As soon as the bell rang, I practically skipped off campus, extra elated for my mentoring session since it meant missing the terror that was the lunchtime cafeteria. But I came to a halt when I got to the street—I hadn't thought about getting home from school—the St. Charles Streetcar line wasn't close to operational. I contemplated calling my father, but I was curious about how the rest of this side of town had weathered the Storm and decided walking three miles wouldn't kill me.

Walking through town wearing the Catholic-school uniform made everything feel even more surreal. Having survived my first day at Sacred Heart only exacerbated the weirdness. The fact that it hadn't been that bad made me nervous, like the calm before the storm. I plugged in my headphones, floated my phone from my pocket to my hand, and searched for happy music. By the time I reached the desolate streets of the mostly abandoned Warehouse District, I'd already forgotten about the catty girls.

It was easy to identify which residents had returned. The garbage-collection service hadn't started back up, so the occupied buildings had mounds of trash on their curbs. Dismantled storm boards, fallen trees, uprooted shrubs, piles of ruined drywall, moldy furniture, and boxes and boxes of books, clothes, and toys beyond salvageable—all stacked up in hill-shaped heaps twice my height. The pop music couldn't hold a candle to the sullen atmosphere as I passed by one blighted building after another.

When I arrived at our house, I found that our own trash mountain had grown considerably since I'd left that morning. Several discarded jars of dried paint told me my father must have been cleaning out his studio. I pulled a thick bundle of canvases from the pile and unrolled the top layer. It was a sketch of the Mardi Gras–masked ballerina sculpture. She always had a certain sadness to her—like she was dancing a tragic scene—but now water had dripped down the canvas and the charcoal had dried in streaks, making the drawing itself appear to be weeping.

It made my own eyes well. My father had always been so attached to his ballerina; seeing him let a sketch of her go into a giant pile of garbage was not something I could deal with. I rolled the canvases back up and ran up to my bedroom to stash them, not wanting him to argue with me about reclaiming them.

***

"Dad?" I yelled as I bounced back down the stairs.

Music poured from his studio. I opened the door to find a shirtless guy ripping down the remaining plaster from the damaged wall. His back was to me—thank God—so he didn't catch me hovering at the door in surprise. Splatters of dried paint covered his ratty jeans, and his dirty-blond hair was just long enough to fit into a tiny ponytail.

He swung a sledgehammer toward the top of the wall, stretching his back. Just as I became fixated on the way his muscles moved with the motion, my father shouted my name from another room, and he turned around—

"What are you doing here?" I yelled, hearing the shock in my own voice.

The corners of Isaac's mouth turned up, and I crossed my arms in an aggressive stance.

"What are you doing here?" he echoed.

"I live here!" I wasn't sure if I was more shocked at finding Isaac in my house or at the tone of his upper body. Either way, I was at a loss for words.

"Nice uniform. I didn't take you for the Catholic schoolgirl type." He laughed. "I can't believe you're Mac's daughter."

What the hell? Isaac's on a first name basis with my father?

"You expect me to believe this is just a coincidence?"

He held up his hands in innocence, although he didn't really seem that surprised to see me. My father walked in from the hallway with two stools from the kitchen. "Isaac, keep your shirt on in front of my daughter, please."

"Sure thing, Mr. Le Moyne—"

"I told you, call me Mac."

Isaac grabbed a dirty white T-shirt and stretched it over his shoulders. It was impossible not to sneak another glance at his chest as I grabbed my father's wrist and pulled him into a corner. "What is he doing here?" I hissed.

"I finally found someone to repair the wall! His name's Isaac Thompson. He's down from New York City with his pop, working with Habitat for Humanity to rebuild houses. It gets better: we're doing a barter. He's helping me fix the wall in exchange for some art lessons."

"Wait, what?" I felt like I was on another planet. Isaac's been rebuilding houses?

"He wants art lessons, and I figured since we're going to be working on your NOSA mentorship every day, it might be nice for you to have a partner in crime." He smiled. "What's wrong, sweetheart? Do you know this boy?"

