Free Lost & Found by Brooke Davis Page A

he didn’t understand. He didn’t know it was all about his own skin until he met Evie.
    Years later, after his first day at typing school, Karl sat at the kitchen table and plunged the tips of his fingers into a bowl of ice. They were red and throbbing. But it was nice to see pain on his fingertips, and feel it running up his forearms, like something trying to get inside him. It felt nice to have something trying to get inside him.
    For the first time in his life he felt in a position of power, in the decisive way he was forced to use his fingers. The keys flew at the page—
thwap, thwap, thwap—
like he was throwing punches. He loved the potential of those white pages. That they would start off as nothing and become something. It made him feel as if he, too, could become something.
    By day he filled pages with meaningless sentences about cats and dogs, and Jack and Jill and Jane. He typed them as though they were the most important things anyone ever had to say. By night he dreamed in typing exercises. In the morning, he sang the exercises into the showerhead, closing his eyes andletting the water run down his face. His mind lit up in letters as he spoke.
    He loved watching his fingers skidding across the keys. He could see that perhaps he was beautiful, because he was creating something. It wasn’t music they played in concert halls or art they hung on walls, but to Karl it was both of those things, and more.
evie
    Karl had met Evie at typing school. Eventually he would come to like the way she clutched at her chest when she talked, as if she were trying to stop her heart from falling out. When they first met, however, he simply thought her name would be good to say during sex. There was something excitingly sacrilegious in the way he could tie Original Sin and sex together. He had, of course, known her as Eve back then; Evie would come later, when he knew her knees and elbows and belly button better than he knew his own. Her name had, from the very beginning, felt incomplete without the
ie
, kind of hanging there with a drama that seemed unnecessary.
    After two months, there had been three conversations, the eyes, the touches, that walk she did with those hips he couldn’t blink out of his mind. If she was in the room, he couldn’t think of anything else but her presence. Her heat and energy were sonoticeable to him. It wasn’t just his mind, running through the various things that would happen once she gave him permission to know her, it was also his body; he felt it needing to be near her, as though his skin was going to burst into flames if they didn’t touch.
    One night, she pirouetted out the door after class, her eyes resting on him. Karl sat in front of his typewriter thinking,
Eve’sfingers-Eve’shands-Eve’ssmile-Eve’shair
. When the last straggler had filed out, he removed, with great difficulty, the letters
M
,
A
,
R
,
Y
, and
E
from his typewriter. He calmly walked to Eve’s desk and removed the
R
and
M
from hers. He glued the letters to the tips of his fingers, MARRY on his right hand, ME on his left, and appeared on her doorstep in the fading light. He held his hands up on either side of his face, wiggling his fingers a little. She put her hands on his forearm and typed,
Yes, thank you.
    Their wedding day was simple. Nothing too grand, nothing too quiet. Nothing went wrong, really, unless you count the organist fainting at his post, mid–“Here Comes the Bride.” But even that was okay, because when his head fell onto the keys, and that terrible sound of discordant notes crunched together, echoing throughout the church like a moment of suspense in a film, it made Karl feel as though his life was worthy of suspense, and worthy of film.
    Karl stood at the front of the church, feeling the sweat gather in the lines on his palms, feeling the eyes of the typing women seated across two pews, looking like birds on a wire.Their legs were all crossed identically, and everything about them seemed so