Victim

It was a Thursday in 2005 when it all began.

Just a Thursday. We'd all been given an assignment in English class about our biggest hero, and I was perfectly ready to write a short essay on my mother, whom I so looked up to. I was getting ready to get a passport as well, to prepare for the month-long exchange program I was participating in to the Canary Islands as an ambassador from St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. I was excited at this chance to finally gain experience of a culture outside of the United States. It was true that my father was in China at the time, visiting his new girlfriend, and I had always wanted to leave as well. The destination didn't matter as much as the experience.
I surely had an experience.

You see, Thursday was an important day only in one respect: it was the day we began to notice. It was the day people started going around asking each other, "Are you going to evacuate?" The hurricane in the gulf was getting bigger, the news said. It would hit New Orleans at a category five and go straight up the river, making New Orleans the New Atlantis. Yes, this was The Big One. Better get out.

There was only one problem: nobody believed it.

Every year, we'd gotten these calls that told us to put our lives on hold and flee from the weather. Every year, it was going to be The Big One, the storm to end all storms, to wipe out everything we'd worked for. The previous year, it was Ivan, the category four which went off its course and succeeded only in blowing some shutters off of a few windows and wetting a few carpets. Why, in light of all these false alarms, should we really believe that we'd at last found our real Big One in Hurricane Katrina?

It was a boy-who-cried-wolf situation, or rather, as I later called it, a newscasters-who-cried-hurricane situation. I often wish I'd listened to the cry, but we'll get to that later.

By Saturday, the population of the area seemed to have split in two. There was the first half who was frantically running around and telling their friends and families to evacuate, and then there was my half. This was the half that simply didn't believe.
"It's going to be fine," I'd said to my grandmother, whom I was spending the day with. "It's going to miss us just like Ivan."

By one o'clock, she'd gotten nervous enough to close her religious shop early, thanks to my grandfather's heckling. She simply placed a statue of the Virgin Mary in the doorway and locked up, leaving the place. It was as if she believed that a little plastic statue would protect the glass windows from the storm. I know she didn't, but if she could think she believed, that would ease her nerves.

We went to the brand new Super Wal-Mart we'd gotten. I still remember the amazement we'd all felt about that store after getting it only a few months prior. A Wal-Mart with a gas station, a McDonald's inside, and benches! The benches were the wildest part of it. The place was so big, you needed benches to take a rest from all you're walking! This was a marvel to us.

Anyhow, when my grandmother and I had finally reached the gas station in this brand new Wal-Mart, we were met with absolute chaos. These were the first half of the population, the part frantic to get out. Cursing, yelling, and honking cars were heard throughout the lot. The line backed up twenty cars long in either direction. People were going in the wrong way in order to get their gas and get out quickly. We were sure a fight would break out and left as soon as my grandmother had filled her gas tank up.

She dropped me off at home, at which point I trudged up to my bedroom to continue reading my favorite book, Eragon. The book was already falling apart then, the third time I'd decided to read it, but I had just gotten a hold of the sequel, Eldest, and wanted to refresh my memory. I didn't read for long, however, before the call came from my mother to pack our things and get ready to leave. We'd be gone at six. So, I rounded my little brothers together and packed three days' worth of clothes for each of us, along with some toys and movies to keep us all occupied. I didn't know any music to listen to then, so I brought along the only few CDs I owned and my old Walkman.

By six thirty, my mother, three little brothers, golden retreiver, dachsund, and I were piled into my mother's Toyota Camry, along with a small television and plenty of movies for us to watch. I held the dachsund, Chloe, in my lap as we drove away from the house, and the golden retreiver, Colby, sat on the floor in the back. We left my cat, Donte, home due to lack of space.

By the time we'd reached the Twinspan, the pair of bridges stretching over Lake Ponchatrain, my brothers had already gotten restless. They fought and yelled in the back seat, begging Mom to allow them to put a movie in. That was the day Mom started smoking again.

Finally, halfway across the bridge, my brothers had settled down a little, and the car was quiet. I held Chloe in my arms and looked out over the water at the sunset, as serene and warm as always, reflecting over the still water as if to tell me to enjoy the moment now and forget my troubles. Only one thought came to my mind, however: "The calm before the storm."

