Reality Check\r\n Thursday, August 25, 2005 I had gotten my senior ring, bringing myself and the other 332 classmates of the Brother Martin class of 2006 into our final year of high school. That Saturday was when the original Ring Dance was scheduled. I say original because it was cancelled. So instead of the Ring Dance I gallivanted around an almost deserted city. New Orleans was deserted because of the threat of one of the most devastating hurricanes in the history of the United States. As the events of this weekend unfolded it seemed likely that Hurricane Katrina really was going to hit the New Orleans area. So my dad threw the video camera at me and told me to video the house for insurance purposes, while he started to board the windows. Once everything of value (computers, electronics, etc.) were either loaded into our van or stored at least four feet into the air, we left for Jeanerette, Louisiana. My family piled into two vehicles, my grandmother and I in the van and my Dad, my step mom, and my two sisters in the Expedition. I drove the van most of the way. Traffic was horrendous. It took us five boring hours to get from the 310 split on Highway 90 to our destination. Once settled in at my step mom\'s cousin\'s house, I broke down; worried about how everything was going to turn out. I was comforted, but that didn\'t hide any emotions that were still to come. We stayed in Jeanerette for a week after the storm, wondering what had happened to our house. In Jeanerette, I found out that my family would be living indefinitely at my step mom\'s parents\' house. There I found out that I was going to be going to a school where I knew no one, and would probably be treated as a refugee. To my surprise it wasn\'t as bad as I had thought it might\'ve been.\r\n We left Jeanerette feeling tired and frightened of what was to come. The day after Labor Day, I was scheduled for classes at Assumption High School, a 5A public school in Napoleonville, Louisiana. We were living in tight conditions with sixteen people under one roof. I had to sleep on the floor of my uncle\'s bedroom. I rode the bus for the first two weeks of school at Assumption. The first week there I talked to the football coach and asked him if I could help out and be a trainer. He gladly accepted the help and informed me that there was a dinner every Thursday night for the players and trainers. I was not really planning on attending this dinner, but Nate Naquin and Beau Prejean decided to come calling on my grandparent\'s door. They took me to the dinner and tried to coax me into getting into the swimming pool. I gave in. Once they threw me into the pool, we started talking about homecoming and that even the senior trainers were escorts for the homecoming court. I was thrilled to learn this and that possibly I was going to be able to pick any girl that I wanted to be on the court with me. I found out that Thursday night that not every person in this world was mean and critical from first sight. I found out that someone actually cared enough about me to come and pick me up from a house that they had never been to. I was blessed. I had the friendship of two football players that liked me. First realizing that people actually do care and then finding out that I\'m on the homecoming court at a school that I\'ve only attended for three days, that just put the icing on the cake.\r\n Kaylin Guillot, that was her name. She was the girl that I asked on court. I had the biggest crush on her. In fact it was hard for me to talk to her. I asked her in English class. \"Did someone already ask you on court?\" I mouthed and motioned my hands in what could have been mistaken for a kind of sign language. She shook her head. \"So, do you want to be with me?\" I mouthed again. When she understood what I meant she nodded her head and smiled her smile that made me melt. One day I finally got enough courage to ask for her phone number and she gave it to me. It was that simple. I never thought it would be that simple for a beautiful goddess like her. All in all, our relationship turned out to be purely about homecoming. I found out two months after we last saw each other that she had a boyfriend and that he was jealous of me talking to her.\r\n About three weeks after homecoming, on October 30th, my dad told us that we were moving back to Kenner. I was devastated. I couldn\'t be taken away from the euphoria of this dream high school. I tried to find every exhaustible way to stay and continue at Assumption until Brother Martin opened back in January. In the end, my step mom\'s parents wouldn\'t let me stay with them. I could have stayed with my mom\'s parents in Thibodaux and traveled thirty minutes back and forth trying to find rides. My dad had given me his old truck that had weathered Katrina, but he told me that I couldn\'t use it if I stayed. There was no way I was going to sacrifice my relationship with my dad and family for my new friends. In the end I had to come back to Kenner. Everything went well after we came back. To my surprise, I went to Chapelle and had blast. Brother Martin re-opened in late January and most of my friends came back. \r\nI will never forget my time at Assumption; it changed my life. Realizing that people can have a good effect on your life like the friends that I had at Assumption, made me look closer to how I could live my life. It showed me the kindness and willingness of people to help, in an awesome way. My experience at Assumption changed my reality of having a dull high school career into my dream high school experience. I had never hoped that I would be picked to be a homecoming escort

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“[Untitled],” Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed May 21, 2024, https://hurricanearchive.org/items/show/40880.

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