AUNT CEL LIVES IN a two-story brick house in a nice neighborhood in Atlanta. It’s not super-fancy, but it’s way bigger and newer than ours. Walking in is a relief after the hotel. It’s a home. There is wall-to-wall carpeting, and everything is really clean and orderly.

“Come on in,” says Aunt Cel, hugging each of us. She’s still in her work clothes: a blue suit and tan pantyhose and low-heeled shoes. Mama would call them pumps. “Here, let me help you with that.” Aunt Cel is tall and no-nonsense. It’s not that she’s not warm — when she hugs you, it’s strong and you feel like she puts her all into it. “Vangie, John — you’re in my room. Don’t argue, that’s how it’s going to be. Hi, Mama.” She hugs Mamere a minute longer. “Mamere and I will take the guest room. Girls, you’ve got Ami’s old room.”

We take our stuff up. There’s not much to take. The carpeting on the stairs is plush, off-white. At staggered levels on the wall beside the stairs, there are pictures of Ami through the years: baby pictures, graduation portraits. There’s a black-and-white picture of Mamere and Grandpere’s wedding, and a sepia-toned one of Mamere and her sisters when they were little in old-fashioned clothes and bare feet on the porch of their bayou shack. There’s Mama and Aunt Cel with their feathered haircuts in the ’70s. And us — the extended-family picture that Aunt Cel hired a photographer to take two Thanksgivings ago. At the time, it felt so silly — we’re all wearing black tops and jeans like we’re members of some team. The Beauchamp team. But now I can’t describe how it feels to see it. That we’re important enough to her to be on her wall. It feels like that little part that Aunt Cel has always occupied in my life — the once-a-year trip for Thanksgiving and for my cousin’s graduations — has tripled, quadrupled. We have another home because we have family. It’s like a piece of the shipwreck that I found bobbing in the water and I can grab onto it to keep me afloat. It’s something Danielle doesn’t have.

Not knowing where she is has gone from shocking pain to a nearly all-consuming thought to a dull ache. There have been times when I thought our friendship was so strong that we had some kind of psychic connection. But no matter how much I will her to call me, she doesn’t call.

The room Mandy and I are going to share has a big double bed with lots of pillows. The closet is spacious, but neither of us has anything to put in it anyway. Mandy heads off immediately to take a shower. I take off my shoes and lie down on the cool cotton comforter. It smells like fabric softener. Like someone else’s house. I try to remember what our house smelled like. It’s there, somewhere in my memory, but I can’t reach it. Did it smell like garlic? Fried seafood? Orange blossoms, sometimes? Mandy comes back from the shower with one towel wrapped around her head and the other around her body. She starts going through the dresser drawers.

“What?” she says when she turns to find me giving her a reproachful stare. “Aunt Cel said we could.” She picks out an old pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a Georgia Bulldog on it. “Oh, Lord, it’s a good thing nobody from home can see me in this.”

“You’ll never get into LSU now.”

Dinner is spaghetti and salad and some bread in a basket — nothing that we would ever have at home. Before I even start eating, I feel suddenly exhausted, like I can barely lift my head. I’ve gotten through the past five days on adrenaline. Now that I’ve relaxed a tiny bit, I’m falling apart. I can only manage to make occasional appreciative sounds to show Aunt Cel that I’m enjoying my dinner. Nobody is really talking, just complimenting her on her cooking.

“Oh, please,” she says, brushing it off. “Do you know how intimidating it is to cook for the likes of you? Vangie’s the one who got all the talent in the family. I can barely boil water.”

When dinner’s over and Mandy and I have cleared away the dishes, Aunt Cel asks us all to come back to the table. It’s a big round one, pushed into an alcove surrounded by built-in benches with cushions. There’s a pendant light hanging above it, almost like a spotlight that’s shining on her as she starts to speak.

“I know you’re all in shock and probably don’t want to think about this yet,” she starts out. “But it may be a long time before everything gets sorted out. So I’m proposing the following.” She looks around and catches everyone at the table in the eye. I can see why she’s the boss where she works. She tells us that she’s going to enroll us in high school and help Mama and Daddy fill out the FEMA paperwork at the Red Cross. I imagine her as a general. She’s mapping out our battle plan. No one disagrees.

“I spoke to Jim,” she continues, speaking of her ex-husband, who’s a real-estate investor. “He’s got a condo that’s going to be available next week. You can have it as long as you need it. It’s a two-bedroom, so it will be tight, but Mamere can stay here with me. It’ll be a chance to make up for a lot of lost time. With all your bookkeeping experience, Vangie, we can find you something at my office. Now, John, Jim knows someone at the marina north of town. I know it’s not exactly the same, but you need work and we might be able to help you find some odd jobs.”

I finally look up at Daddy. I can’t tell what the expression on his face means. “Cel, we’re so grateful for everything you’re doing for us,” he says. There’s something in his voice. He’s ashamed that he has to be in the position of getting and not giving.

Aunt Cel’s voice turns even more serious. “Now, I’m going to say this once and once only. I will not hear any discussion about money or paying for things, and if you bring it up, I will be angry. It is my privilege to be able to help my family when they need it. When everyone’s back on their feet again, it’s forgotten.”

The conversation turns to what has happened to whom. Have we heard from so-and-so? Mrs. Menil? Yes, she’s with Delbert. His house uptown was barely scratched. I guess she’s finally moved in with him permanently. She’s got no choice now. Mr. Ray is in Baton Rouge with his brother’s family. On and on. I see my chance to blurt out “Can I use your computer? To check to see if Danielle got my message?”

Aunt Cel looks at me. “Desiree Watts’s daughter? Are they missing?”

That awful, overwhelming tension seizes the table.

“They didn’t have a car. We’re not sure how they got out,” says Mamere. “No one has heard from them.”

Aunt Cel gives Mama a serious look. “The computer’s in the office. Go on ahead,” she says to me.

I go straight to my message on the Plaquemines Parish board. Nothing. The New Orleans boards are full of updates, but no one seems to know or care what has happened to Bayou Perdu.

Later, Mandy and I are in the double bed, both wearing Ami’s old clothes. It’s so dark in here, and there’s a quietness that I’m not used to. It’s not just that you can’t hear what’s going on outside; it’s that each room has its own quietness.

“Insulation,” says Mandy. “And central air conditioning.” Two things we’ve never had.

Despite my earlier exhaustion, I can’t go right to sleep. I can feel Mandy awake next to me.

“I can’t believe she’s making us sign up for school,” she says finally.

“I think it’s, you know, the law,” I say. “We’re dropouts right now. Can’t be homeless and dropouts.”

“You know tomorrow night would have been the ring dance and Sunday, the Orange Queen court selection,” Mandy continues. “I really thought I had a chance this year.”

It’s so unlike her to open up to me, to give me a glimpse into what she’s really feeling, to show a chink in her armor. For a moment at least, it’s like we’re little again, when we used to get along sometimes, play together.

“Who knows what they have up here? Maybe you can be the Peach Queen instead.”

A pillow thumps softly but with force into the side of my head. I go to sleep feeling less tense than I have since we left home.

The next morning, Aunt Cel drives us to the school where Ami went. A SCHOOL OF EXCELLENCE, the sign in front proclaims. It’s a huge place — it looks like a college. The parking lot is full of cars — nice new ones. The least nice one is close to the kind of car you’d see in the parking lot of Bayou Perdu High School. Inside, the lighting is bright and everything looks so clean and new. We follow Aunt Cel into the front office. The secretary, sitting at a tall counter like the one at the library, looks up and smiles. “Welcome back, Mrs. James,” she says. “What can I do for you?”

“These are my nieces from Louisiana,” says Aunt Cel. “They’re going to be staying with us for a while. I’ve got the paperwork here from the district office.”

