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

feel like everything disappears? I am trying to find a way for my coffee’s disappearance to inspire love and togetherness, but really I just feel irritated. Hope you’re doing well. Your tragedy of the day is worse than mine, admittedly.
    â€”Bucker
    I finished the message and pressed Send, then locked my phone and slid it into my pocket. My sister’s appointment wouldn’t take long. They’d show her how to put the legs on and they’d make sure she could do it by herself a few times, and then we’d be on our way. My mom was supposed to take her, but then one of our biggest clients had some sort of Egyptian cotton emergency. Willa and I had been back and forth to the doctor’s so many times over the years (leg fittings, leg adjustments, general leg health) that we were fine on our own.
    I was tired. Willa’s coffee was lukewarm, and she took it without sugar. I liked one packet, the brown kind. I had a sip of hers, but it was too bitter. I sat back and closed my eyes.
    I didn’t fall asleep but I drifted in and out of a weird place until my sister leaned over me and tapped me on the shoulder. She didn’t look happy.
    â€œBehold,” she said. “My new transfemoral prostheses.”
    I looked at her legs. She lifted her skirt a little to oblige me.
    â€œThey look the same, really,” I said.
    â€œThey feel weird,” she said thoughtfully. She lifted one leg, then the other, testing them. She swayed a little. I grabbed her arm. “I’m supposed to use a walker for the first couple weeks.”
    â€œDo you want me to get it? Is it still in my trunk?”
    â€œLOL if you think I’m actually using a walker,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be fine. Plus, so what if I fall? It’s not like they can re-amputate my legs.”
    â€œWell, I think they look nice.”
    â€œYou said they looked the same.”
    â€œThey look the same. I mean, they look newer.”
    â€œThey are that.”
    I stood up. I put my hands on her shoulders. “Wait. Are you taller?”
    She smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. Am I?”
    â€œYou are! They’re taller!”
    â€œWell, if I still had my real legs, they would grow too,” she said. She tried to turn around gracefully and almost fell sideways. I put my hand on her arm. “Did you give that form to the nurse and decide you liked the clipboard too much to part with it?”
    â€œWhat?”
    Willa picked the clipboard up off the chair. It wasempty. Its little clip was only clipping air. She showed it to me, shaking it to demonstrate its lack of paper.
    â€œI didn’t . . .” I hadn’t touched it. I looked underneath the chair and behind the chair and then I said, “I have no idea. I didn’t touch it.”
    â€œGreat. Now I have to fill out another fucking form or else face the wrath of the receptionist,” Willa said, rolling her eyes. “We might as well just find a forest somewhere and burn it or something. All this paper. It’s depressing.” She took the clipboard to the front desk and filled out another form. She was a little shaky. I helped her out to the parking lot.
    She’d described it once as walking on stilts. But they were stilts that were suction-cupped to your body. It was basically impossible to slip out of them, so if you fell, they fell with you. When she’d been fitted for her first pair, she used to worry about becoming detached. But the weight of her body, as she later explained it to me, kept them in place.
    It just took a lot of work. You had to lift up one leg at a time. I could see her concentrating. And I knew when she got too tired to do it. She couldn’t stand up all day. At school, she took wheelchair breaks. At home, she sat down a lot.
    I think that was part of the reason she slept so much. She was almost always concentrating on not falling over. It must have been