The Lost & Found by Katrina Leno Page B

you.”
    â€œI’m showing myself.”
    She continued to scroll through the photos, pausing on certain ones to zoom in or read the comments.
    â€œWho’s this?” she asked, stopping on a photo of Frances and Arrow. The elevator dinged and stopped and the doors opened to the lobby, a 1920s architectural gem (so said both my father and that issue of
Architectural Magazine
).
    â€œArrow. Her cousin.”
    â€œHmm. She’s cute too.” She clicked her phone off and slid it into her pocket. “They’re both cute. Frances is really cute. I like her.”
    â€œI’m glad I have your approval.”
    â€œ
You
don’t have my approval,
she
has my approval. Why did she tell you her name now, anyway? Because her mom died?”
    â€œI guess so. I think she’s thinking about doing something. Like finding that movie star I told you about.”
    â€œWallace Green? Because her mom said that’s her father?”
    â€œThat’s what she said.”
    â€œWell, fuck. I hope she finds him. Everybody deserves to know who their real parents are. I would freak if Momor Dad pulled something like that. Family shouldn’t lie to family.”
    There was something in the way she said it. But I was probably being paranoid.
    I hadn’t told anybody about the University of Texas’s offer. But I wasn’t
lying
. I was omitting.
    Willa pushed the lobby doors open, and I maneuvered the chair out of the building. It was seven o’clock and still boiling and bright out. I headed down Hope Street in the direction of our local bookstore. Mom and Dad made a big deal out of shopping local because they were local, and local business paid the bills.
    â€œWhat do you need, anyway?” Willa asked. “At the bookstore?”
    â€œI thought I’d get a book on mythology.”
    â€œOhh,” Willa said, a truly annoying singsong quality to her voice. “Doesn’t this girl live on the other side of the country?”
    â€œ
Frances
lives in Maryland, yes. But I’m not reading this book for her.”
    â€œYou’re not reading this book because Hephaestus is the Greek god of metalworking? You just randomly happened to become interested in mythology after Frances told you her name? Didn’t I say family doesn’t lie to family?”
    We were passing in front of Sally’s Diner. I still hadn’t given Benson his fourteen dollars, but I had the money now. I steered Willa to the entrance.
    â€œHey!” she said. “What are you doing?”
    â€œI need to give something to Benson. You can wait outside.”
    â€œWell, I don’t care. I don’t care what I do. You can bring me in or I can wait out here, I don’t care.”
    I stopped her chair outside the entrance and then walked around to face her. “Whatever happened to family not lying to family?”
    â€œOh, ha-ha,” she said.
    I went inside. Benson brightened, looked behind me, dimmed.
    â€œHere,” I said, handing him my debit card. “She’s outside. I have to use the bathroom, anyway.”
    I spent a long time in the bathroom. I pulled my phone out in front of the wall of mirrors and I went to my contacts to find Frances’s number. I wanted to text her, to be able to say I had contacted her in another way. Because each new way—TILTgroup, Facebook—seemed important. I wanted to find her in every single possible way. I wanted to invent new profiles in new social media sites so I could contact her in a hundred different ways. All different versions of myself contacting different versions of her. I just wanted her to know—
I am thinking of you
. That’s what I would text her.
    I am thinking of you
.
    But she wasn’t in my contacts. Hadn’t I saved her number?
    But I knew I had—I knew I’d saved it. I’d written her number and her address into my phone (
In case you want to mail me something
, she’d