When Chase drops me off at Aunt Cel’s at the end of the day, I say good-bye to Tru in the backseat, but then he gets out and comes around the back of the car. “Wait, we need to have a real good-bye.” He touches my shoulder, then puts his hand on my hip, pulling me closer to kiss him, a kiss that goes right through me. I’m like a leaf that fell into the water, picked up into his flow, gliding along with it. I forget who and where I am and I’m liquid. I could float away, evaporate.
“Oh, God, you two, get a room,” Chase moans out the car window.
I have to pull myself back to stay in my own skin, but the feeling echoes as the car pulls away.
As I’m going to bed that night, I think about Mandy’s stupid advice about dating. For me so far, falling in love has been nothing like fishing. It is more like making music. Trying to find a melody and matching the words, and then when they’re together, getting lost in it. Carried away. You carry it in your body so that sometimes it bursts out of you and other times it’s quiet and so unconscious that you’re humming and you don’t even notice it. It’s that slow unfurling of the orange bud. And now I am that tiny orange bud bursting into blossom.
THE WEEK AFTER THE LAKE WEEKEND, the rehearsals at Chase’s are a little unfocused. They break up early. Chase skulks into his room, Derek goes downstairs to fix himself a snack and sit in front of the TV. Tru and I stay in Chase’s music room, with the big stack of his dad’s records from the ’70s and ’80s and the turntable, examining the pictures and delicately dropping the needle on the tracks we want to listen to. Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Gram Parsons, other musicians that people have forgotten about singing songs of love.
We are sitting on the floor, heads close together. My brain shuts off. I’m just feeling. All I am aware of is him, sparks coming from the closeness of us together, and then we are kissing again.
I never expected to feel this away about kissing. How it becomes a hunger in you, a craving. It’s not all I think about, but on the days when we see each other but don’t have any time alone together, I have a kind of dull ache and burning impatience to be alone with him again. He is the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I think of before I go to sleep at night.
Mandy has figured out that something is going on with me. I catch her eyeing me suspiciously when we’re doing homework in our room one night. “There’s something different about you,” she says.
“Like what?”
“I can’t put my finger on it.” Then she has a revelation. “You’re happy. That’s it.”
“Happy? That’s different?”
“Uh, yeah. You’ve met someone, haven’t you?”
I hesitate, but I can’t help telling her. “Yes.”
She smiles. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen her smile in a long time, either. “Details, please,” she says.
“Well, he’s from St. Bernard. I actually met him before. At the Blessing. He’s Hip Tran’s cousin.”
“Oh.” She looks slightly confused. “But I mean, what does he look like? What is he into?”
“He looks . . .” I don’t know how to describe it. “Cool. He’s into music. He plays guitar.”
Her eyes go wide. She nods. “Not bad. And he’s nice to you?”
“Very.”
“Have you kissed him yet? Oh, God, you have — I can tell. Why didn’t you tell me?” She is excited. This whole time, I thought she would be the last person I’d tell about Tru. But it feels good to tell her. I feel closer to her than I have in a long time. I don’t have Danielle. I don’t have Kendra. I don’t have a best friend anymore. But I do have a sister.
One afternoon, Derek’s home sick, and when we get to Chase’s house, he says he’s really tired and may be getting sick, too. “I’m just going to lie down for a while,” he says, heading up the stairs. “You can hang out or take the car if you want. Just be back by around seven so my mom doesn’t freak out.” He tosses Tru the keys.
In Chase’s car, we look at each other and laugh.
“Should we just take it and drive back to New Orleans?” He gives me a conspiratorial look. “We could live in this thing. It’s actually nicer than where I’m living now.”
The idea of us running away together hangs in the air for a moment. “I’m up for it,” I say.
We have three hours and a car. What will we do?
Neither of us really knows where we’re going. We just get out on that big ugly road near our school, punching at the car radio, looking for something to listen to. A girl and boy in secondhand clothes, in a borrowed car, riding down an ugly strip. But I feel like I’m bouncing off the clouds. I put my hand on the window and feel the cold from the glass seep into me, the gloom of early December on the other side of it kept at bay by the warmth, the closeness, inside Chase’s fancy car, the two of us together.
Tru settles on some Mexican station playing cheesy love songs in Spanish, which neither of us can understand. The announcers are reading out phone numbers in booming, over-the-top voices: ceh-ro, ceh-ro, cin-co. A rhythmic, accordion-heavy song comes on, not too different from zydeco, really. It has a catchy chorus; we both pick it up pretty quickly, singing with mock earnestness.
“Maybe this can be our song,” he says. “You know how couples are supposed to have a song that’s their song? We don’t have a song.”
This surge of happiness wells up in me. We’re a we.
“Tell you what,” he says. “I’m going to write a song for us. A song for you, actually. I’ll play it onstage tomorrow.”
I hide my face in my hands. “Oh, God. OK.”
“What? Are you nervous?”
“Shy.”
“Superhero Gumbo Girl? No way.”
“I don’t like attention.”
“I wouldn’t ever do anything to embarrass you. You know that, right?”
I nod.
