“Are you playing games?” I asked timidly, approaching the computer.
“Nah,” he said contemptuously, “not games,” and he covered the screen with his body so I could not see.
I wondered later if my mother had even registered his presence, or whether Sister Olivia had ever thought of the potential perils of leaving a teenage boy alone in the house with a little girl. I know now, of course, that there was nothing to fear: Riley was not an ordinary, libidinous boy; Riley saw me only as an irritant, and later, as a not-very-useful accomplice. But he missed nothing; if I thought at first that he barely knew we were there, I discovered quickly that he had an intimate and detailed knowledge of us, that he tracked our every move with characteristic sensitivity.
“That’s Sanskrit, isn’t it?” he asked me once, as we sat in the kitchen eating untoasted Pop-Tarts from Sister Olivia’s sparse pantry. “That language your mother chants in?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s Indian. We’re from India. Well, my parents are. I was born here.”
“There’s no such thing as Indian,” he retorted with scorn. “The prayers are in Sanskrit.” I found out later that he was right. He was always right.
“You’re rich, too, ain’t you?” he asked. “I can tell by your teeth. You have good teeth. What do your dad do?”
“He’s a securities attorney,” I said, parroting the phrase I had been taught without any conception of its meaning or implications.
Riley whistled between the gap in his large front teeth. “You was real rich, then,” he said. “You all lived Uptown?”
I nodded, assailed with a pang of homesickness for my pale pink room, my canopied bed, my schoolmates in their pristine uniforms.
Riley watched me, his eyes glinting.
“You can’t go back,” he said. “Once you here, you can’t go back.”
At first it was unbearably lonely and dull in that house, without company or diversion. I spent hours lying on the moth-eaten sofa in the front room, watching the geckos chase bugs through the dust on the floor. Riley spent all his time at the computer: Sister Olivia had an Internet connection, though there was no telephone, no mailbox, no other links to the outside world.
“Can I play a game?” I asked him once, not moving from the sofa but craning my head so I could see him.
“What I do’s more important than games,” he said. “No little girl games on this computer.”
Hacker. I learned the word later, from Riley. He was smart about it; he could put extra money into his school lunch account; he could fix his friends’ parking tickets. He did other stuff, too. He was a news junkie, but not like my father had been. Riley read everything, and he told me about the cool stuff: about shortages of chocolate-dipped ants in China, or house burglars who asked their victims for rides home, or proposals to put voting booths in bars in New Orleans. He told me about corrupt politicians and crazy socialites. But he never read about the crimes. “Too much bad stuff goin’ on in this city,” he said to me. “You don’t need to know no more about that. Not after what we been through, you and me.”
Occasionally Sister Olivia would return to check on us, to restock the pantry and the refrigerator, and to report on Riley’s mother’s progress. Not that she was making any.
“Her skull was fractured, Riley,” she told him gently, her eyes luminous with sorrow. “We are not sure if she will live. She may have to go to Our Father in Heaven soon.”
“I figured,” said Riley. “He beat her head against the wall. She a small woman and he was drunk.”
“He was always drunk,” he told me later. “That man could drink like a skink.” He paused. “You know what a skink is? One of them little lizards.”
Did skinks drink a lot? I wondered. But it didn’t matter, it was just something from Riley’s repository of trivia, just Riley’s way of talking.
“I thought my dad would hurt my mom that bad, too,” I confided by way of sympathy.
“I shoulda got her out in time,” he replied, almost to himself. “I shoulda stood up to that bastard. He wasn’t my real dad even. All she had in the world was me, and I didn’t do nothing to help her.” He turned to his computer, fingers tapping restlessly across the keyboard. “All I know how to do is this, and that didn’t help her none.”
Riley knew the storm was coming, maybe before anyone else in New Orleans did. He tracked it on the National Weather Service for a week before it came. “This is gonna be the big one, Kiran,” he said. “This the one that’s gonna break the levees.”
“So then what?” I asked. “What if the levees break?”
“The city drowns,” he said soberly. “You ever heard of Atlantis?”
I had seen a cartoon movie about a pretty, crystalline underworld kingdom populated by big-eyed humanoids. “Yes!” I responded excitedly.
“It was a lost city,” said Riley. “The water covered it and it disappeared. New Orleans is gonna be Atlantis.”
The idea thrilled me; I envisioned living underwater, like a mermaid. I didn’t know what the storm would really bring. I couldn’t fathom the death and destruction that would attend the wrath of the wind and the water. I couldn’t imagine the screaming mayhem that Katrina would deliver. Instead, I rapturously pictured my beautiful city sinking whole into the ocean’s depths. It was a lovely idea.
“The river levee ain’t gonna break,” said Riley. “They been workin’ on that. We’ll pretty much be okay Uptown.” He pointed to the map on his screen. “Gentilly, that’s goin’ away. Jeff Parish is toast. Serve that racist pig Harry Lee right.”
He squinted at the screen. “We’ll be okay here on this block of Calhoun,” he said. “But down here, where my dad be hidin’, the water will come up.”
He sat back in the rickety dining chair, his eyes half shut, so that I thought he was falling asleep at the screen.
“Huh,” he said suddenly. “Huh. Bastard deserves to die.”
I am not sure how long it took Riley to hatch the plot. But he timed it perfectly; I think he had calculated exactly when the storm would hit, and he knew — the way almost no one else seemed to — what would happen afterwards. “We got to get out on Sunday, Kiran,” he said. “That’s likely when she’s gonna come, this Katrina ’cane. Your mom, can she drive?”
“Yes,” I said with surprise. “But we don’t have a car.”
“My dad’s got a car,” he said. “It’s a old junker but it goes. If we do this thing on Saturday, I can drive it back here. Then your mama got to get us out on Sunday.”
“If we do what thing?” I asked.
“I gotta take care of some business before we leave,” he said. “You’re gonna help me. You’re small, but you’re strong for your age, and I may need you. It’s gonna take two of us. You ain’t scared of blood or nothing, are you?”
“Blood?” I repeated. “Blood?”
“This ain’t no time to be stupid, Kiran,” he said tersely. “You gotta do what I say. Your dad got away with it, but I ain’t gonna let mine.”
His dad was in hiding, having disappeared after the near-fatal beating of Riley’s mother; he knew the cops would want to talk to him, he knew it would be trouble worse than any he’d been in before. “But I found out he’s with his cousin George down on Calhoun,” said Riley. “Not six blocks from here. He don’t know I’m here or he’d kill me, too. He’s tried before. That’s how come I got this scar. He threw a knife at my head when I was a baby.”
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“I don’t recall,” replied Riley. “Your brain can erase memories like that. If they’re too bad, you forget them. But I reckon I won’t forget a lot of it.”