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immigrants had settled to build homes and chase the American Dream. In more recent years, artists and bohemian types had moved into the neighborhood because it was cheaper than other parts of the city but still well located. Post-Storm, one could beg to differ whether it was really so well located – in between the Mississippi River and the Industrial Canal.
    Pre-Storm, this neighborhood had been one of the most colorful in the city, literally. The cultural diversity of its inhabitants brought a distinct flavor to each one of the old Creole cottages. Chartreuse, orange, magenta – pick any Crayon from the box and you could have found it here. Now it felt like I was looking at everything through a dirty gray lens. Rust and mold were the new accent colors, and the neighborhood was more akin to a junkyard: tricycles, hi-tops, ceiling fans, and bunk beds were sprinkled on the lawns. The contents strewn about varied from block to block, but every street looked exactly the same – like it had drowned and then been left out to bake and rot in the Indian summer sun. Flipped cars and boats, some smashed into houses and storefronts, had become a common sight. The sidewalk lifted in various places, reminding me of colliding plate tectonics from seventh-grade social studies.
    A cloud of flies swarmed an overturned refrigerator, and an accidental glimpse of the maggot-infested mystery meat inside made me gag uncontrollably. I tried to move away quickly, but there were still puddles the size of ponds and no clear paths. I took a giant step, barely avoiding a drowned rat, and said a quick thank you for my Doc Martens.
    A bad feeling crept up as my school came into view; all the windows of the old factory-converted building had been blown out. I approached the nearest one and peered in. The ground level was still filled with stagnant water. My heart sank.
    The warm familiar feeling I usually had on campus had been replaced with the strange sense that I was trespassing. I circled around to the front and found a piece of paper inside a plastic sheath nailed to the front door:
     
    New Orleans School of Arts
    Closed — Indefinitely
    Contact the office of the
    School Board Superintendent
    for current status updates.
     
    I snapped a photo and texted it to Brooke, adding only a sad-face.
    Despite the official stamp on the paper, there was something so unofficial about the posting that it looked piteous: the handwriting, the nail. For the first time in my life, the lack of bureaucracy made me un comfortable. School and bureaucracy went hand in hand.
    NOSA was an audition-only art high school where we were taught that creativity was in everything, even in trigonometry, which I struggled to believe. After my audition, my father had sat me down and very seriously explained that the greatest lesson an artist could learn was how to deal with rejection. I think the day I got my acceptance letter was the best day of both our lives.
    Now I wondered if this would be it for NOSA.
    As I approached the corner where I would normally see my father’s beautiful ballerina sculpture, I tried to brace myself for the possibility that she would be mangled, vandalized or missing altogether. He’d donated the sculpture for the school’s twenty-fifth anniversary. She was who I ’d hidden behind, crying, after Johnnie West robbed me of my very first kiss during a scene-study class freshman year, and she’d always been there to listen to my nervous banter before my juries. I’d grown attached to seeing her every morning. Please be there. Please be—
    “Thank God!”
    I nearly skipped when I saw that she was still mid-pirouette. Her metal tutu, thin as paper, still created that amazing sense of movement, even the mask that covered the top half of her face was still intact – a metal version of the ones traditionally worn during Mardi Gras. She had always been one of my favorite pieces of his, and now she glimmered bronze against the sad spectrum of gray, almost