“Music is just my way to express things I can’t say any other way,” he explains. His eyes are intent on the road. “Do you have any money?” he asks suddenly.
I scrounge in my pants pocket. “About thirteen bucks.” There are a few more cents in my backpack.
“Should we get something to eat?”
“Sure.” We’re on that ugly strip of road with a zillion Asian restaurants and businesses. He pulls into Chinatown Mall.
“There’s a place here where we could probably swing it.”
It’s just an ordinary restaurant with plastic-covered seats and tile floors, a few fake plants, and pictures of scenic places in Vietnam on the wall. We order a bowl of pho — which Tru says is great and enough for two — and some spring rolls. The waiter doesn’t seem very pleased about our meager order. Tru tells me about his mom’s pho, which he says is the best, and I tell him about the diner. “That’s your mom’s restaurant? I’ve been there!” he exclaims. He describes his waitress, and we realize that it was probably Mandy. What if I had been there, in the kitchen, and we hadn’t even known it? What if there were lots of times when we’d been so close to meeting?
The pho is comforting. It’s different from my family’s home cooking, but it makes me feel the same way: full and cared for.
We walk around the stores in the strip mall. There’s a grocery store with all kinds of imported goods. Spiky fruits and pungent herbs. We pick up some fabric dye and a four-pack of men’s white T-shirts that I promise to make into really cool shirts for the band to wear at the concert. “Since I’m the groupie,” I say.
There’s a gift store with little Japanese erasers shaped like desserts and animals. They have a photo booth that prints your faces on sticky film with designs on it, and we have just enough cash to get our picture taken. I sit on Tru’s lap. We adjust ourselves, facing the blinking red eye of the camera before the flash goes off. Awkward exchanges. “I think my eyes were closed.” “I look like I’m possessed.” The flash goes off again. Right before the last one, I lean into him and he puts his cheek on mine and the camera catches both of us with looks on o
ur faces that say, “I am so lucky to be with this person.” The machine spits out the tiny, almost impossible-to-see images of us on the sticker-print bodies of animals: we’re giraffes and ecstatic, in-love elephants. He rips the strip of pictures in half so we each get some.
“I wish I could take you somewhere on a real date,” he says when we’ve finished our sweep of the mall and are back in Chase’s car. “Someplace nice.”
“This was nice,” I say. “This was perfect.”
He drops me off at Aunt Cel’s house so I can go to my babysitting gig. We have one more kiss, intense, no looking away. We don’t even say good-bye. When I get home from babysitting, I stay up late working on the band T-shirts, gray dye in the sink, potato-print letters and stars. I’m dazed with happiness.
It’s a little awkward the next day at school. Things are hurried. I give him the T-shirt. He grins and holds it up in front of him. “Excellent,” he says. “Another hidden talent I didn’t know you had: T-shirt designer.”
The concert is tonight and the guys are busy with last-minute rehearsals, so we don’t really have any time together. But I got Mandy to agree to drive me. “I guess I’ll stay so I don’t have to drive you back and forth,” she says with a sigh.
“Chase can drive me home.” I don’t want her there. I’m practically out of my body with excitement about this night. My night. My song.
She scowls at me. “Fine. I don’t want to be seen at that place anyway.”
After dinner, I’ve got my Underground All-Stars Project shirt on and I am just about to walk out the door when the phone rings. It’s Aunt Cel. There’s something strange and serious in her voice. “Turn on the TV right now,” she urges. “On the public TV station. It’s Danielle.”
It’s a documentary called Deep Water, about the lives of a group of Katrina refugees who settled in Utah. When I turn it on, they are showing that awful footage of Katrina that everyone shows — the trees bent over in the relentless wind, people waving white flags from the top of their roofs, desperate to be rescued. The scene turns to a shelter in a school gym in Baton Rouge. The camera pans around the hot, tired, desperate-looking people. “This is where we met sixteen-year-old Danielle,” the announcer says. Then they cut to Danielle.
She looks so different. Her hair is perfectly cut with a headband in it. She’s wearing makeup, which I’ve never seen her do before. She’s in a dark room, talking about what happened.
“The Sunday morning before Katrina, there was almost no one left in Bayou Perdu,” she says. “I started to get scared.” She explains how some guy her mom worked with at the Home Depot called and asked if they wanted a ride. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he had room in his car. Desiree decided they should take him up on it. “We brought one change of clothes. That’s it.” The coworker drove down from Bellvoir to get them, but by the time they got to New Orleans, the roads were closing. They had to go to the shelter at the convention center. It was all right for the first night, but by the second night it was bad, and by the third it was chaos. She was one of those people waiting on the bridge to be picked up and taken to a shelter, the ones on TV. “I saw things. Things I don’t want to remember.” She stops for a moment. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She had needed my help and I wasn’t there for her.
When the bus finally did come and took them to Baton Rouge to live in a school gym, things were better there, but still. She stops again. “It was hard.” I know Danielle. I can read between the lines. Desiree must have been losing it. “At first, after the storm, I couldn’t feel anything. I was just in survival mode, you know? It was just getting through every hour and every minute.”
