Find Layla

by Meg Elison

  “Layla, I’m going to get you out of there. You and your little brother. This is not okay.”

  I’ve heard this promise before. Social workers are always nice ladies with good clothes who look very concerned and are really convinced they can do something to change the disaster in progress that is my life. And then we move away in the middle of the night, and it all resets.

  “Okay.” I go to close the window.

  She puts her hand in the way. “No, really. Help is on the way.” She’s actually crying now.

  “Okay.” I’m pushing her hand out of the slot. I’d chop it off right now if it meant I could close the window and bring this to an end.

  I hear her click back down the steps. I slide into my hiding spot and find my camera fully charged. I stay in there until my eyes are dry and I can breathe like a normal human.

  Andy comes home and calls my name in the dark house. I don’t say anything.

  I can’t show anybody the video I made. The shark I saw in my mother’s eyes today makes that clear. I don’t know how she could make things worse, but she always finds a way. She always talks her way around those clipboard ladies, always threatens to get the school nurse fired. She’ll get rid of Bette, too. Somehow. I am not a real scientist. I am not proving anything. I am still the kid in the bath with the knife. My experiments always fail.

  Sunday 9:30 a.m.

  I go to the stupid park. I film the stupid bees in the stupid honeysuckle. I find stupid regular mushrooms and a stupid white moth. I film stupid squirrels and stupid birds. Otospermophilus beecheyi and Passer domesticus. Stuff anybody could have found. I narrate the whole stupid thing. It’s done.

  I have to go to the stupid school and use their stupid computers to edit this stupid video. But I can’t do that until tomorrow.

  And now there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go but home.

  Nobody’s there.

  I’ve undertaken cleaning up the house before. It works best if nobody’s home. If Mom says one word to me about it, I quit on the spot. And Andy is helpless. But I should expect trouble, after yesterday. So I return to the processes that have worked in the past.

  The dishwasher is full of bugs, and the last load that was put in it is still dirty.

  Everything stuck to the plates is dry. I empty out the sink and boil a few pots of water to pour in and get washing.

  The dishes take two hours, but at least there’s soap. After that, I start throwing away the boxes of Hamburger Helper. They’re beyond done. Most of the cardboard has been chewed along the bottom, and macaroni spills out everywhere when I try to pick up a box.

  After a while, I hear the bucket spilling over in the bathroom and I run cursing at it, going to siphon it out.

  The kitchen’s not really clean. I can’t get any of the sticky stuff off the counter or mop the floor. There’s still mold on the walls, and the fridge is still a biohazard. But it’s better. I open the kitchen window to let it air out.

  After that, I start pulling up wet newspaper. It comes up in thick layers that tear apart like soggy bread. The smell that comes from underneath it is like rotten eggs and mold. I can barely stand it. I pull up as much as I can and then realize the trash bag is too heavy to lift. I heave it out the window and it lands with a splat on the parking lot below, not far from the dumpster. I’ll go get it later.

  I put down fresh paper and work on the general living-room crap. I find more mushrooms growing out of a pair of Andy’s old swim shorts in a corner. I throw away the shopping bag from the mall, and it only hurts for a second before I shove it out of my mind.

  It’s looking better here than it has in months. Not enough that Mom would let maintenance in to fix the sink. Or the door. But I’m not even sure that’s possible anymore. I can see the wood of the frame warping at the bottom, where it’s always wet.

  That door might never open again.

  I may have cleaned up enough so that she’ll notice, but there’s nothing she can say to me about it that would sound good. It’s still not enough to head off trouble, if Bette comes back with help.

  Not enough that I could let anyone in. Still. I find a can of soup that’s only a little past its expiration date. No dents. I set it aside to make for Andy’s dinner.

  5:00 p.m.

  Mom and Andy come home, and I don’t even ask. And she doesn’t say anything. And nothing changes.

  My phone vibrates and it’s Kristi.

  Hey, did you do the project?

  I did *my* project.

  -_- I didn’t have any time to film mine. My mom has been freaking out at me.

  Ok

  Can I please help you edit yours and we can call it a group thing?

  I sit and stare at my phone for a bit. There is no universe where it’s fair for Kristi to ask me for anything.

  I guess. But it better be super fancy editing.

  I’ll bring my laptop tomorrow.

  Fine.

