the cabinets or on top of a table. Put the generator up in the very top of the closet — that’s what you’ll need the most if the power lines come down and the lights don’t go back on for a week. Throw out anything perishable from the fridge. Board up the windows: I hold the boards; Daddy nails them in. Then we go next door to Mrs. Menil’s house to do hers. She’s sitting out in her chair, as always.

“All this fuss,” she shouts, not realizing how loud she is because she’s hard of hearing now. She bats her hand as if she’s swatting away a fly.

“Is Delbert on his way?” Daddy asks. Delbert is her son, a big fancy lawyer in New Orleans who still comes to see her almost every week and always tries to get her to move up there.

“I told him not to, but he’s on his way. Taking me to Lake Charles, for God’s sake. A lot of fuss, if you ask me. I’ve seen my share of hurricanes in my day. Not but two worth getting up and leaving for. Betsy and Camille.”

“You enjoy your time with Delbert,” says Daddy, patting her on the arm. “Think of it as a vacation.”

“Who goes to Lake Charles on vacation?” Mrs. Menil growls. “If he was taking me on a cruise, that would be something.”

She’s still grumbling as we walk down the porch steps and wave good-bye.

Back home, I use my new phone for the first time to call Danielle. “Hey!” I chirp at her. “I’m calling from my new phone.”

“Great,” she says. “I’m answering from our old landline.”

“So, what are you guys going to do?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Desiree’s at work.”

“You heard it’s mandatory evacuation, right?”

“Yeah,” says Danielle. “But not mandatory, mandatory, right?”

“I think that’s what mandatory means,” I say. “You know, mandatory.”

“But it’s not mandatory up in Bellvoir, is it? I mean, if we leave and the store’s still open, she’s going to lose this job. And she just got it.”

Of course I didn’t think about that. Never mind the fact that they don’t have a car or any money to pay for a hotel. Of course she’s worried about Desiree’s job.

“I’m sure if it’s mandatory, they’ll close,” I say.

“I guess,” she says. She sounds worried.

“We have a hotel room. Do you want me to ask if you guys can come with us?”

“No,” says Danielle. “I don’t want to impose. We wouldn’t fit in the truck anyway.”

“Maybe you could take Claudine.” Claudine is Grandpere’s 1979 Chevy Impala that hasn’t moved from the garage in four years and probably doesn’t even start.

“It’s OK,” she says. “We’ll just stay. It’ll be fine. If it’s not, they’ll come get us.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

When I hang up, I approach Mama cautiously. “Could we wait and leave later so Danielle and Desiree can come with us? Or could they take Claudine because they don’t have a car?” I know she’s going to say no.

Mama gives me a look that’s half guilt and half annoyance. “Claudine’s not a reliable car, sweetie. They couldn’t get past Bellvoir in that thing, never mind cross state lines. Don’t give me that look, Evangeline. You know I’m sorry for Danielle, but I can’t be responsible for her. They’ve got buses that will pick people up and take them to a shelter. She should call the parish office and get scheduled for a pickup.”

I call Danielle back. “There are buses that will pick you up and take you to a shelter,” I tell her.

“OK,” she says. “I guess we’ll just do that.”

“I’ll call you from wherever it is we’re going. On my new phone.”

“Don’t rub it in,” she says.

I call Kendra. On my new phone. She answers on her phone that she has had since she was thirteen.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“You don’t want to know,” she says. “The same place we’ve been for an hour. On I-10 going to Houston to stay by Uncle Cedric.”

“Is that Evangeline?” I hear her mom, Ms. Denise, say in the background. Kendra’s mom is the opposite of Danielle’s mom. She’s a nurse at the navy base up in Bellvoir, and she’s what Mamere calls “a force of nature.” Kendra will be getting a basketball scholarship or those poor college basketball coaches will have to deal with Ms. Denise.

“Yes, it’s her, Mama,” Kendra says. “What do you want?”