The Red Cross started assigning people to long-term housing, says Danielle. They told them they’d have a new home, but they weren’t sure where yet. And that’s when she found out she was going to be living in Utah. Both she and Desiree were against it. They didn’t even know where Utah was. But the Red Cross gave them plane tickets and told them they’d have their own home there. They didn’t have anything to lose. So they went.
Danielle had never been on a plane before. They flew over the desert, she says. And when they landed, “it was like landing over the rainbow.” The scene switches to an airport tarmac, snowy mountains in the distance. Katrina refugees are starting to disembark from a plane. There are people on the tarmac doing a second line parade to welcome them. Several of the families, says the announcer, are “adopted” by church congregations who help them start over. We see Danielle and Desiree meeting the church family who adopted them: a man called Alan, whose wife died a few years ago, and his three daughters, who seem to be in their twenties. They all walk into a new apartment that the church is paying for, Danielle looking shell-shocked and Desiree in tears. It’s fully furnished; there’s even a computer for Danielle. We see Danielle walking the halls of her new school, everyone being really nice to her. She starts to smile and laugh. Desiree is at her job at a warehouse, packing boxes.
It seems like they’re trying to show that something is starting to happen between Alan and Desiree. Alan talks about how he hasn’t had a purpose since his wife died. Helping Desiree and Danielle has made him feel needed again. Then they cut to Desiree, on the couch with a tissue in her hand. “The thing is,” she says, “I wasn’t a very good mother to Danielle. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve hurt a lot of people I cared about. And I could never get out of that cycle. My past was always right there. But here” — she chokes up — “no one judges me. I get to start over.” It’s a side to Desiree I’ve never seen before, and I feel guilty again for all the times I’ve been one of those people judging her.
“For some,” the narrator intones, “Katrina was a blessing wrapped in a curse.” They show Alan putting his arm around Desiree’s shoulders.
They cut to Danielle. “When we got to Utah,” she says, “I was expecting to feel terrible and alone. But it was like this big desert was between me and my old life, all the bad stuff. What was in front of me was all new, with no black marks on it yet, you know? With my mom . . .” She hesitates, but I know what she’s thinking. With my mom acting like a mom now. “I get to be the kid now.”
They cut again to church. People are singing hymns, then gathering in the fellowship hall afterward. Desiree and Danielle seem to be doing better than a lot of the other refugees. Some of them are thinking about going back to Louisiana or to Houston. Many of them lost members of their families, old people especially. “A new life means painful good-byes,” the narrator says.
They cut to Danielle again. “The person I miss the most is my best friend, Evangeline,” she says. “She’s always been like a sister to me.” She gets a little teary. “I don’t know where she is now. I don’t know how we’ll ever see each other again.” They play the instrumental part of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” as they roll the credits.
My throat starts to close.
I look up to see tears running down Mama’s face. She leaves the room and Daddy goes after her. Mandy reaches over and grabs my hand and squeezes it for a moment. “Are you OK?” she asks in almost a whisper. I can only shake my head.
The feelings swirling around in me range from relief (she’s alive, she has a great new life, she has what she’s always wanted, to just be a kid) to betrayal (how can she not want to go back home?).
The TV announcer tells people that if they want to help the refugees they’ve just seen or any others, there’s a number they should call. I grab a pen and write it on my arm.
“Do you still want me to take you to that thing?” Mandy asks.
The concert. It went completely out of my mind. I need to see Tru. Mandy gets the car keys.
On the way, I check my phone and see that I missed four calls from Chase while I was watching the documentary. There are three voice mails.
The first is this: “Hey, where are you? We’re starting in about ten minutes. Are you coming? OK, bye.”
The second is: �
��OK, you’re late. We’re going on next. Where are you?”
The third is Tru on Chase’s phone. “Hey, are you on your way? Pick up. Pick up. Pick up.”
When I get to the event space, I can see that the concert is already over, although people are still milling about. I can’t see Tru anywhere, but of course Chase’s hair stands out.
“What happened to you?” he says, annoyed. “I tried to call you, like, a million times. You missed it.”
I explain.
“Wow,” he says.
“Where’s Tru?
“Gone,” he says. “You just missed him, but that’s probably a good thing. After we played, I saw him in the back of the room with this guy who I guess was his dad. They were arguing. Kind of loudly. In Vietnamese. He came back to where me and Derek were and grabbed his guitar, and he asked if I’d seen you yet. And I said no. He said he had to go, but to tell you he was sorry. And then he said, ‘I’m not sure what’s going to happen. But tell Evangeline I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.’ And then he left.”
“Did he seem OK?”
“He seemed upset. I don’t know.”
“Should we go over there?” I don’t know where he lives, but Chase does.
“It kind of felt like a family thing. Maybe we should let it blow over.”
Part of me thinks, What if he needs me? But I don’t say anything. “I guess we’ll find out Monday.”
I barely sleep that night. The next morning I call the phone number I wrote on my arm. I don’t understand what the person says when she answers, but she ends with “How can I help you?”
“I saw the documentary last night. Deep Water. My friend was in it. I’m trying to get in touch with her.”
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