The secretary gives us a look as if we have some fatal disease. “Oh. I’m so sorry. We’ve had some other Katrina refugees come in from Mobile. Let’s see, then. A junior and a senior. Do you girls know what you were enrolled in at your old school?”

A hot anger wells up in me. Everyone is using that word now. Refugees. Yes, we’re refugees from southern Louisiana, but we’re not stupid. I do happen to remember what classes I was taking. I pull out my fall schedule and hand it to her.

“Let’s see. Evangeline, I’ve got an opening in an English class that I think will work. For PE, we’ve got a yoga that would fit with this schedule. Would that be OK?”

Yoga? I nod. I think about how everyone at home would flip out if they knew I was going to a school that offers yoga. I’m not entirely sure what it is.

The secretary prints out a schedule and gives us our e-mail log-in and password, then says “Hold on a minute” and comes back with someone who looks like a student, except that her clothes are a little worky.

“I’d like you to meet our school counselor, Ms. Bell,” she says.

Ms. Bell shakes hands with us as if we’re grown-ups. She seems nice.

“Ms. Bell is available anytime you need to talk, considering what you’ve been through. I know she’s helped some of our other Katrina refugees.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but Ms. Bell seems to cringe a little at the use of that word, too. “Strictly confidential. Strictly voluntary,” she says. “If you ever find you need to talk to someone, my office is right through that door.” She points to the left.

I know I am never going to come talk to this woman.

On the way back home, Aunt Cel brings us to the temporary Katrina shelter the Red Cross has set up at the YMCA where refugees like us can fill out paperwork for FEMA and get any updates on federal assistance. It’s the fanciest YMCA you’ve ever seen. It makes the Y in Bayou Perdu look like a dump.

When you walk in the door to the gym part, cots are arranged in rows across the floor. A few people are lying on them, asleep. Others are lying on their backs reading. Some people come in and out of what must be the locker rooms. There’s a row of tables set up on the far wall with laptops on them. The sound of a baby crying echoes through the huge space. It smells like chlorine. There must be a pool around here. I wonder if Danielle is in a place like this somewhere. That wouldn’t be so bad. Not like the endless rows of cots at the Astrodome I’ve seen on TV.

A friendly-looking woman is sitting at the table inside the door. “Welcome. Y’all here from the Gulf?” She’s smiling. She reminds me of Kendra’s aunt Mechelle. She’s the first person who hasn’t made me feel like I’m an object of pity. “Come on in. Do you have some kind of ID?”

Mandy pulls out her license and hands it to her. “Oh, y’all from Plaquemines, huh?” She pronounces it right. Plak-uh-min. “I got people in St. Bernard. They’re stayin’ by my aunt in Opelousas, but I told ’em they could come up here. Now, what can I do for you?”

We fill out forms and she tells us we’re welcome to “shop the boutique” at the back of the gym, full of stuff that people have donated, like old sweats and T-shirts from 5K races that they ran or jackets with shoulder pads and floral blouses. I pick up a few solid-color T-shirts.

“Eww,” says Mandy, holding up a huge bra. “I can’t believe people donate their underwear.”

As we’re leaving, I approach the shelter lady. “Is there any way you can check to see if someone is staying in another shelter somewhere? I’m looking for a friend.”

“You got her number?”

“She doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“Do you have one?”

I nod.

“Give me her name and I’ll see what I can find out for you,” she says, smiling. When I slip her the number, she opens a lockbox to put it in and gestures to me to come closer. She presses a two-hundred-dollar Old Navy gift card into my hand. “Now, I don’t do this for everybody,” she says. “But a girl’s got to look nice. Here’s one for your sister, too.”

I’ve never had two hundred dollars to spend on clothes in my life. It seems such strange compensation for all we’ve lost. “Thank you so much, but this is too much. I couldn’t take this,” I say, embarrassed by her generosity.

The shelter woman smiles with a kind of understanding. “People want to help,” she says. “It’s OK to let them.”

Uncle Jim’s “investment property,” which he usually rents out to college students, might sit empty for a while. He says we’ll be doing him a favor if we live in it and keep it up. It’s a two-bedroom town house at the Village at Pine Ridge Pond. There’s a big sign that proclaims its name stuck to the fake stone wall that surrounds the whole complex. The sign — which is made of something plastic pretending to be wood — is coming unglued, and it’s sagging in one corner. There are little poster-board signs stuck into the grass in front of the flower beds: FIRST MONTH FREE, FITNESS CLUB, WASHER/DRYER CONNECTIONS, FULLY FURNISHED.

I guess you could call the location a ridge; it’s overlooking the expressway with one of those huge concrete-slab walls forming a barrier in between. There are a couple of scraggly pines sticking out of the red clay, some scattered pine needles beneath them. Orange mulch. There is a sad pond with some benches next to it. The two-story, grayish town houses are grouped together with parking spots out front. Since they all look alike, it takes us a while to find ours. The building has a big C on the side.

“Here we are,” says Mama. “Home sweet home.” She turns with a forced cheerful look on her face and meets my eyes, then Mandy’s. The tension in the truck is as thick as the air in southern Louisiana in August.

When we get out, I can hear the distinct whoosh of the cars passing by on the expressway the same way you can hear the ocean when you’re close to the beach. The gray door ahead is ours: 501-C.

Mama turns the key and opens the door into a tiled hallway with a stairway immediately ahead. Off to the side is the living room: gray carpet and one of those sectional sofa sets in gray pleather. There are metal venetian blinds in the window. Mama catches my eyes again. This time, she looks genuinely excited. She gestures to all the furnishings like a model on a game show. “How about this? Can you believe the TV? Saints games are gonna look good on that, huh, John?” Daddy’s face is blank.

She glides into the kitchen, which begins beyond the little bar and bar stools at the back of the room, turns, and gasps, “Would you look at this?” It’s a galley kitchen with stainless-steel appliances, granite countertops. Mama’s face is flush, like a little girl on Christmas morning. She’s already opened the fridge. “Side-by-side,” she almost squeals. “This whole side is a freezer! Mandy, look!”

“Oh, yeah, lots of space,” says Mandy. But I can tell her heart’s not really in it, either.

Upstairs, there’s a bathroom in the hall and two bedrooms. The room Mandy and I will share has what looks like an old-fashioned little girl’s bedroom set. There are twin beds with a nightstand in between. Mama and Daddy’s room has its own bathroom.

“This is nice,” says Mama. “This’ll be just fine.”

“I’ll go get the stuff from the truck,” says Daddy.

“That won’t take long,” says Mandy. She wanders back into our room and plops down on the edge of the bed. “I wish we could have stayed with Aunt Cel,” she says. “This place sucks.”

“It’s only for a little while. Four months maybe.”

Mandy grunts. “You’re dreaming. You really think we’re going to be back in Bayou Perdu by spring?”

“We’re going to have a FEMA trailer,” I say. “We’ll have a trailer by, like, Mardi Gras.”

Mandy throws herself back on the bed. “Right.”

I want to rewind to the day before my sixteenth birthday, when my whole life stretched out before me, sparkling like the sun on the clear water of a back-bayou channel. When my life had a rhythm and I knew my place in it.

Mandy and I roll into the parking lot of Brookdale High School for our first day in the car that an elderly man at Aunt Cel’s church donated because he lost his mind. It is, if not the uncoolest ride in the parking lot, at least in the top ten. I think I see a Ford Taurus parked way over where no one can see the driver getting out of it. We stop and look at each other for a second before opening the front door of the school.

“I want to go by Amanda up here,” Mandy whispers as people sweep past us. “Don’t call me Mandy in front of anyone.”

“OK, Mandy.”

She shoots me the bird and steps inside.