"Apparently not," I answered, still trying to process this Dr. Jekyll side of Isaac, who put down the measuring tape down and looked at me.

Insecurity erupted.

I ran upstairs to change, cursing the stupid school uniform on my way, and came back down in jeans and an old Quintron concert tee. My father had cleared off his workbench to simulate a classroom, and Isaac was sweeping up wall crumbles. I took a seat on one of the kitchen stools, trying to hide my disbelief that I was about to start my apprenticeship with my father and him.

When Isaac finished sweeping, he leaned on the table next to me and looked me straight in the eyes. "Do you want me to leave?" The vulnerability in his voice hit me unexpectedly.

"Whatever . . . this day couldn't possibly get any more random."

"Famous last words," he said and pulled his stool right next to mine.

A smile twitched my lips. His usual smug attitude had been replaced with . . . something else. I was glad my father could get the wall fixed, but I wasn't buying Isaac's innocent act just yet.

My gaze crept back to him, and my face immediately flushed. He was staring at me. At my face. The cut. Just as I prepared to answer the question for the fiftieth time, he looked away without asking me about it. I breathed a sigh of relief.

My father stood before us in full metalsmith safety gear: boots, rubber apron, giant gloves, and helmet. I'd seen him dressed like this thousands of times, but now it seemed utterly ridiculous. I had to suppress giggles as he droned on for fifteen minutes about the importance of safety when working with chemicals and fire.

"I can't believe you're willingly subjecting yourself to this," I whispered to Isaac without moving my head to look at him.

"Whatever, Mac is so cool," he whispered back.

I rolled my eyes and smiled.

"Okay, let's move on," my father instructed. He seemed a bit nervous. "Take out your sketch pads."

"What?" I asked. "Why? Aren't we going to work with metal?"

"We will. Later."

"Later? After all that?"

His eyes pleaded with me to cut him some slack.

I dashed upstairs again to get my supplies. Upon my return, Isaac's sketchbook was lying on the table in front of him, and I practically had to sit on my hands to keep myself from throwing his pad across the room.

Maybe his Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde condition is contagious?

I'd never met anyone who stirred such polarizing feelings in me, besides maybe my mother.

My father put one of his sculptures on the table—a two-foot-tall prototype of the ballerina at NOSA.

"I'm going to give you fifteen minutes to draw this figure." He set an egg timer. "I want you to think about proportion and depth perception. Try to draw it as close to scale as you can."

I gazed at the figure and then back down at the blank page. I'd only drawn three lines before my father came over and changed the position of the pencil in my hand.

"It feels awkward now," he said, "but once you get used to it, you'll have more control."

He repositioned Isaac's pencil too, which made me feel better, and then sat down across from us with his own sketch pad.

When the timer buzzed, my father put down his pad, but neither Isaac nor I did. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that my dad had not only sketched the entire figure but had already moved on to shading it. Isaac had finished a line sketch. I was stuck on the feet.

"Pencils down. Don't worry if you aren't finished. I probably should've given you a bowl of fruit, but there isn't a piece of produce within fifty miles of this place." He stood behind me and looked over my shoulder. "Nice job for a first try, especially given the time constraint. You need to work on proportion. See how your dancer is elongated?"

"Commentary on the emaciated state of ballerinas?" Isaac joked.

I shot him a dirty look. Just because I let him stay did not mean I was interested in his critique.

My father moved on to Isaac's pad.

"Nice job with the form, especially the slight arch of the back. Capturing movement is one of the hardest parts of drawing."

I tried not to get into a competitive mind-set, but I was definitely annoyed that Isaac was already head of the class. As I listened to my father give him more advanced tips, my attention diverted to the pile of drawing tools on the table. I could swear the pile was moving.

An X-ACTO knife was vibrating, causing the pile of charcoal pencils to shake. I blinked a couple of times, and the knife bounced with the rhythm.

I slapped the tool down on the table and reached for its safety cap, causing both my dad and Isaac to look up at me. I smiled, and they went back to the critique.

The knife continued to vibrate on the table. Even capped, the little blade made me nervous. I rested a book on top of it.