“Ask her what they’re doing. Where they’re going,” Ms. Denise shouts in the background.

“Tell her we’re going to Georgia,” I say.

“They’re going to Georgia,” Kendra repeats.

“Tell her to be safe,” says Ms. Denise.

“Mama, do you just want to talk to her yourself?”

We say good-bye and I finish getting ready.

In our family, we have a tradition for those rare occasions when we do evacuate. We’ve each got an old tackle box that we fill with our special things, the things that we’d miss the most, that we couldn’t live without. Mama’s got the birth certificates and insurance documents and legal stuff for the restaurant and junk like that. Daddy has our baby pictures and some things from when he was a kid. Mandy’s is always changing: mostly pictures and jewelry. Mamere has her family Bible, beautiful old rosary beads, jewelry, and pictures. When I open mine, I realize it’s been a while since I’ve added anything. My stuffed dolphin, Sleeky, that I used to always sleep with. My first-place medals from the fishing rodeo and those little newspaper clippings about them. My spelling-bee ribbons. Report cards. A picture of Mamere and Grandpere at their wedding. A response I got when I wrote to the president about protecting the marshes and barrier islands from erosion. I scan my desk and put in a few more things from my bulletin board. The Evangeline book Mamere gave me the other night. I pack a bag with three changes of clothes, my knitting, and a couple more books.

It’s after four when we get in the truck: Mama and Daddy in the front and me, Mamere, and Mandy in the back. There’s a cooler full of po’boys and soda under our feet and ten two-gallon jugs of gas in the flatbed. There’s probably not a station with any gas left between here and Alabama.

The air is still, the way it always is before a hurricane, that thick, thick stillness. The sky is blue, not a cloud in sight. Mamere was right. No birds.

When Mamere comes with us, we always start the trip with Hail Marys and the Act of Contrition on the rosary beads so that if we die, we’ll get into heaven because we’ve already said sorry for anything we did wrong. She asks the Blessed Mother to spare us from the storm.

We sail along Highway 23 for about three miles and then come to a dead stop.

Mama lets out a big sigh. “I knew this would happen. We should have left earlier,” she says.

“What do you mean?” Daddy says. “You said you wanted to stay open until after lunch.”

“I had to open this morning,” she says testily. “It’s not that I wanted to. We can’t do without that income.”

“Then why are you blaming me for not leaving earlier?”

The car goes silent.

The late afternoon passes and we’ve only made it over the causeway, just past Slidell. Daddy switches off the engine and we sit. I knit, read, and look out the window. Some guys are playing football in the median of the highway. A guy sets up a camp stove and starts grilling hot dogs until a highway patrolman comes over and makes him put it away. You can hear music coming from other people’s rolled-down car windows. There’s a steady thump-thump-thump of hip-hop drifting from somewhere far away. Snatches of country music closer by.

“Can I go sit outside?” Mandy whines. “Please. I’m gonna lose my mind in here. I’ll be right here in the grass.”

“Go ahead,” Daddy growls. “I’m getting out, too.”

I watch him walk up to a group of men and start talking. Mama sighs and stretches out her legs onto his part of the seat. Mamere has dozed off.

It seems like hours before we move again. I look into the windows of passing cars to see what other people brought with them: sometimes there are big suitcases and pillows in the backseats, dogs, the occasional TV. This wild-looking tattooed couple with bright blue and red hair and all-black clothes have a parrot that hops around the front seat and a big snake that rests on the woman’s neck. Must be from New Orleans.

There are Jet Skis and small boats on trailers. Some people have written messages on their rear windows, like FOLLOW ME TO TALLAHASSEE! and CATEGORY 3 PAH-TEE!