The next few weeks were a blur of cramped hotel rooms, foreboding news, and false hopes. We shared a few other rooms with my grandparents, aunt, uncle, two cousins, and their two St. Bernard dogs. Most of our food was fast food or so-called, R.E.M.s, the military-issued ready-to-eat meals. We left the young kids in a room to play while watching the news reports of water covering the roofs of houses, the cars floating away down the street, and the reporters clinging to whatever was on hand to keep from being blown away in the winds. Worst of all was the oil spills. There were two of them in our area, and because of these, almost nothing could be salvaged.

It took me about three weeks to realize that maybe - just maybe - it may take longer to recover from this storm than I'd thought. I wouldn't be able to go to the Canary Islands. It didn't matter whether or not I did the English paper. My cat may have drowned. I may have lost connections with all the friends I'd worked so hard in the last few years of living there to gain. I didn't even care for my material possessions. I had no phone number to contact friends with. I was alone again!

I cried a lot in that time. My mother comforted me with hopeful statements that maybe my cat had made it through, and maybe I could find my friends again. Sheer optimism kept me through this time, but there was no escaping the fact that for the first time in my life, I was truly depressed.

When my mom went back down to salvage what she could, I told her to find three things for me. Only three. I didn't care what else I had, as long as I had those. The first was a small stuffed animal in the form of a Pegasus. It was my oldest possession. I'd gotten this animal in the year 2000, during my first trip to Disney World. The second was my eighth grade yearbook. It would allow me to remember what I've always considered the greatest year of my life, the time when I could fit in and excel. Finally, I wanted a box. I'd gotten this box for my birthday a few months prior, and it was no bigger than the size of a shoebox but held some of my dearest memories. I had pictures of my friends inside it. There were little notes and drawings my first boyfriend had given me. There were birthday cards and a few other odds and ends, all in memory of happy times. Reflecting, it seems all I asked my mother to save for me was the memories.

Luckily, my room was on the second floor, and the two feet of water there didn't disturb all of my things. I got back my stuffed animal and my yearbook, which was much more than most people could hope to find in the oily muck that covered the majority of the town. She left a note on my best friend, Kathryn's door, giving her our phone number, and soon enough, I was back in contact with many of my old friends. These things all seemed to bode well, or at least better, but I couldn't escape the horrible realization that I may never go home again. This tortured me.

I spent a month in a school in Houston, the size of which shocked me. I compared it to a college campus, this school with its four divided wings and two floors. I maintained the entire time there that I hated this place, this big, crowded city, where I could find no new friends for myself in the din of people running along. So when my mother was offered a job at the Horseshoe Casino in Shreveport, I was determined to be happier.

My mother and I went ahead of the rest of my family, spending Halloween in a hotel room. I sat and talked to people online the whole night. A few nights later, we were in an apartment near Airline High School, sleeping in sleeping bags before we'd gotten our furniture in, and I was enrolled in my third school of the year. I was determined that I would overcome my depression at this point and nearly forced myself to believe I liked it there. I said that the people were nice and that I was glad to be away from Houston, but the time of day that defined the real experience there was lunch, when I "ate with the angels," as my grandmother says.

In April of 2006, I made my first real step towards recovery from the depression that was clinging to me. I got online and found my friend, Ashlynn.

A thing to be understood here is that Ashlynn and I weren't best friends before this time. We had been friends in middle school, and in finding her, I rekindled the relationship we had once had. We began talking together constantly, even more than I talked to people whom I had been closer to before the hurricane. She told me about music, which I had always struggled to find, and in this simple act, Ashlynn changed my life.

Finally, I had found something to take away my sadness. The music I listened to pulled it all away faster than any method I had ever tried before.

Since that time, my life has been generally improving. I've found more music I like, along with various other hobbies and loves, such as writing stories and watching British television. My personality has stabilized, and for the first time in my life, I've come to understand who I am rather than who my family and peers want me to be. I know what I like, and I know how to love. In a way, I think I'm better off now than I've ever been, thanks to that horrible test of character called Hurricane Katrina.