After Teens Were Displaced by Katrina, a Stranger Helped Them with One Unexpected Joy — Prom

Two women who were in high school during Hurricane Katrina are reflecting on how the kindness of a stranger helped make their prom feel like a normal school celebration.

Twenty years ago, the catastrophic hurricane claimed over 1,300 lives and displaced more than a million people across the Gulf Coast, including Ryan LeFrere, then a high school student.

When her senior prom came around nine months later, nearly 75% of her classmates at Cabrini High School had been affected by Katrina. “It was smaller,” LeFrere, now 37, tells PEOPLE of the celebration they managed to have. “Not too many people came back,” she says, but adds that it was still a “good time.”

LeFrere and other teens were even featured in Teen PEOPLE, celebrating the traditional milestone of prom even as visible reminders of the disaster lingered.

“They made us forget that that year was so terrible,” says classmate Hannah Foret. “They definitely made it memorable for us.”

But it was the generosity of Marisa West, a then-high school senior from Maryland, that left a lasting impression on LeFrere. West collected thousands of prom dresses for girls living along the Gulf Coast — and LeFrere wore one of her dresses that night.

“It was very sweet that someone who didn’t know us or experience what we’d been through cared enough to do something,” she says.

The attention was also a thrill for Foret, a junior at the time, who wore her own dress.

“I remember being very surprised when they asked me,” Foret says. “I’m a very introverted person. I wasn’t involved in a lot of clubs at Cabrini. It was really cool to be picked.”

For LeFrere, it’s “crazy” to think it’s already been 20 years since Katrina. She still recalls evacuating two days before the hurricane made landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border on Aug. 29, 2005.

“I remember taking all of my pictures off the window because I had a higher window,” she says. “I put them all on my bed. My bed ended up floating due to the water that got into the house. My pictures were still on my bed, but they were all ruined.”

When Katrina struck, Foret and her family were living in a rental home after a tornado had damaged her childhood home months earlier. They evacuated to a church in southern Louisiana.

“We lost our possessions that we were storing at other people’s houses because their houses flooded,” says Foret, now a legal assistant and mother of three.

Her family eventually moved to Baton Rouge, living in her aunt’s trailer for about two months. Even though Foret never returned permanently, it wasn’t until Cabrini reopened that life felt “somewhat normal” again.

Now living in Houma, just over 50 miles from New Orleans, Foret says that despite the devastation, something positive came out of the aftermath: her family.

“My husband, who I ended up marrying, is from this area,” she says. “It’s kind of crazy to think that had Katrina not happened, I wouldn’t have met him, and I wouldn’t have these kids.”

LeFrere, who now lives in Houston with her wife and newborn son, also feels the storm changed the course of her life. She doesn’t think about Katrina as much as she used to, but says, “When I watch things or the date comes around, of course, Facebook floods your timeline with all your memories.”

“You have to be resilient, because if not, you’ll break down every day,” LeFrere says. “The place you grew up in, the city you love that helped build and mold you — it’s never the same.”