CHICO, Calif. — Gabe Price was having another rough day. As he had every morning since escaping the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, the 17-year-old had woken up beside his father on a sagging air mattress at his grandparents’ house, now crammed with four extra people and a dog. Stress filled the cramped rooms like smoke, always on the verge of flaring into another argument.

Home — or what he had until recently known as home — is a pile of ashes. Paradise High School, where he is a senior, is cordoned off in an evacuation zone. Lessons are now all online, and Mr. Price desperately needed to find a Wi-Fi signal. So there he was, walking through a Muzak-filled shopping mall, where the Paradise school district had converted a former LensCrafters into a temporary school, wedged between a JCPenney and a toy store.

“This is the most stressful environment I’ve ever been in,” said Mr. Price, over the buzz of Spanish and algebra lessons nearby. “There’s nowhere I can get fully comfortable and I’ve got so much work to do.”

In the weeks since the Camp Fire killed at least 85 people and wiped out more than 18,000 buildings in Paradise and neighboring towns, those who fled have urgently searched for housing and normalcy, many still reeling from nightmares of the flames. The burden is particularly acute for Paradise High’s Class of 2019, 240 seniors on the cusp of adulthood whose post-graduation plans have been derailed by more pressing challenges.

For Mr. Price, hanging over his current circumstances is an even bigger worry: how to pay for college. As captain of the track team whose season ended at a state meet a few weeks after the fire, he had hoped for an athletic scholarship. But with no track nearby to improve his running times, he fears that his best laid plans may also fall victim to the wildfire.

“It’s not just me,” he said. “My entire grade is having to rethink our futures.”

[Read: A Frantic Call, a Neighbor’s Knock, but Few Official Alerts as Wildfire Closed In]

A tight-knit community that was already struggling economically — 67 percent of Paradise High School students qualify for free or reduced lunch — has been pushed closer to the edge.

“These kids’ entire foundation has been wiped away,” said Lowell Forward, an engineering teacher at Paradise High, holding court at the mall’s improvised school in Chico, about 13 miles west of their former campus. Teenagers hunched over laptops in the food court, trying to tune out the shrieks of small children running through an indoor play area.

“It’s not just that their house burned down or their parents lost their jobs,” Mr. Forward said. “The seniors were expecting a step-by-step preparation for graduation and beyond, and now that’s all up in the air.”

Although the school district is offering tutoring at the mall and has provided its students with laptops, backpacks and school supplies to replace what they lost in the wildfire, many do not have access to the internet when they return to their temporary housing. Some don’t even have running water. Yet another challenge: the ticking clock of college applications deadlines, which many students, like Elie Wylie, have already missed.

Ms. Wylie, 17, grew up in Paradise “way below the poverty line,” she said. Problems at home motivated her to get stellar grades. Her zeal for perfection made her Paradise High’s top tennis player and earned her the nickname The Comeback. She dreamed of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon, believing that college was the sole path to changing her family’s fortunes.

She was in the midst of applying to a dozen colleges, including Yale, when the inferno reduced her home to ashes. While California state schools extended their application deadlines, she still does not have all the paperwork they require. “Everything is crashing down,” she said. “Now I’ll be the only person in my family to have a future. They’re going to expect me to take care of them when I can barely take care of myself.”

Overwhelmed, Ms. Wylie said she has temporarily moved in with her A.P. history teacher, who is now retired. It was the only way she could do her homework and complete college applications, she said.

“The Camp Fire tore up more than just my town; it took away my peace of mind,” she said. “Everything for the rest of my life is going to be affected by this.”

[Read: After a Wildfire, Rebuilding Life Can Be Hardest for the Oldest]

For the Class of 2019, there will be the time before the Camp Fire, and the time after. One event last weekend stood out for its normalcy: a college seminar at the Chico Marriott, where volunteers helped students fill out applications and financial aid forms. But despite how ordinary it felt, it also highlighted the challenges of planning ahead.

“These kids want to put down an address for a house that no longer stands,” said Elizabeth Stone, an independent college consultant who organized the seminar.

With her house untouched by the fire, Julionna Keers is luckier than most of her classmates at Paradise High. She lived in Magalia, a town up the road from Paradise that escaped heavy damage but was completely evacuated by authorities. In the ensuing chaos, Ms. Keers missed the S.A.T. on Dec. 1, which was the final scheduled exam that the California State University System allowed for applicants.

For now, Ms. Keers, who has a part-time job, is focused on more immediate issues, like helping her parents pay for their weekslong hotel bill, which their home insurance does not cover. “My mind’s always been on school, but now it’s making sure my family is going to be O.K.,” she said.

[See: ‘Hell on Earth’: The First 12 Hours of California’s Deadliest Wildfire]

Suffering from survivor’s guilt, Ms. Keers has busied herself by trying to help less fortunate friends. Last Friday night, she drove to a suburb of Sacramento, where the Del Oro High School had turned its state division championship football game into a fund-raiser for two of her classmates.

One student, Kaleb Nelson, a Paradise High football player and wrestler, was given a new generator, gift cards and enough donations to buy a used pickup truck. Later, in the glare of stadium lights, he cheered from the 20-yard-line in his white Paradise football jersey.

“It’s really good to see football again,” he said, giving his girlfriend, Adrianna Marciella Orozco, a hug.

It had been nearly a month since a neighbor pounded on his front door, screaming about the approaching wildfire. He ran barefoot toward his pickup truck, his girlfriend beside him, and inched along in traffic past woods wreathed in flames. His truck broke down shortly after they moved into his uncle’s trailer, which is parked on a Chico street and lacks electricity and running water.

Standing beside him, Ms. Orozco, 17, said she could not forget the inferno that killed her four dogs and made her family homeless again. Racked by flashbacks of the burning heat on her skin, she is rethinking her life after graduation. She had planned to attend a community college near Paradise, but now is considering a school in Arizona surrounded by desert.

“It’s too traumatizing to be around trees,” she said.

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