I had been imagining the first day of this new school like one of those bad teen movies: I open the door and everyone turns and stares as I walk down the hall. Some point or whisper behind their hands. But it couldn’t be more different. We are invisible. Everyone rushes by to their classes, talks with their friends. I don’t think anyone would have known that we were new because there are so many people — how could you know them all?

The lady at the front desk gives us a map to our classes. There are different wings, other buildings. I get lost on the way to homeroom and arrive late. No one gives me more than a glance as I walk in. Everyone looks so much older than me. They’re way more dressed up than we would ever be for school at home if we didn’t wear uniforms. They’re in high-heeled boots, tons of accessories, like everyone’s going clubbing in the Quarter. I wish Danielle could see this. Wherever she is. If she is somewhere. The bell rings and I try to check the map inconspicuously in the hall so that I can figure out where my next class is.

I find my political science class as the bell rings. I don’t have the book. The teacher, a plump lady named Mrs. Economou, tells me to look on with the person next to me, a guy who’s wearing the closest thing I’ve seen to what I’d consider normal clothes: jeans, a long-sleeved plain T-shirt, and tennis shoes. He smiles. Seems nice enough. I try to follow along. After about ten minutes, Mrs. Economou tells us to break up into groups to discuss the three questions she wrote on the board. People groan and mutter and metal scrapes the floor as everyone shifts their desks together. I find myself in a group of four with my book partner, this guy who looks like a big jock, and a serious-looking girl dressed all in black.

I have a hard time keeping up. It’s mostly the girl in black talking and the football player responding with wisecracks. The nice guy who shared the book adds the occasional comment, but you can tell he doesn’t want to get caught up in the drama between the other two. His name is Tate. The girl’s name is Ariel. She’s taking all the notes, writing down everything that she herself is saying.

When the bell rings, Tate slides the book to me. “Here. You keep it. My neighbor has one I can borrow if I need it.”

“Are you sure? It may be just a few weeks, but it could be longer,” I protest.

“I’m sure. My number’s written inside the front cover. We can study sometime if you want.”

“Thanks.” There’s something about the way he offers me his number that doesn’t seem like a come-on. I’m grateful for that. For a second, I feel almost like a normal person.

“So, Amanda,” I joke to Mandy when we get in the car after school. “How was your day?”

She shakes her head. “Whatever. Who cares? You said it. We’re only here for a few months.”

“That good, huh?”

“It was fine. There was this guy totally checking me out.”

And so our new life here continues.

Things that we lost seem to remind us of their absence only when we need them.

Almost every day, Mandy stands in front of that big, near-empty closet and says, “I wish I’d brought that belt,” or “Today would be the perfect day for that white shirt.” She stares into the blankness like she can make whatever it was come back if she stays there long enough.

Sometimes it’s the most unexpected thing, like a whiff of a certain laundry detergent or cleaner, that will bring something or someone back into my mind. The librarian at school wears the same perfume as Miss Helen at the Dollar Store in Bayou Perdu. What happened to Miss Helen? I wonder. Is she living in some shelter in Baton Rouge or Houston? Will I ever see her again? It’s not that we were close. She’s another part of my life that was swept away, another missing piece. Checking the message boards on the Times-Picayune website for some sign from Danielle has become a reflex for me. Whenever I’m in the library at school, I’ll log in, knowing I won’t find anything. I’ve even just typed her name into Google to see if anything comes up, but so far I’ve only found a woman named Danielle Watts who lives in Australia, and about three who live in other places but aren’t her. I’ve called that woman at the YMCA shelter three times, but she hasn’t found anything.

When I call Kendra, she says that there’s so many kids from New Orleans in Houston schools that there’s been a backlash. The Houston gangs are harassing New Orleans kids, and New Orleans kids are forming their own gangs. Someone spray-painted GO HOME on a bunch of the New Orleans kids’ lockers, and someone else painted NO right back. No one has messed with Kendra yet. She’s big, you know. But there’s a group of girls who always talk trash about New Orleans when she walks past. “Too stupid to realize it’s a city, not a state,” she grumbles. Ms. Denise’s job at the navy base is waiting for her when they get operational again. They’re going back as soon as they can, Kendra says. She’s not going to let this get her off track from her scholarship hopes.

At home, Daddy is planted constantly in front of the TV, watching Hurricane Katrina coverage. Everyone wants someone to blame. It could be Mayor Nagin for not getting all those old folks and poor folks out of the Ninth Ward where they drowned. Or it could be Governor Blanco for not asking for enough help. Or is it FEMA for their slow response? Or the federal government and President Bush for flying over the coast instead of coming down to earth and showing some real concern? Some people think the dumb southern Louisiana and Mississippi people who were too stubborn to leave got what they deserved. What were they thinking living in Hurricane Alley in the first place? What could they expect? When Daddy hears this, he shakes his head. “Everybody knows better,” he mutters. “But they like their fresh shrimp, don’t they?”

The subject comes up in Political Science. Mrs. Economou is talking about the role of the U.S. government. “What does the government have an obligation to provide for its citizens?” she asks.

One girl raises her hand. “To provide roads, military protection, and Social Security?”

“Public safety,” says another girl. “You know, like the justice system.”

“OK, that’s part of it,” says Mrs. Economou. “But one person’s safety is another’s intrusion into privacy. What are the limits? Who decides? There will always be cases that push the limits and cause us to reexamine what we believe. When something unprecedented happens. Take Hurricane Katrina, for example. We have this perfect example of a conflict, when the role of the government is under discussion. Was the government obliged to get people out of their homes, by force if necessary, in order to save their lives? Was what happened at the Superdome a failure of government? And is the government obliged to rebuild the Gulf Coast when another hurricane could wipe it all out again?”

She turns to me. Here it comes.

“Evangeline,” she says, as if she just remembered I was there. “I’d be curious to know what you think.”

It’s like every eye in the room is on me. I am now the spokesperson for all of Louisiana. For every Katrina refugee.

I want to disappear under the floor. But if I’m going to have to speak for all of us, I’m going to take my time and collect my thoughts. I can almost hear a giant clock ticking in my head.

I start, my voice sounding small. “About making people leave. I think people just don’t understand. There are hurricanes every year. It’s part of life. More people probably die from traffic accidents here every year than have died in hurricanes in Louisiana in a century.” There are a few snickers. “It’s not a place that everyone would choose to live, but it’s our home.”

I am horrified to feel a lump growing in my throat. Please don’t cry. Please don’t cry, I urge myself. I have to think of something else to say. Something smart. But the word home has broken me. In a split second, all the weight of that word washes over me like a massive wave and crushes me. If I open my mouth again, I’m going to sob. So I stare at my desk and the awkward silence envelops me.

“All right, then,” says Mrs. Economou briskly. “Anyone else?”

I look up in time to see Ariel, who is still in black and still sending out that hostile energy, thrusting her hand into the air. I feel a rush of gratitude toward her for taking the focus away from me.

“Yes, Ariel?”

“I don’t understand why it’s even a question that we should rebuild the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. I mean, we are willing to go in and blow up and then rebuild two entire foreign countries that most Americans can’t find on a map, and we can’t get trucks with food and medicine into New Orleans?” Her voice is rising and her face has hardened. She is just getting started. “If the government has any obligation, any purpose, that should be it. To provide for its citizens in the times of greatest need and to bring the power of the collective to bear for the individual.”

I look around the classroom. Most people are not listening to her. Those who are look annoyed with her. I’m in awe of her.

Mrs. Economou uses this opportunity to segue back to the book. “Yes, well, that brings us back to page one hundred seventy-five and the framing of the constitution . . .”

