Worth a Thousand Words

The Lost and Found

TILLIE GREEN STUDIED CONSTANTLY. NOT MATH, or English, but pictures. Pictures and pictures of everybody, scrutinizing their comings and goings, their forgotten moments, thoughtless mistakes, and ever- changing faces.

She arranged last week’s photographs over the well-worn desk in her room. Ordering them based on chronology, she recounted the Monday-through-Friday lives of her classmates. She spotted Clay Johansson getting into an argument with the lunch lady about the quality of the tater tots. Next up was Mary Boyd, her eyes crinkled in a smile at Deshaun Washington as he read a poem at an assembly, oblivious to her adoration.

And there, from Thursday, was the one Tillie had been looking for. It captured Tom Wilson laughing in the cafeteria in his oversized T-shirt, whispering something, his hands under the table along with Lauren Canopy’s. It looked like they were passing a note of some kind. Or were they holding hands? Were their hands touching all the time now, only in secret? A photograph could hold many secrets, Tillie knew.

In the photo beneath it, taken on the same day, Tillie spotted Tom leaning against his locker reading something, his face scrunched up in concentration. As Tillie had first suspected, they must have been passing a note-the note. A love note, probably.

“I lost some… paper. A paper,” he’d told her last week in an awkward panic. “I need it.”

In the next photo, Tom was walking off, the note teetering out of his back pocket. Maybe it had fallen out shortly after, and if it was retrievable at all, it most likely sat in the recycling bin by Tom’s locker on the third floor. The janitors were supposed to clear them every other day, but sometimes they neglected the bins by the stairwells.

One of her cases might be closed.

Satisfied, she grazed her fingers over more of her weekly spread: Cara Dale, laughing at something unseen as she played with her necklace; Ms. Martinez, the best teacher in the world teaching the best subject-art; and the beautiful and impeccably dressed Diana Farr, just a blur in the background of a classroom photo but somehow the star of it, even when out of focus.

Diana was the one who had designated Tillie the “Lost and Found”-the school’s investigator, its finder of lost things. It had taken Diana over a year, all the way until the fall semester of seventh grade, to even notice Tillie. Tillie wasn’t exactly of the same social status as Diana Farr. Tillie didn’t even have a social status.

It had started with a typical Diana drama. One day, a few minutes before the first afternoon class began, Diana couldn’t find her diamond bracelet.

When Tillie heard “I’ve lost them! I’ve lost the diamonds!” she remembered that just a few short hours ago she had noticed the bracelet’s sparkle in one of her shots. She clicked through her morning’s two dozen pictures. When she got to an image of Diana wearing it in the art room while she washed paint off her hands, Tillie went to retrieve it.

Coming back to Mr. Werner’s classroom, Tillie murmured, “I’ve got it.”

A hush fell over the class. Diana walked toward her.
“You last had it in art,” Tillie said. “It must have fallen off in the sink when you washed your hands.” She paused and shrugged. “It was still there. I saw it in my…”

Tillie nodded down to her camera, on its strap around her neck. “This.”

Diana shrieked. She hugged Tillie, whose arms were stuck at her sides, and the class clapped. “You guys!” Diana turned to the other kids. “Who needs that useless lost and found when we have Tils and her crazy camera?”

By the time the bell rang to start the next class, Tillie had existed for the first time.

Tillie’s mom’s voice broke her concentration-somehow it could boom and squeak simultaneously.

“Tillie! My love! School!”
“Okay, coming!”

She saved the new images she’d uploaded onto her laptop and shuffled all the printed pictures into her Lost and Found folder. One fell out and Tillie bent to pick it up.

It was from Sunday morning. Her dad stood in front of the kitchen window above the sink, drinking his morning coffee, his graying hair messy, staring at the bird feeder in the backyard. He had quietly watched the birds like this, Tillie was fairly certain, ever since the accident. Before, she remembered weekend mornings as full of pancakes and silly songs, the birds scared off by all the noise. But maybe she was just imagining things.

“I guess you’re just not going to school today!” Her mom poked her head into Tillie’s room. Eyeing Tillie’s photographs, she added, “Seriously, get a move on, honey.”

“I’m coming,” Tillie repeated as she began to gather her things.
“And hey, make sure to text me when you’re on your way home!”

Tillie sighed. Her mom always acted as if Templeton, Illinois, were Gotham City and not a small, boring college town in which the most dangerous thing Tillie could ever encounter would be an angry squirrel protecting its nuts. All the other kids got to hang out downtown after school, often until dark, getting hot chocolate and snacks on Main Street, but Tillie always had to head right home, or to physical therapy or a doctor’s appointment. Not like she had anyone to get hot chocolate with, anyway. But it was the principle of the matter.

