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

exhausting.
    â€œI have to get used to you, like, three inches taller,” I told her. We were about the same height now.
    â€œTwo inches,” she said. I opened the passenger door for her, and she sat down heavily. She looked exhausted. I moved to lift her legs into the car, but she batted me away.
    â€œI have a portable in the trunk,” I told her. “I’ll get it out when we get to the store.” Portable wheelchairs weren’t comfortable, though. There might be a better one at the store.
    â€œOnly our parents would make me work on brand-new legs,” she mumbled.
    I shut her door and walked around to the driver’s side. I watched her put her seat back. I knew she wished she could drive, but it was either new legs or hand controls for my Corolla. We couldn’t afford both.
    We’d tried it once, in the lot of an abandoned warehouse building (there was no shortage of abandoned buildings downtown). She’d only been at it for thirty seconds before she ran my car straight into a telephone pole. Luckily, we’d been going about five miles an hour and she’d happened to hit the exact spot my car had been backed into just a week before (by our probably legally blind neighbor who was ninety and definitely shouldn’t have been parallel parking anymore).
    My parents would flip if they knew I’d let Willa behind the wheel. But she kept asking and asking and finally I let her.
    â€œHey, Willa?” I said, ducking into the car.
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œYou know Wallace Green?”
    Willa snorted. “Do I know Wallace Green? Do I live in the world? There are posters for that new robot movie fucking everywhere.”
    The Day They Came
, starring Wallace Green and Saige Firth. Opening date: July 8. Robots gain sentience. Take over the world. Etc. Something about aliens.
    â€œYeah. You know that girl I talk to on TILT?”
    â€œYeah,” she said. “The pen girl.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhat about Wallace Green?”
    â€œHer mother died. The girl on TILT. And I guess she wrote her all these letters insisting that Wallace Green is her real father.”
    Willa snorted again. “Okay. I mean, that’s hysterical. Wallace Green, long-lost father. I mean, it’s obviously not true. Her mother sounds crazy.”
    â€œI don’t know. I think he lives in Austin?”
    â€œAgain—why do I care?”
    â€œI was just having a conversation with you. This is how conversations work. Each person takes turns saying things.”
    Willa looked over at me, but I kept my eyes on the road. Willa was always difficult, but it seemed like there was something else going on now.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said.
    â€œWhatever.”
    The truth was—I wanted to talk about Austin becausethat was where the University of Texas was, and that was where I was possibly going to school in one year and two months, give or take, on a full scholarship.
    The thing is, I’m really, really good at tennis.
    My dad took me on the courts for the first time when I was just three years old. I beat him at singles. He thought it was funny, so he invited a couple friends. I beat them at doubles. And then I kept playing, and I kept beating people. And when I got older, since our high school didn’t have a tennis program, they shipped me to the Pacific Palisades, a much wealthier school district (more money = more tennis). I beat everyone in the Pacific Palisades, and then I worked my way up and down the coastline until I had beat everyone in Southern California. And then the University of Texas sent people to watch me play, and those people offered me a very early, very generous, very prestigious scholarship to come and play for their NCAA Division I tennis team.
    And the campus was in Austin.
    And Wallace Green was in Austin.
    And that couldn’t help but feel like some sort of divine gift. Or, at least, a pretty cool coincidence.
    I had no idea what