I don’t know if it’s my breakdown that causes him to pity me, but the next day, Tate invites me to go with the Outdoor Adventure Club on a weekend rafting trip up to the mountains in North Georgia. It’s just as friends, I’m sure, and it’s free. I’m sure Danielle would make a big deal about it and dance around squealing, “He likes you!” But I don’t feel that way at all. He’s just a nice guy. So I go.

“It’s beautiful up there — you’ll love it,” he says, sitting next to me in the van on the way up. I wonder if it’s obvious that living in the city is draining the life out of me.

The countryside rolls by, wooded, with the fall colors coming up. Then the land starts to rise, gradually at first. Rushing creeks border the winding roads, the rocky walls of mountains rising up all around. Beautiful, yes, but I feel almost suffocated. For me, the beauty of Bayou Perdu is all that limitlessness, the water and sky going on and on forever. A place where you are completely free.

I don’t enjoy anything about rafting, bumping along over rapids. Water just isn’t supposed to race. It flows; it sings; it even roars sometimes. But it’s not in a hurry.

After school the next week, I go fishing and canoeing with the club on this man-made lake outside of Atlanta. No one even knows what to do with their rods. They’ve got all the wrong bait. You can see from one end of the lake to the other. When we get out on the water, no one is really serious about fishing. Then again, why would they be? There’s no challenge in it here. All I can think is, I may be some Katrina victim, but at least I know what a proper lake is. These people get so excited about paddling around in this little baby pool stocked with fish they’ve trucked in. I actually feel sorry for them.

I miss the water, the birds, the wind through the marsh grass. I miss the sunset and the sound of that hard, hard rain falling on the roof. I miss the smell of salt in the air, that awful heat rising up from the docks. I feel sore all the time from all the missing. Bruises just beneath the surface. Invisible.

I see the damage in Daddy, too. He gets work as a handyman some days by standing outside in a parking lot with a bunch of mostly Mexican guys and waiting to see if someone will come by and choose him. On the days he works, he comes home, pops a beer, and sits on the couch flipping the channels of that big, big TV. He is lost, as lost as Bayou Perdu.

But Mama. She is different here. She’s happier. She likes putting on a skirt and stockings to go to work. She likes wearing heels. She could never have done that at the diner. She likes sitting at a desk and answering the phone. She probably likes going to the break room and making microwave popcorn for herself. She’s not hot and dirty, and there’s no one making demands of her every minute. She doesn’t burn her fingers or have to explain that she’s run out of the special. Most of all, I thinks she likes that she’s not the one making all the decisions — having to fire people or beg for credit from the bank. She shows up, does her job, and leaves. Sometimes on the way home, she stops and goes shopping because she can and buys another pair of shoes or a set of place mats that were on sale. You can tell, she feels like she’s really moving up in the world.

Mandy, though, is moving in the opposite direction. She got right to work making sure everyone knew that she was someone important where she came from. But the truth is, she’s not going to cut it with the popular crowd here. She may have been the biggest thing at Bayou Perdu High School, but the cheerleaders here are out of her league. She’s “country come to town,” as Mamere would say. I can see her trying and missing the mark. Since the football cheerleading squad has been in place since last spring, she tries out for basketball cheerleading. On the day the announcement is made, I find her in our bedroom crying hard, mascara running down her face.

I sit down next to her on the bed in the dark. “Sorry,” I say without asking what happened. I know.

“It’s pathetic,” she chokes out. “I can’t even make basketball cheerleading.” She says the word basketball like it’s chess or something. Like it’s the most pitiful thing anyone could ever cheer about.

I’ve always found her cheerleading obsession shallow and stupid, but I get it. I put my arm around her.

She sobs harder. “I wasn’t good enough.”

Mamere says that there’s always going to be people with more than you and those with less. You can’t spend your time looking around for things you don’t have. But so much of what Mandy had, what she was, was dependent on having more than others: prettier, more popular, the most boyfriends. Without it, I don’t think she knows who she is anymore.

“Mandy.” I put my hand under her chin to lift her face so she’ll look at me, like a little kid who fell on the playground. “You’re good at everything you do. You always have been. Remember the Mandy on homecoming court every single year? And in the state softball championship? This is a setback. You can get past it.”

“No,” she says fiercely. “I’m not her anymore. She’s gone.”

As if to underscore her point, she makes this new friend called Lacy. She’s one of those girls who wear way too much makeup and talk with that fake ghetto accent. She’s what Mamere would call “common.” People always say that when you go to a new school, the good kids already have their friends and the only ones who are looking for more are the bad ones. I’m a little surprised that Mandy would fall for that, but then again, she has an air of desperation around her here and like attracts like, I guess.

I’m not sure what that says about me, though, because I seem to be attracting Tate. I don’t know what he could possibly see in me. A girl with a possibly-dead best friend who’s dead inside herself. I’m wearing other people’s clothes and living in someone else’s house. But on the trip to the lake, he seemed taken with the fact that I know how to fish and operate an outboard. He laughs at my jokes as if I’m wildly amusing. I catch him looking and smiling at me during class. It’s sweet, I guess. It’s something. I wish I could talk about it with Danielle. But I’m still a little surprised when he asks me to the homecoming dance. “I mean, just as friends, of course,” he adds hastily in response to the look on my face. “Never been to one of these things before. Thought it might be good people-watching.”

“Sure. Sounds fun,” I lie. Sixteen years in Bayou Perdu and no date. Two weeks at Brookdale High and I’ve got a date to homecoming.

“You’ve got a date to homecoming? Seriously? Now I’ve heard everything,” sneers Mandy, who does not have a date to homecoming.

“The world’s gone mad,” I deadpan to her.

I get ready at Aunt Cel’s. Mamere fixes up an old dress of Ami’s from the ’90s so I can wear it in public. “Oh, so now you’ll wear a dress,” Mandy says, shaking her head.

For the second time in as many months and in our lives, Mandy is trying to get me ready for a moment that should have been hers. “Here,” she says, bringing out a little jeweled headband that she must have found in Ami’s bedroom. “You need something for your hair. Just come on. No one from home is here to see you.”

It looks suspiciously like a crown. Without a shrimp. I roll my eyes. “Fine.” I am playing a role. A normal girl going to a homecoming dance. This is what she would wear.

Tate comes to pick me up at Aunt Cel’s and has a corsage and everything. He is polite to my family. We get into his nice car. “You look really pretty,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“What kind of music do you like?” he asks.

“Lots of different kinds. Most kinds. You?”

“Me too, I guess.”

Then silence.

“So, do you have brothers or sisters?” Boy, I’m really scraping the bottom of the getting-to-know-you question barrel here, but he’s not doing a lot to keep the conversation going.

We get to school and people are stepping out of limos in dresses like you’d see on the red carpet on TV. In fact, there is a red carpet leading into the gym. I feel painfully unsophisticated. No plunging neckline or four-inch heels. No professional makeup job and updo.

This dance is catered. There are waiters in white shirts and black pants walking around with trays of hors d’oeuvres. There’s a DJ and a light show. In Bayou Perdu, we would have a band and a crawfish boil under the boatshed. I’ve felt out of place here before, every minute of every day. But this is like another planet to me. I wish Danielle were here so we could talk about it.

Tate finds his friends, who, to my great relief, also look unsophisticated and out of place. They’re not jocks, not stoners. There’s nothing obviously academic or high-achieving about them. They’re just normal. I make small talk with one of the other girls, Mary Katherine.

“I like your dress,” she says.

“Oh, it’s from the nineties,” I say. Why can’t I accept a compliment? “I like yours, too,” I add quickly.

“Thanks!” she says. “Are you and Tate dating?”

“No, just friends. I just moved here. He’s being nice.”

She nods. “He’s like that. So sweet.”

