Read Online The Lost & Found by Katrina Leno - Free Book Online

She had to use her hands to lift her feet over the door. Then she gripped each side of the doorframe and pulled herself out.
    I didn’t help her unless she was really tired. It only made her angry.
    I turned off the engine and grabbed Willa’s coffee cup. It was still half-full. I met her around the back of the car.
    â€œI meant your new legs,” I said.
    â€œI know what you meant.”
    â€œSo, are you?”
    â€œNervous?”
    â€œNervous, yeah.”
    â€œNo, Louis, I’m not nervous about my new legs.”
    â€œSo you’re nervous about something else?”
    Willa stopped walking. She turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes behind her sunglasses.
    â€œWhy are you being so nosy?” she asked.
    â€œI’m just trying to help.”
    â€œI don’t know. I guess I’m tired. I don’t think I got enough sleep.”
    In the waiting room, the receptionist asked her to fill out a new emergency contact form.
    â€œI do one of these every time I’m here,” Willa argued. “Literally nothing has changed. It’s still my brother. Somehow, in eighteen years, I’ve managed to not make any better friends.”
    â€œIt’s policy, love,” the receptionist said. She knew Willa. She winked at me. “Six months between visits, you gotta fill out a new form.”
    â€œHow come you don’t have iPads yet? I could do all this on an iPad. It’s greener,” Willa complained.
    â€œOkay, love, I’ll be sure to give the doctors your feedback:
Willa Johar is tired of paper forms
. I’ve made a note of it here on my space pad.”
    â€œIt’s not a space pad,” Willa mumbled, taking the clipboard the receptionist was wagging at her. “It’s an iPad.” She grabbed a pen from a black plastic holder and sat down next to me.
    â€œHey, cranky,” I said.
    â€œThis is asinine,” she retorted. “Your phone number hasn’t changed. Our address hasn’t changed. This is a waste of paper.”
    Definitely nervous. I watched Willa fill out the form, noting her severely shaking hands and shitty penmanship. At the bottom of the paper, she wrote,
Go green
. Then a nurse came and called her name and she dumped the clipboard on my lap. I set it on the chair next to me.
    I watched her disappear behind the waiting room doors, and I wondered what they’d do with her old legs. I couldn’t remember what had happened to the ones before these. Maybe they donated them to people who couldn’t afford their own?
    I pulled out my phone and opened up the TILTgroup app, which was terribly designed and had zero functionality besides checking times for different support groups and reading your messages (if you were lucky, and it didn’t make your phone crash).
    I had a message from Nib, a quick one about taking a road trip to find Wallace Green.
    I pressed Reply.
    Willa had asked me once why I liked talking to someone I’d never met. At first I hadn’t known what to say, but it felt like I knew enough about Nib. She told me about her family. I told her all my secrets.
    And it was safe too. I couldn’t find her. She couldn’t find me. She was just a screen name.
    Nib—I’m sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, waiting for my sister to get her new legs. She got fitted a few months ago, but they take a long time to make. They’re state of the art, supposedly, and they’re setting us back an absurd amount of money. But my parents’ store is doing really well, I guess. They were featured on that reality show about making clothes? I don’t know. Iwasn’t allowed to be in the episode because I “didn’t promote the brand.” That’s what my mom said. That’s kind of harsh, but I also didn’t really want to be on TV anyway. I left my coffee on the roof of my car and then drove away. That is my tragedy for the day. Do you ever