We snack out of boredom. The sandwiches have gotten soggy and the car smells of fried shrimp. It’s been about six hours when we finally get to the Mississippi border, a journey that usually takes two hours. Mamere sings in French. I skim through my birthday copy of Evangeline, which is, to be honest, a bit dull. My favorite parts are when Longfellow describes coming to “the Bayou of Plaquemine,” which I take to mean the waters around Bayou Perdu. He calls the waters “devious” and “sluggish” and the characters get lost in them, which is one of the reasons Bayou Perdu got its name. But the way he describes the trees, the boughs of the cypress meeting in a “dusky arch,” the moss trailing from the trees like “banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals,” the moonlight gleaming on the water, is so beautiful. It takes me right out of this car and back home for a while.

We move occasionally. I stare at the snake of red blinking lights in front of me, as far as the eye can see. I come to feel like I have never been anywhere else but in this car. By three a.m., we get to the Florida Panhandle. After Pensacola, the traffic thins out a little. The license plates aren’t all from Louisiana, Alabama, or Mississippi anymore. There are fields with big, black cows along the road. It doesn’t feel like we’re anywhere near a coast. My eyes are raw from lack of sleep, and the inside of my mouth is sticky from soda. I wish I was anywhere but in my own skin.

It’s Sunday morning when we roll into the hotel in southern Georgia. It’s one of those chains that are on the side of every highway. It’s been almost sixteen hours since we left home. The parking lot is jammed with cars. Evacuees, I guess. Stepping out of the car, my whole body feels like it’s still moving, like I’m seasick. I fall into the queen-size bed I share with Mamere and Mandy and close my eyes to try to make it stop.

When we wake up, Daddy switches on the TV to the Weather Channel. The beautiful white swirl takes up the whole space between Florida and Louisiana. It’s restless. It’s strengthening. But when I look at it, I still can’t really imagine destruction. It looks peaceful. It’s a gathering of vapors, something you can put your hand right through. When bad things happen, it seems to me, they don’t announce themselves like this. They sneak up on you and catch you by surprise. They slam you from behind, like that truck that killed Danielle’s dad when she was a baby.

A ticker runs across the bottom of the screen. Hurricane Katrina upgraded to Category 4. Winds over 175 miles per hour. Expected to make landfall overnight. They cut to the mayor of New Orleans giving a press conference. “We’re facing the storm most of us have feared,” he says. There’s a mandatory evacuation in place for New Orleans. For the first time, I start to get scared. I step out into the hallway and call Danielle. With my new phone. She picks up.

“You’re still there?”

“Yeah, still here,” she says.

“You really need to leave,” I say. “Aren’t you getting that bus that’s going to evacuate people?”

“I guess so,” she says with only a slight trace of concern in her voice. “Desiree’s still sleeping. I’ll wake her up.”

“Promise me you’ll get the bus. Just call the parish office. I bet they’ll come pick you up.”

“OK. I will.”

There’s something about the way she says it that makes me not believe her.

The hotel lobby is crowded, bustling even. There are all different kinds of people: some families who look working class like us, some who look wealthier. Most look tired and annoyed. There’s a feeling I can’t quite describe. Not excited, but there’s a sense of anticipation in the air. We’re all waiting for the same thing.

“Y’all from the Gulf?” a man in the lobby asks. Daddy nods. It’s strange how it’s “the Gulf” now instead of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

“We’re from Pascagoula. Took us ten hours to get here.”

“Took us sixteen from south Plaquemines.”

People all around us ease into the conversation.

“We’re from Slidell. Shoulda gone west. The traffic couldn’ta been that bad.”

“No, my sister went to Houston and it took nineteen hours,” another woman says.

Traffic is the great equalizer.

After lunch, it’s cloudy and gray. Back in the room, Daddy turns on the Weather Channel again. “Expect devastating damage,” says the reporter, who’s standing in front of a casino in Biloxi wearing a blue jacket. It’s not even raining yet. We can hear muffled voices and the sound of football games on TV through the wall, the smell of smoke seeping in although it’s a nonsmoking hotel. The interesting part that comes with being in a hotel is wearing off. Daddy flicks back and forth between the Weather Channel and CNN all day. The hurricane will make landfall overnight, they say. I sleep well on the cushy hotel-room pillow.