Our conversation fades away because it’s hard to hear over the throbbing hip-hop. The DJ switches to more clubby dance music, and a few people get up to dance. I’m terrified that Tate will ask me to dance to this, but he doesn’t. The minutes feel like hours. They finally play some mainstream country music like we would have had at home. I’m desperate for something, anything to happen. “Do you know how to two-step?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Want to learn?”

He shrugs.

We’re off to the side of the dance floor. There are groups and couples out there, some who really know how to dance, others just goofing around because they think country music is so uncool it will be funny to try to dance to it. I show him a few steps, and then we join in with the lines. My heartbeat gets going a little. I find myself smiling, laughing a little. I’m almost having fun. When the song’s over, we sit back down.

“That was fun,” he says. “You’re good at that.”

“Really, not,” I say. But things feel a little more comfortable with him. Maybe this is not so bad. Maybe. Maybe if I give it time.

I excuse myself for the bathroom, then wait in line with a bunch of girls who have obviously been sneaking in booze or came drunk already. There’s a girl in front of me in sky-high heels, and when she exits the bathroom, she trips and goes splat before I can grab her.

“Are you OK?” I rush to her side to help her up. A guy coming out of the men’s room gets her other arm. After she’s on her feet, she looks at me with annoyance rather than gratitude and then hobbles away, smoothing out her dress. When she moves, I see the guy who was holding up her other side. It takes a second for his face to register, but when it does, my brain pretty much explodes. It’s the guy with the boat from Bayou Valse d’Oiseau. It’s Tru.

We stare at each other for what feels like forever. And it really is like a teen movie, where our eyes lock and music and noise around us recedes and there is only this intense shock of staring into each other’s eyes in disbelief. I’m sure my mouth is hanging open. His definitely is.

“Gumbo Girl. Evangeline,” he says in wonderment. “Every time I see you, you’re saving someone. And wearing a crown.”

Without saying a word, I reach up and rip the stupid headband off my head, my hair falling all around. But I still can’t say anything. I can’t reconcile everything that’s happening. Me. Him. Here. Me. Him. Here.

“This is . . . wow,” he says. “This is incredible.”

“This is incredible,” I manage to repeat stupidly. “Do you —? What —?” I can’t finish a sentence. “What are you doing here?” I finally get out. “Do you actually go here now? This actual school?”

“This actual school,” he says. “For, like, a month. Do you?”

“Yes. Also for, like, a month.”

“Bayou Perdu,” he says in a way that I take as shell-shocked shorthand for I heard. It’s gone. I’m sorry.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “St. Bernard,” meaning the exact same thing.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Is your family OK? And the Trans?”

“OK, yeah,” he says. “Relatively speaking. We lost everything. But, you know, we’re still alive, so . . .”

“Yeah, I know.” I feel like something passes silently between us.

“How is Kaye?” I blurt out. “She’s not here, too, is she?”

He looks confused. “Who?”

“Kaye Pham. From Bayou Perdu. I thought you guys were dating.”

“What?” He looks genuinely surprised. “No. What made you think that?”

Relief washes over me. “She was talking about you at school.”

“What? No. No.” He shakes his head. “She’s nice, but my cousin was just trying to set us up. Unsuccessfully. What did she say, exactly?”

“I don’t remember, exactly.”

“No, we never even went out. My cousin was just trying to set us up because . . . well, it’s a long story,” he says. “Not a particularly interesting one.”

Just talking about someone from home, something familiar, feels so comforting. Even if we are talking about someone I thought he was dating.

“And you?” he asks. “You’re here with someone?”

“Just a friend. Sympathy date. For a Katrina victim. You know how it is.” If there was a way for me to downplay this date any further, I don’t know what it could be.

He laughs. “I doubt very much that it’s a sympathy date. But yes, I know how that is. Refugee status.”

“Are you? Here with someone?”

He tugs at his T-shirt, which he’s wearing over jeans. “I’m the hired help tonight. The music teacher recruited me. I’m helping with the sound setup.” He smiles. Laughs that laugh I remember from that hour or so we spent together back in Bird’s Waltz Bayou in another lifetime. A laugh that invites you in somehow. “So you go to this actual school?” he asks, as if he’s talking to himself out loud. “And we haven’t seen each other?”

“Until now,” I say.

“Until now,” he repeats.

We talk about our schedules. We’re never really near the same place at the same time. My lunch is during his music class, and the music teacher is cool. Since the classroom opens to the back of the soccer field, the teacher lets them go out and practice on the hill near it. Some people take their lunches out there, so maybe we could meet there sometime.

“Sorry, I don’t have a phone,” he says. “You know how it is. Every penny goes toward buying a new boat.”

I nod. “I hear ya. If my dad doesn’t get some work soon, mine will probably be gone, too.”

“I better get back to work now,” he says. “You better get back out there. There may be some people who need help on the dance floor.”

“There are definitely people out there who need some serious help,” I say. “Gumbo Girl to the rescue.”

He turns down the hall toward the back entrance to the gym. And I feel like one of those cartoon characters whose eyes turn into hearts and little birds tweet and float around their heads. I open the door to the gym — to the pop music, the heat, and the purple lights — and I can’t stop myself from bopping my head along to the stupid dance song, all the way back to the table. I am bursting. All those SAT words that mean ecstatic. Ebullient. Elated.

“You must really like this song,” says Tate when I get back to the table, beaming and flush for the first time since we got here with this feeling of possibility, of hope.

I just giggle a stupid, Mandy-ish giggle. “This song rocks,” I say. “Wanna dance?”

He gets up and dances with me, looking a little awkward and embarrassed. We dance goofily through a few more songs before his friends start to leave.

“Tonight was really fun,” he says as he drops me off.

“It was really fun,” I say.

“Well, see you at school,” he says. To my relief, he doesn’t try to kiss me.

“Thanks for everything,” I say, and I rocket into the house, tolerating everyone’s questions until I can get up to my room to be by myself with my thoughts, with this thing that is only mine. I take it out and hold it for a moment. He is here. Tru is here. He’s not with Kaye. I get to see him again. The only thing that could make it better would be sharing this moment with Danielle.

I remember Mandy telling me one time that men like the chase. For them, dating is the same as fishing. It’s all about anticipation. Imagining what will happen. You have to make them work for it. I remember thinking it was ironic that my sister, who really doesn’t like fishing, was using fishing analogies to describe dating. But that really is the way it is for her. String the bait and reel them in, keep them hooked or throw them back.

This may indeed be solid advice. I probably should wait at least a few days before wandering out to the soccer field during lunch to try to find him. But lunch has been pure torture for me ever since I got here, and I really can’t wait to see him again. I take my paper-bag lunch and head around the side of the building toward the back, past the clusters of people with friends, past the sketchy-looking loners who follow me with their eyes, toward the open back door of the music room. When I turn the corner, I see him sitting on a sunny patch of the hill with two other people. My heart seizes up. My feet carry me forward. Getting closer, I can see that he’s got his guitar and the guy to the right has a trombone. The guy on the other side has a bright-pink Mohawk. I walk toward Tru and his friend working out a song on a guitar. I approach, take a deep breath, step out of the shade, and stand in front of them. He stands up immediately, looking a little surprised, but also, to my relief, pleased.

“Hey!” I say, as if getting here took absolutely no emotional effort on my part.

“Hey! You came,” he says. “And you brought food.”

Now, at least, I feel like I did the right thing. It’s good to have the lunch as a prop. “Yep,” I say. “Muffaletta and some chips.”

The guy with the trombone looks up at me. “Girl, I know you ain’t say you got a muffaletta in that bag.” While he’s obviously exaggerating it, his accent gives him away. He’s from New Orleans. And while that’s a world away from Bayou Perdu, here that distance is nothing. He’s my people.

