The Casquette Girls (Book 1)

17. Fight What You Know

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."