I wake up to the sound of Daddy turning on the TV. A little gray light is coming in through the heavy curtains. Images of trees being whipped by the wind, water surging over a seawall somewhere, flash across the screen. Hurricane Katrina made landfall this morning at 6:10 a.m. just east of Empire, Louisiana. Just east of Empire, Louisiana, is just south of Bayou Perdu.

Thirty-foot storm surge. I try to imagine what that would look like. The ceilings in our house are about eight feet high. So four times that. A sick fear spreads over me. Unprecedented. Levee breach. A second landfall over St. Bernard Parish.

This is bad. This is really bad.

“Why don’t you all take Mamere to breakfast?” Mama says with that voice she uses when she wants to show that she can cope. “Go get something to eat. Daddy and I’ll stay here and watch.” Her eyes look hollow.

When I’m putting on my clothes, I feel my legs shaking. It’s like that knowledge, those words, are trying to break into me and I’m mustering all my strength to keep them out. I whip out my phone and try Danielle. She doesn’t answer, but it’s just because she’s gone. At one of those shelters. She must be.

This morning, the feeling in the lobby is different. People look stunned, tired. All that energy that bounced between people yesterday has gone. It’s turned into something heavy and black that looks like it’s weighing people down: their heads are bowed, their shoulders slumped. We go through the line silently and get a table near the window, watching sheets of rain pour down on the parking lot. I eavesdrop on the people around us.

“Have you heard from anyone yet?”

“No cell service down there.”

“I’m sure they got to Houston. I’m sure they left in time.”

“Last time I talked to her, she said they was gonna ride it out. I hope she came to her senses.”

An old man in a plaid shirt at the next table catches Mamere’s eye. “Where you from?”

“Plaquemines.”

“That can’t be good,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s underwater. All underwater. St. Bernard. Even Jefferson Parish.”

The man at the next table reaches out and pats Mamere on the back. “Good luck. God be with you.”

We get up and leave our breakfast half-eaten on the table. On the way back to the room, it’s like everyone’s avoiding eye contact with everyone else. Because we don’t want to see what’s in other people’s eyes right now. Because if you see what’s in their eyes, you know you have to be scared, too.

Back in the room, Daddy’s still perched on the edge of the bed, the curtains closed to the rain. We huddle around the TV. Reports from the hard-hit areas are starting to come in. A few hours later, they announce that the levees in New Orleans have been breached.

The day is a blur. Daddy tries to get through to the sheriff’s department, but there’s no response. I am sick, sick to my stomach wondering where Danielle is. Mandy is on the phone constantly. “I told you to get off that phone,” says Mama. “You’re payin’ if you go over your minutes.”

“Byron texted me. Can you believe that? I wish I could send it to Jasmine so that she would know,” says Mandy.

I want to punch her in the face. My best friend could be dying out there, and I have no way of knowing. I call Kendra and tell her that I’m afraid about Danielle.

“She’s going to be OK,” she says. “They wouldn’t have let anybody stay there.” I didn’t realize how much I needed someone to say that, even though there’s no way to know if it’s true.

By the early afternoon, we hear that St. Bernard Parish is under ten feet of water. But no one ever says anything about Bayou Perdu. Like we’re not important enough to mention.

Tuesday morning the hotel feels like a cage full of angry, hungry animals. That feeling of us all being in it together and helping each other out is gone now. It’s every man for himself.

The next couple of days are spent glued to the TV. The words the announcers use to describe the scene “all across the Gulf Coast” feel intentionally cruel: decimated, destroyed, annihilated, swept from the map, obliterated, pounded, wiped off the face of the earth. Catastrophic. Reporters are standing in piles of rubble. New Orleans is a bowl filling with water. Coffins are floating by. People are wading in waist-deep water down Canal Street, pushing shopping carts full of stuff. People are dying in the Superdome.