“Evangeline, this is Derek,” Tru says, gesturing to the trombone player. “And Chase.” The pink-Mohawk guy. Chase has an open laptop instead of an instrument. “Evangeline’s another one of us Katrina refugees.”

“I’m surrounded,” says Chase. “Welcome to my hometown, such as it is.” His voice is a lot higher and his disposition is a lot sunnier than I thought they would be based on his hair.

I pull out the sandwich. “We can split it, if you want,” I say.

“In that case, you can visit our music class anytime,” says Chase.

Tru smiles and gestures for me to sit down. “After you, mam’zelle,” he says. I sit.

“You got real olive spread on that muffaletta?” Derek asks suspiciously.

“I make it myself from Mamere’s recipe.” I break the muffaletta into four pieces and give one to each of them, keeping the smallest part for myself. I’m focused on Tru, but now I really want Derek’s approval of my olive spread. I watch both of them eating it. Tru closes his eyes in a rhapsodic expression. “Oh, yeah, this tastes like home,” he says.

Derek nods and gives me a thumbs-up. Chase tilts his head and mumbles, “S’good” through bites. I feel glad that I came.

“You people are really into your food, aren’t you?” Chase asks when he finishes swallowing.

“Yes, we people are,” says Tru. “How could we not be?”

“The food’s probably the thing I miss the most,” says Derek. “Along with the music. The stuff they try to pass off as ‘Cajun food’ up here. It’s a joke.”

“Zatarain’s is in the international section of the grocery store here,” I say.

“Zata-what? What is that?” Chase asks.

“It’s a Louisiana secret. If we told you, we’d have to kill you,” says Tru.

“You don’t know what Zatarain’s is?” says Derek. “He probably doesn’t know what jambalaya is, either.”

“Jamba-what?” says Chase.

“Chase, you just don’t understand,” says Tru in a mock serious tone. “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?” Then he gives Derek a quick conspiratorial look.

Derek nods and picks up his trombone.

Tru picks up his guitar and counts off. Then he starts to play and sing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” imitating Louis Armstrong’s voice, singing about the lazy Mississippi and the Spanish moss and the Mardi Gras memories.

At this point, Derek joins in smoothly with a trombone solo so beautiful it sends chills through me. They both do the chorus. I close my eyes as I listen, and on this red-clay hill in Georgia, I feel closer to home than I have since I left.

I know it’s not his usual voice, but I can tell that he’s confident, that somewhere in there, Tru’s real voice is strong and deep.

“I can’t compete with that,” says Chase when they’re done. “Nobody writes songs like that about missing Atlanta. People write songs more like ‘Get Me the Hell Out of This Crapbox.’”

“I’m not familiar with that one,” Tru jokes.

“Give me time,” says Chase. “I’m working on it.”

I walk back with Tru into the classroom toward the end of class. The teacher, Mr. Heller, gives me a kind of confused look, then a you’re-not-supposed-to-be-in-this-classroom look before I head out.

“Sorry we really didn’t get to talk,” says Tru as we get to the door. “Will you come back again?”

“Sure.”

“Tomorrow?”

I laugh. I was hoping he’d say that, but I didn’t believe he would. “Sure. Any lunch requests?”

“No, I’m bringing you lunch tomorrow,” he says.

I go back to class with a big goofy grin on my face. In Political Science, Tate is more relaxed with me, trying to catch my eye, making faces when someone says something stupid. I know he thinks something is starting between us. I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s not. I don’t have to do anything just yet. I’ll just ignore it. I’ll just continue to be nice. To be his friend.

The next day, Tru brings us each a banh mi, a Vietnamese po’boy with pickled carrots and pork on a baguette, the perfect combination of crunchy, spicy, and slightly sour. Derek and Tru mess around on their instruments. They try to get me to sing.

“I can only sing in French,” I say. When Grandpere was alive, he used to play music on the porch in the evenings. He taught me so many songs.

“That’s OK. I only play guitar in French. What’cha got for me?”

“Do you know ‘C’est Si Triste Sans Lui’? It’s kind of bluesy, in a Cajun way.”

“Kind of bluesy is my favorite kind. Sing a few lines,” he says. “So I can get the chords.”

The song comes out of me confidently, from so many nights with Grandpere.

Tru picks up the tune easily. “Très bien, mam’zelle, très bien,” he says when we finish.

“Everything sounds good in French,” I say. “By the way, Kaye Pham said you were going on American Idol. What’s up with that?”

Tru’s jaw drops. “She said that? Wow. I did do the auditions last year and I got a callback, but I didn’t get the golden ticket. I was going to go to Austin to try again, but, well, you know what happened. It was on September fifth.”

That’s Derek’s cue to share his Katrina story. “That’s when I was supposed to be starting a new school for kids who are musical geniuses.” He’s making a joke, but his expression is serious. Then he tells the real story. People in his neighborhood in New Orleans East weren’t really leaving. His dad, who is this kind-of-famous trombone player in New Orleans, was planning on staying, but then he got this strange feeling, almost like a premonition. They threw a few things in the car and left. His dad plays a lot of gigs in Atlanta, so they came up to stay with a club owner he knows. They’re living with him now. His grandma was in a nursing home, and the nursing home people were supposed to take her to Baton Rouge on a bus, but they didn’t get her out in time. She died from the heat when the electricity went out. So maybe they won’t ever go back to New Orleans.

Tru’s story doesn’t come out all at one time. His family had a pretty big shrimping operation with their other cousins, not the Trans. They evacuated to Baton Rouge to an uncle’s house because his two older brothers go to LSU. They lost their boat, which was uninsured, so they had to make money fast to get a new one. They came here to live with another uncle who has a business until they can buy another boat. So they are going to go back to St. Bernard. “Could be a while, though,” he says. “Are you going back?”

“As soon as we can,” I say. “Whenever we get a trailer. They’re going to let us go check out the house and get our stuff next week. If there’s anything left.”

“Wait, did you two know each other from back home?” Derek asks, sounding confused.

Tru gives me this smile that makes my stomach flip. “We’ve met,” he says. “She came to my rescue.”

We keep it up throughout the week. I bring them roast beef po’boys au jus, because you really can’t get good seafood here. And so a pattern, a rhythm, is starting to develop.

Whenever we’re not talking or eating, he’s on that guitar. You can hear him working things out. He doesn’t play the same thing over and over again. The chords are like messages, peeks inside him. Sometimes I feel like he is showing them just to me. He shows me he has sadness and fierceness and tenderness. I catch each note in my ear and let it dissolve, and I find that it makes its way down through my chest, my veins, into my heart. Somehow in there it turns into yearning for more, to be closer to whatever part of him holds all that.

It’s so hard to see where this is going without having Danielle to analyze it with. I’m so desperate to know if I’m doing the right thing, I might even ask Kendra. But I’m not desperate enough to mention it to Mandy yet.

There’s a little voice in the back of my head that says: Don’t get swept away. I’m going back to Bayou Perdu. He’ll be here and then in St. Bernard. But if the last couple of months have taught me anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as certainty. There’s only now.

We finally get word that we can go back. Forty-eight hours to get in, inspect your property, collect what you can salvage, and get out again.

The signs of the storm start when we get to Mobile: trees with broken branches, the breaks still looking fresh. Nothing has had enough time to heal. The road signs are torn down and detour signs are in their place. Exits blocked off. Military checkpoints.

Then the destruction starts coming at me fast. The telephone poles are leaning in toward the road as we approach, as if they want us to come closer so they can tell us what they saw. There’s a church in the middle of the road, as though it used all its strength to hoist itself up to beg us to stay. The timing feels off. We shouldn’t have gotten to that church yet. It’s a good mile up the road from where it should be.

There’s an eighteen-wheeler with its back wheels in a tree and the front ones on the ground. A school bus like a crumpled-up soda can. There are cows on top of the levee, alive and dead. The live ones move slowly, grazing under a blue, blue sky.

