Free The Lost & Found by Katrina Leno

to do.
    Aside from not even knowing whether I’d be able to handle the pressures of going away for school, I was also worried about my parents.
    On the one hand, they’d be thrilled.
    We weren’t poor by any means, but we weren’t exactly swimming in money. It was expensive to raise a daughter with no legs, and it was expensive to live in downtown LA, and it was expensive to fly all the way around the world looking for new fabric. And the store was doing well (
Project Runway
? Is that a thing? It had been on TV, I don’t know), but sending two kids to college in the same year was really stressing my parents out. I’d heard them talking about it.
    So a full scholarship—they’d be overjoyed.
    But a full scholarship in Texas—I wasn’t so sure.
    My mother didn’t even like it when I went to the Pacific Palisades by myself, and that was thirty minutes away (or, like, twelve hours, depending on traffic). I couldn’t imagine what she’d say if I told her I wanted to go to school in Texas.
    And then there was Willa.
    I’d never been away from her before.
    People talked about twins being spiritually connected or whatever, and sometimes it was bullshit but other times it was true.
    Like when Willa fell off the fire escape and lost her legs, I could feel it.
    I could feel a tickle in my thighs as the bone saw cut her legs away. My knees got numb and my toes cramped up and I couldn’t walk. For one full hour, I sat in the waiting room and couldn’t stand. I lost the feeling in my feet. I could tell the exact moment they brought bone saw tobone. I knew when it was over. I could feel them stitching her up. It might as well have been me.
    We had never been apart. We had never talked about what we were doing after graduation. We’d be starting senior year soon, and I had no idea what Willa wanted to do after that.
    For eighteen years it had been her and me.
    I didn’t know how to tell her it might not be that way forever.
    And just thinking about the possibility was making it hard to catch my breath.
    I pulled into the parking lot behind our parents’ store, into one of three parking spots marked Private, No Parking. I turned the engine off and reread the message from Nib as Willa let herself out of the car.
    Was it the stupidest idea in the world, to travel across the country to meet a girl I hadn’t even seen a picture of? Was it the second-stupidest idea? If it was the second-stupidest idea, what was the first stupidest? Thinking I could move across the country to play Division I tennis at one of the best schools in the country?
    I kept going back and forth. They seemed equally stupid, I thought. And maybe not stupid at all. If I was honest, they seemed maybe a little perfect.
    But were they
too
perfect?
    Ugh. I couldn’t trust my brain to be positive for more than a few seconds at a time. I got out of the car and tookWilla’s portable wheelchair from the trunk. I wheeled it around to the passenger side; she grumbled when I woke her up, but then let me help her into it.
    â€œYou’re counting again,” she said as I pushed her toward the back entrance of the store.
    She was right.
    Lately I was counting a lot.
    Lately I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.

NINE
Frances
    I had not yet decided whether I would go to my mother’s wake.
    I knew I should, but it was hard to talk myself into it. It would be small, just me and Grandpa Dick and Grandma Doris and Arrow and Aunt Florence and Uncle Irvine and my mother’s coffin being lowered into a plot in a local cemetery that apparently she had purchased twenty years ago, because that is a thing people do that I didn’t realize people did. But it made sense. I mean, you can’t buy a burial plot when you actually need it.
    Two days had passed since I’d found the bill for the coffin (the bill had never turned up, but I had no doubtthey were already printing another one), which