Tillie grabbed her coat and rushed out the door, her glasses sliding slightly down her nose, her backpack heavy on her shoulders, and her camera hanging from her neck, swinging in time with the drag-step rhythm of her walk as she made her way to the bus stop.

Tom Wilson’s love note sat near the top of the overflowing recycling bin by the stairwell.

“Did you read it?” he asked as she handed it to him. “No,” she answered, already turning away.
“Okay, well-” he started. She looked back at him.

“Never mind, Lost and Found,” he muttered, and walked away.

“You’re welcome,” Tillie mumbled to Tom’s back. And tell Lauren Canopy “You’re welcome,” too, she thought.

Tillie flexed her foot and released it a few times, like the physical therapists always told her to, and began to shuffle off to class. Her leg already hurt and it was only the beginning of the day. She noted some kind of com- motion behind her but ignored it, focusing on balancing her walk and clicking shots of some new Sharpie graffiti on Alice Pierce’s locker.

“Hey!” she heard from somewhere far off.

Someone had dropped an anatomy book on the ground. It lay flipped open to a picture of a skeleton. Tillie took a photo.

“Hey, wait up!” the same voice hollered again.

Tillie hardly registered the call behind her. She was too busy noticing a circle of blue gum wads in the drinking fountain that reminded her of one of those old stone circles she had read about in history class. She snapped a shot of it.

“Lost and Found!” The voice had made its way to her, and Tillie felt a hand on her shoulder.

She stopped, turned, and hid a groan.

It was Jake Hausmann. She’d taken photos of him here and there, of course, but she’d gone out of her way to never have to speak to him.
“You’re the Lost and Found, right?” he said. “You find stuff for people? They said to look for the girl that…” He blushed.

Tillie-as kids used to say back in elementary school before they were scolded for it-“walked funny.” At first, for a few months, it was because of the back brace. Once that was off, it was the way her bones had healed, the way her legs had learned to get her around after all her body had been through.

Tillie’s main doctor called her current walk “a triumph,” usually adding, “It could’ve been much worse.” Her mom said she was “so proud she’d come so far.” The gym teacher said the whole thing was “a shame.” The kids at school, most of them speaking in hushed tones they thought she couldn’t hear-unless they were the mean ones and she got in their way in the hall or something-called it “freakish,” “weird,” or “super sad.”

Back in elementary school, her classmates had been used to it. But once middle school started, and kids from all over town joined together for the sixth grade, it was a novelty for a while. And though most of them merely stared but never said anything, a few kids openly mocked her. One time, early in sixth grade, Tillie had noticed a group of kids laughing hysterically, holding their bellies, heads thrown back. She framed the image and locked onto the face of a laughing girl, nailing the focus. A perfect photo. But as she took the picture, a boy broke into the frame, ruining the shot. Through the lens, she saw that he was the source of all the hilarity. With his shoulders hunched over and his hair in his eyes, he dragged his leg and pretended to take pictures. As she dropped her camera against her chest and moved away as fast as she was able, the boy ended his impression and joined in the laughter, too, accepting pats on the back and high fives from those around him.

Now that boy stood before her, his pleading eyes fixed on hers.

“I need your help with something.” He held her gaze. “It’s important.”

Everyone thought what they were missing was important.

“I have to get to class,” Tillie snapped. It took her twice as long as the other kids to get down the hall and she was already late from lingering with her camera.

But then Jake grasped Tillie by the arm, and she fought the urge to flinch. She stopped.

His hand stayed on her. “No… I mean it.”

Tillie stood still, feeling the heat of his hand, and looked Jake Hausmann up and down.

He was small-petite, even. A kid her mom might politely call a “late bloomer.” He had a haircut one could only describe as ridiculous (shaggy-jagged, but a little too short in the back). He wore a shirt with Aragorn from Lord of the Rings on it, and his pants were too tight, revealing matchstick-thin legs. Despite all this, she knew that he was always in the center of every group of people he was around, just as he had been when she’d first spotted him.

“Please, Lost and Found. You have to help me. Just listen.” He dropped his hold on her arm, and even though they were already standing close together, he took a small step toward her, staring right at her.

“Okay. What is it?” She tried to look away from his eyes, but despite their air of desperation, they were warm and wide. Somehow she had never noticed that in her photographs.

“I lost my dad,” he said. “I need to find him.”