The storm seems to have been selective: snipped off a roof, but left the body of the house. Curtains flutter in the frame where a window used to be.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Mandy keeps repeating with each new horror, until Mama snaps, “Will you please shut up!”

But Mandy continues to sob, loudly. She sounds like a wounded animal.

I can’t stand it. “Seriously, Mandy, stop it.”

Daddy doesn’t say anything.

We’re coming close to what must be Bayou Perdu now. Where Bayou Perdu used to be. There’s Ashley Parker’s parents’ drugstore. The top of it is still there, but it looks like a huge claw raked across its bottom, pulling off everything down to the metal-beam skeleton. Kendra’s house: half the roof and the windows, plus a lot of the siding, are gone. Our Lady of the Sea looks like an inflatable with the air let out. The roof is resting on the foundation, splinters of wood spread all around. There are a few coffins laying here and there, out of place. Like all this was enough to make the dead get up and walk away. Or float away, as the case may be.

Daddy pulls onto Robichaux. Mrs. Menil’s house isn’t there anymore. There are only concrete steps leading to nowhere. Then there is our home. It looks like a dead fish with its guts hanging out, entrails of rubble and appliances spilling onto the lawn.

“Oh, Jesus,” says Mandy.

“Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain,” Mamere barks. She never barks.

We get out of the truck.

There’s an almost indescribable smell of decay in the air. After the smell, the next thing I notice is the silence. The birds haven’t come back yet. For a place that was underwater for weeks, it’s now bone dry. The ground is powdery dirt.

FEMA has been by: there’s a spray-painted symbol on what’s left of the house. A big X with numbers on each side. On the bottom, there’s a zero. No victims.

“Nobody goes in but me,” says Daddy. “It’s not safe.” He goes to the truck to retrieve a crate for our salvage.

We stand at a distance observing our home, as if we’re having an awkward introduction with a stranger. Daddy goes into the house. Mama starts picking around in the yard, pulling up boards and looking under them. She sticks a few things in her pocket.

Mamere walks around the side to look at the orange grove, and I go with her. There it is, Grandpere’s dream, dead, brown, and shriveled from standing under salt water for weeks. I grab onto Mamere’s hand and squeeze it. She nods and says nothing. I see a glint of metal from somewhere back in the grove, and I drop Mamere’s hand and run to it. It’s our pirogue, the little fishing boat, wedged between two trees. I try to push it free. It’s really jammed in there. Soon I’m pushing so hard, I’m grunting and sweating, but I’ve got the back end free and the front loosens up. It falls to the ground. I sit down in it. Mamere comes through the grove to join me. I help her over the side and into the boat. We are sitting in a boat in a dead orange grove.

“Want to go fishing?” she asks. A twinkle comes back into her eye.

“More than anything,” I answer.

When we get back to the front of the house, there’s a wild look on Mandy’s face, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. A mix of pain, fury, and disbelief.

“No!” she screams. The next thing I know, she is on the ground, pounding it with her fist. “No. No. NO. NO.” She screams again at the top of her lungs, the type of scream that you can’t ever get out of your head. She is doubled over, sobs mixed with screams. Nobody moves a muscle until Mamere goes over, kneels down, and puts her arm around her shoulder.

“It’s just things, cherie,” says Mamere, almost cooing, like she would talk to a baby. “It’s just things. We’re here together. We’re all right. We’re all right.”

I go over and put my arm around Mandy and can feel her body shaking. I am as calm as the eye of that storm. I’m floating above all of this. She calms down a little. We help her up, and Mama walks over and hugs her. Mandy starts sobbing all over again.

Daddy comes out of the house with the crate. There are five things in it: the wooden box of Mamere’s silver flatware that she got for her wedding, Mama’s favorite copper pot, his waders, my rubber fishing boots, and Mandy’s mold-covered softball glove.

“That’s it?” says Mama.

He shrugs.

“Any pictures?” she asks.

“They’re all water damaged.”

“Even so.”

He puts down the box and places the items on the ground, then hands her the empty box. “If you want to go look . . .”

She shakes her head.

It takes about two minutes to drive to the diner. To where the diner should have been. All that’s left is a pile of rubble, not a single wall standing. All the booths, the appliances, must have floated away. It’s so hard to believe that for a few minutes, I think we must be in the wrong place. But there are the usual landmarks. Mr. Ray’s gas station is right there, stripped down to the bones. The collapsed post office. The gutted library. I can feel Mama stiffen all the way from the backseat. She gets out of the truck so quickly that by the time I get out, she’s already right in the middle of the rubble. I glance quickly at Mamere, whose face is tight with pain.

From beside the truck, I watch Daddy race over to Mama. He puts his arms around her like he’s picking up a child who fell off her bike. She pushes him away. She walks around the edges of the rubble, wearing her anger like a suit. She picks up a cement block and uses all her effort to throw it back into the center of the pile.

I help Mamere cross the field of debris to reach Mama. Looking down, I see a laminated menu lying on the ground. I pick it up. Mandy comes up on the other side of Mamere and holds on to her arm.

Mama and Daddy are on the far side of the rubble, but I can hear her shouts. “Twenty years!” she screams. She picks up whatever’s lying there — an empty ten-gallon bottle of cooking oil, a napkin dispenser — and hurls it back into the pile. “Twenty years, twenty years,” she repeats over and over.

“All those things you wanted to change. New booths, a better stove. You can make it the way you want it now. You can make it the way you always wanted,” Daddy says.

“I can’t. I can’t start all over. I can’t. I don’t WANT to start all over. I am NOT starting all over again!” she shrieks. She picks up a tray and hurls it across the debris.

“When everything is rebuilt . . .” Daddy keeps trying. “It’s an opportunity. The construction workers need to eat, too. You could hire someone.”

Mama’s face is almost unrecognizable with rage. “You don’t understand. I’m NEVER coming back here.”

I feel like someone has dropped an anchor on my chest. She can’t mean that. This is our life. She can’t turn her back on this place. This place is us. We can be OK. We’ve got the fight in us.

I look at Mamere for reassurance. But her face is drawn and so old.

Mandy and I exchange the same look. She didn’t mean that, right?

No one speaks as we go back to the truck. I notice that Mama isn’t carrying anything from Vangie’s Diner. I have a single laminated menu rolled up in my pocket.

A horse walks slowly down the middle of the road as we drive back to Bayou Perdu.

There’s a huge tent in front of where the fire department used to be. A food buffet and rows of tables are set up under it, and around fifty people are clustered inside. The mood is upbeat. You could almost imagine that you’re at a crawfish boil. All that’s missing is live music.

Sheriff Guidry comes over and shakes Daddy’s hand, then pulls him in for a big hug. “Good to see you back, John. Been over to the house yet?”

Daddy nods. “Our pirogue is still there. Wondering if I can bring it over to you and you’ll keep an eye on it till we get back?”

Sheriff Guidry nods. He turns his attention to Mama. “Been over to the diner?”

Mama nods stiffly.

“Have you heard from Desiree and Danielle yet?” I shove my way into the conversation.

He shakes his head. “We didn’t find them in our airboat rescues, but every home has been searched. They must have gotten out on their own.”

He hands me a brochure with a bunch of numbers to call for information about missing people and pats me on the back. “They’ll turn up,” he says. “People from this community are scattered all over now. Got some in Tennessee. Texas. A lot probably never coming back.” He shakes his head and I see my parents exchange a painfully tense look.