"Are you okay, sweetheart?" my father asked with a quizzical look.

"Mmm hmmm."

The knife rolled out from under the book and onto the floor.

Out of sight, out of mind.

"Okay, we're going to repeat the exercise." My father turned the statue upside down and leaned it in between two stacks of books so she stood on her head. "This time I want you to try to forget this is a ballerina. Forget you know she's a woman and that she's wearing a tutu. Forget she's wearing a mask. I want you to look at the object like a newborn baby would. Draw what you see: a series of lines and curves, groups of shadows and highlights. Try to draw each line exactly as you see it, and replicate each area of negative space as it relates to the boundaries that create it."

"Why are we doing this, Dad?" I asked, genuinely interested in the process.

"Our minds are trained to call on experiences we already know. Since you know you're drawing a ballerina, your memory informs you what a ballerina should look like. Turning the statue upside down will help you to draw what you see instead of what you know. Fight your intuition, and draw what feels instinctual. Fight what you know to be true."

After staring for a couple of minutes, my mind eventually let go of the image of the upside-down ballerina, and I began to draw lines and shadows as if it was natural. When the timer went off, we both put down our pencils and eagerly flipped our pads around. I expected to see a crazy tangle of graphite, but, to my surprise, a ballerina was staring back at me—feet and all.

"Whoa."

"This is crazy," said Isaac.

I looked over at his two sketches. The second was nearly perfect. "Nice job."

"You both did a nice job," my father said. "Sometimes, being an artist is about forgetting the constructs society has been instilling in you since birth."

"Oh my God, Dad, you sound like . . ."

"What?"

"You sound like an actual teacher."

He laughed. "Is that so shocking?"

"Well, yeah, kind of . . . It's just that teachers are old and bald, and you are . . . I don't know, not that."

"What are you saying? You think I'm cool?"

"Not exactly—"

"On that note, I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. That's it for the day."

"Thanks, Mac. That was awesome."

Did he mean that, or was he just sucking up? One day back in prep school had me questioning everyone's motives.

My dad turned the miniature statue upright and asked, "So, Isaac, how long have you been in town?"

"We arrived from New York about twenty-four hours before the Storm hit, since my pop's consulting for the feds on the trauma rescue—"

"How exactly did you get into town so close to the Storm hitting?" I asked.

"They flew us into Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, where the National Guard transferred us to a chopper along with some other military first responders. It was pretty surreal. We thought we'd be here for a couple of weeks, but you know how the story goes."

Isaac was a first responder? Seriously?

"So, how do you like New Orleans, despite everything?" my father asked.

"Well, to be honest, sir, I haven't really seen much of the city. I have to be on-site by four thirty. Plus, the curfew."

"That's very admirable, son."

"Thanks. I'd really like to see the city, though. It seems like a pretty special place."

I struggled not to snap my pencil in half. I could see where this was going.

"Well, I'm sure Adele wouldn't mind showing you around. Right, sweetheart?"

"Dad!"

"What? You know so much about the city from all of those books you read, and you can explain how everything is supposed to look. How it will be again, once everything is rebuilt—"

"I would love that," Isaac said, trying again to look innocent.

Trickster, I thought, fuming.

"Okay, you want to see the town?" I asked sweetly. "Meet me in front of the cathedral at seven."

"It's a date," he replied, with a look of concern over my sudden shift in mood.

"It's not a date," my father corrected. "Don't make me change my mind."

"I mean, not a date date—"

"If she's not back by curfew, I can assure you, there will never be another nondate. Is that clear?"

"You've got room to talk," I muttered.

"What was that, sweetheart—?"

"Yes, sir!" Isaac said. "You don't have to worry."

"I'm serious, Isaac. I get that you're from New York City, but crime's different here. If I hear she leaves your sight, it will be the last time you hang out."

"Dad!"

"No problem, sir. I completely understand, Mr. Le Moyne—I mean, Mac."

"I'll make sure I'm back by curfew, not Isaac," I snapped. "Don't talk about me as if I'm not here!"

"I'll see you at seven in front of the cathedral," Isaac said, trying not to smile as he packed up his things.