I’m hardly listening, but then I hear them mention that the southern part of Plaquemines Parish “has become part of the Gulf of Mexico.” It’s like someone pulled a rope tight around my middle and yanked it. I picture our house like it’s made from sugar, dissolving as the water licks its walls.

Daddy finally gets through to the sheriff’s department. We hear him say they’re going around in airboats rescuing people. Forty people somehow made it to the choir loft in the Church of Christ, and the sheriff’s department went in and got them out. That’s what they’re focusing on now. Rescuing people and animals. He doesn’t have time to say more now. “Please,” I plead with Daddy. “Please ask about Danielle.”

“Listen, Cal,” he says. “Desiree Watts and her daughter. Were they there? Have you seen them? . . . Uh-huh. OK.”

He hangs up and shakes his head, but tries to be reassuring. “They weren’t there, but they could have gotten one of the buses out. They’re going house to house now. I’m sure they’re all right.”

“Nobody is sure they’re all right!” I shout. “They should have come with us. We should have given them the car.”

“Evangeline,” says Mama in a calm tone, “we know you’re worried about them. We’re all worried about them.”

A surge of anger overtakes me. “If you were worried about them, you would have let them take Claudine,” I nearly spit at her.

“That’s not fair to your mother. Claudine doesn’t even turn over most of the time,” says Daddy.

I feel like I’m going to explode. “My best friend could be dead, and we didn’t help her!” I slam out the door and head to the lobby.

There’s a line to use the “free Internet access” computers there, and the people in it are impatient. There’s a guy who has apparently been hogging the computer for a while. A guy in an LSU sweatshirt taps him on the shoulder. “You know, there are a lot of people waiting for the computer.”

The guy looks over his shoulder, then goes back to what he’s doing.

The guy in the LSU sweatshirt groans loudly and turns to everyone else waiting, trying to make eye contact so we’ll join in his outrage. “You’re not the only person here who needs information!” he shouts at the computer hog. “You’re so selfish! I’m going to get a manager.”

While he’s gone, the computer hog leaves and someone else takes the LSU guy’s place in line.

I wait for an hour and twenty minutes before it’s my turn. I log in and go straight to the Times-Picayune website. There’s a whole message board for people looking for news, for family, for friends. I click on the Plaquemines Parish page. Some of the messages have a person’s name and a question mark. There are posts like Looking for Adrienne Baptise or Checking on Orleans Ave. On the second page of the board, I see the heading Bayou Perdu. A guy whose family owns a big orange grove north of town found some pictures taken from a helicopter and posted them in his message.

You can only see the top of the levee, the roof of our school. School buses, like floaters, bob on top of the water. I think I can see the roof of our house. It’s hard to tell, there are only the tips of roofs, the very highest point. The rest is under dirty green water. Danielle’s duplex would be over there, if it were there. It’s not.

There’s a note near the bottom of the page: For those who live in the southern part of Plaquemines Parish: We encourage you to seek employment near your current location. It may be nine months to a year before residents are allowed back into the parish. It is heart-wrenching to see what has happened to the place we call home. You will not recognize your community and at times will find yourself lost and confused.

My face is burning, my stomach clenched. I start a “new discussion” in the Plaquemines Parish forum. Looking for Desiree and Danielle Watts is the subject. If anyone has information on them, please respond. Last heard from on August 28 from their home in Bayou Perdu.

When I get back to the room, the mood is solemn, the way it is after there’s been a big argument. I can’t look anyone in the eye. “Bayou Perdu is completely underwater. They say we can’t go back for nine months,” I say emotionlessly.

“Does that mean they’re not going to do the Orange Queen this year?” Mandy shrieks.

Mama stands up and starts throwing things in a bag. “We’re going to Cel’s house,” she says.