Then Sheriff Guidry gets back to his old self. “We could sure use your cookin’ around here now, Vangie.” He sighs, pointing to the food line. “National Guard was here with the MREs at first. Not as bad as you would think. Then this group came in from a church in Minnesota. Great folks. Just great people.” He leans in closer and lowers his voice. “But they don’t know a damn thing about cookin’. They tried to make boudin last week.” He puts his finger in his mouth as if to gag. “You’ll need an escort to get down to the marina. The road’s blocked — guess you heard about that. I can take you down in the morning. Meet me back here around nine. You know Bechtel got his boat out already. He said the reds are unbelievable!”

That’s a Louisiana fisherman for you. Never let a little thing like the worst natural disaster in history stop you from a good run of reds.

On the way over to sit at one of the tables, I see April Dubcheck, this girl in my grade who I’ve never really liked. She’s boring and prissy and has a really bad accent when she tries to speak French in class. It annoys me to no end. But today she hugs me tight, like I’m her long-lost best friend. She recounts everything she knows about everyone. Trey Halbert, this junior guy, was one of those people the sheriff’s office rescued from the choir loft. His family had to hack their way out of their attic. Some of the oystermen stayed on their boats and it’s a miracle they’re alive. She heard that Amber was in Baton Rouge and Taylor was in Houston. I can’t help but feel a little bit spitefully pleased.

April, Mandy, and I all walk over together to Bayou Perdu High. From a distance, you wouldn’t really know that anything is too wrong with it. The walls and the ceiling are still standing. But when you get closer, it looks like it’s been abandoned for decades. You wouldn’t believe that just over a month ago, it was full of students about to start a new year. Most of the windows are blown out, and there’s police tape up around the whole building. We duck under it and enter through the gym.

The water must have covered the gym floor for weeks — it’s all buckled up, planks of wood rising and falling like waves. I think about Mr. Jerome, the janitor, the hours he spent polishing that floor so it would shine bright enough to see your own reflection. I think about the cheers and clapping, the feet pounding on the bleachers. Me and Danielle sitting up there together. Kendra playing on that court. In another lifetime.

“Hello!” Mandy shouts at the top of her lungs. “Huh. No echo.”

April crinkles up her nose. “This is creepy,” she whines. “Let’s get out of here.”

We move into the hall. There are no more ceilings — all those ugly white ceiling tiles have fallen down and the wires are sticking out. Big pink balls of insulation litter the hallway like industrial tumbleweeds. The lockers are rusted and the floor tiles pulled up. There were times, especially freshman year, when I cursed this school and wished it would explode, disappear. Be careful what you wish for.

Someone has cleared all the tables and chairs out of the cafeteria — or maybe that someone was Katrina. In the hall outside it, all the paint has peeled off the walls, but that big engraved sign with the lists of our state championship teams through the years looks untouched.

We walk back to the football stadium. It’s still standing, of course. If there’s one thing in Bayou Perdu that could withstand anything, it’s the football stadium. A military helicopter hovers overhead nearby.

Mandy wanders off onto the track. I’m a good ways behind her, so I can’t see her face, but I can feel her sadness from here, just from the way she’s holding her head. She scans the field from one end to the other, and then she turns back toward me. She does a cartwheel. Then another.

“Clap your hands!” she commands the empty stadium, then claps her own three times. “Stomp your feet!” She pounds the ground.

I find myself doing what she says.

“Clap your hands! Stomp your feet! Cavaliers that can’t be beat! Goooo, Cavs!” She ends with a spread-eagle jump. Her face looks exhilarated, defiant. She’s happy to be alive, happier than I’ve seen her in weeks. She’s just getting warmed up. “Who rocks the house? I said the Cavs rock the house, and when the Cavs rock the house, they rock it all the way down!” She’s shaking her hips, pivoting around, reliving all those Friday nights.

April Dubcheck looks at her like she’s totally lost it.

When she’s done, I go over and hug her. My weird, wonderful sister.

“I heard they might not reopen Bayou Perdu High. Not even next year,” says April. The words hang in the air. “Everyone’s going to have to go to Bellvoir.”

Mandy glares at her.

“My mom said we’re not coming back here.” Why did I say that? Out loud. To April Dubcheck. Who I don’t even like.

April crinkles her nose again. “What?” Her tone is one of disbelief.

“My mom says we’re not coming back here. Even when we can.”

Her eyes widen. “We’re coming back even if we have to live in a van. The Dubchecks have been here for four generations. My dad says it would take more than a hurricane to keep us out of here.”

There is no one in the world I hate more than April Dubcheck right now. That should be us. We’re the resilient ones.

When we get back to the tent, dinner is starting. The Minnesotans have attempted to make po’boys. They are such nice folks, no one wants to tell them that you can’t give Louisianans a po’boy without asking if they want it dressed. It’s on bread that looks like a hamburger roll. When I turn to Mamere, who’s behind me in line, she looks down at her pitiful sandwich and raises her eyebrows. “Bless their hearts,” she mutters. Several people come up and make versions of the same joke to Mamere and Mama. “We need you ladies here real bad. Forget the hurricane. We’re going to starve to death!” Ashley Parker’s dad bangs on the table down from us, pretending to incite a riot. “Food fight! Food fight! We want Vangie’s! We want Vangie’s!” The other men think this is hilarious.

After dinner, the mood becomes more serious. Heads are huddled together; people speaking in hushed tones. I can hear them talking about their sense of loss, but also their anger. How could the levees have failed? Why weren’t officials prepared? Why couldn’t the government have done more, acted more quickly to arrive with relief?

You can hear sniffling and crying from different areas of the tent. Mama and Mamere are deep in conversation with a group of ladies. Daddy is with the men. One of the Bayou Perdu High football players who graduated last year is chatting up Mandy, who is clearly enjoying it. I think about Evangeline, how the Acadians were in “exile without end . . . on separate coasts . . . scattered like flakes of snow.” Just like we are now.

I step outside, past the light that is spilling from the tent, into the dark, far enough away that the sounds of talking fade and I can hear a few crickets, somewhere out there in the marshes. I look up at the sky. The stars are sharp and clear here, so many more than you can see in the city. Everything under it has fallen apart, but the Bayou Perdu sky is the same.

I start walking down the road — the washed-out asphalt that was the road — to Danielle’s house. I don’t expect to find much, and I don’t — a pile of rubble. No walls standing whatsoever. I kick the debris with my foot, trying to sift through it to find some trace of Danielle. But there’s nothing I recognize as part of my friend. Just a haunted feeling that enters me. The ghost of our friendship, once so solid, now just a memory, unsubstantial, slipping through my fingers. My throat closes. I take out my phone and dial Kendra as I’m walking back toward the light of the tent in the distance.

“You sound terrible,” she says after I say hello.

“I’m in Bayou Perdu.”

“How bad is it? Scale of one to ten?”

“I think you’d have to use a number beyond ten.”

“Did you see my house?”

“I took some pictures. I’ll send them to you. Your house is actually better than most.”

“Of course it is,” she says, sounding like her usual confident self.

I explain to her about school. The state of the basketball court is distressing to her.

“What about the diner?”

“It’s completely gone. Mama says we’re not coming back here.”

Kendra is silent for a second. “She doesn’t mean that,” she says. “She’s just upset.”

“She sounded really convincing.”

“Just give her some time. She’ll miss the water and the fishing and all.”

“That’s me, not her.”

“Well, she’ll miss the crawfish boils, then.”

“There’s not going to be any crawfish boils here for a while,” I say. How do I tell her how empty, how not like our home, it feels? “I went by Danielle’s house.”

“Any word yet?”

“Nobody has heard anything from them.”

“She’s probably here in Houston. She probably goes to my high school. It’s so big, you’d never know.”

“Will you ask around? Or ask your mom if she can?”

“I’m on it.”

I smile. Good old Kendra. Solid and real, even on the end of a telephone line. “I miss you,” I blurt out.

“Don’t get all mushy on me,” she says.