  I make Andy bring me his backpack. He whines about each assignment, but we get it all done. He reads to me from his book, and I correct him when the words are hard and he messes them up.

  “Is sluggish the language that slugs speak?” he asks me, his lisp terrible on every word.

  “No, it means to go really slow. Like a slug goes.”

  “It sounds like a language.”

  The linguistics of Pulmonata. It’s a funny idea, but I don’t laugh.

  “I know. Keep going.”

  We keep going.

  Monday 1:15 p.m.

  Raleigh gives us half the period to work on our projects. I pop out the memory card, and Kristi puts it into her MacBook.

  She pulls up the files and looks at them.

  “What are these first ones? The thumbnails are all dark.” She’s squinting at her screen.

  “Nothing. Mistakes. Delete those and just use the second folder.”

  She opens the footage of the park, and her pink lips scrunch all the way over to one side.

  “This stuff is okay. All the plants are out of focus, though. You need to not be so close to them.”

  “Well, I never did it before!” I hover over her, trying to see how she does all this.

  “It’s not your fault. We can reshoot it today, on the way home. Do you want to come over?”

  “I can’t.”

  She keeps fiddling while she talks to me. “My mom said you might be weird about it. She says to tell you to come anyway. She’s making your favorite dinner.”

  “What’s my favorite dinner?”

  “She asked me what your favorite was, so I told her it was fried chicken. Sorry, Layla. I didn’t know the answer, so I took a shot. Anyway, you have to come. She’s like obsessed with you right now.”

  Is that jealousy? I’d be jealous, I think.

  “Fine, we’ll shoot on the way over.”

  When she ejects the drive, I can tell she deleted the files of my house.

  For a minute I wonder if the original files are still on the SD card.

  5:15 p.m.

  Kristi shows me how to get really good details up close on the flowers. She says she’ll show me some of how the editing program works on her computer, before dinner.

  We’re working at her kitchen table when her mom shows up.

  “Hi, girls. How was your day?”

  “Fine.” We say it at the exact same time.

  “Did anything good happen today?” She’s pretending to talk to both of us, but she’s only looking at me.

  “We got all the filming for our project finished.”

  “That’s great! Anything else?”

  I look at Kristi, who shrugs. “Not really. Why?”

  Bette’s face falls a little. “Did anybody come and talk to you today?”

  “Like who?” I’m watching her very carefully.

  “Nobody, I guess. Just . . . wanting to hear something out of the ordinary. I’m going to start dinner.”

  We escape the table and go up to Kristi’s room. She’s work
ing on more poems.

  “Here, how about this?”

  She takes her special poet stance and uses her special poet voice.

  “Tragic whispers

  Lie to keep us apart

  But no one knows the truth

  That I keep in my heart.”

  “Is this about that Twitter thing?”

  She drops her arms. “Yes, it’s about that Twitter thing. Now listen!”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Just waiting for the clock

  To strike the thirteenth hour of never

  Because only on the keyboard

  Are U and I together.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “What?” She looks anxious.

  “I . . . I never noticed that those two letters are right next to each other.”

  Kristi smiles. “Here, I want to show you something.” She pulls a notebook out of her bag and flips the pages for a minute. “Look.”

  On the page is a short black-and-white comic strip starring Emerson Berkeley. He’s riding in the boat on the River Styx behind Death, looking bored. As they round the corner, Emerson looks up and says to Death, “Isn’t it a little bright in here?”

  I laugh out loud at it.

  Kristi smiles. “You were right. He really does like my drawings. And Sean . . . he’s not my dad, but he was actually really cool to me when my mom was being all weird.”

  I smile back at her. “That’s great! You should tweet this at Emerson.”

  “Oh, no way. Mackenzie and that bitch Jane will never shut up about it. Just when I think I have them blocked, they pop up out of nowhere.”

  “Hey . . . um, that reminds me. Were they planning some kind of prank on me?”

  Kristi puts her notebook down slowly. “How did you find out about that?”

  “Just rumors,” I lie. “How did you?”

  She picks up her laptop off the floor. “You seriously need to be on Twitter. I know you can’t do it on your phone, but you can tweet from a computer. And people talk about you on there. A lot.”

  “I can do it on my phone if I have Wi-Fi,” I mumble. I check to see if I’m connected to her home network. I’m not, so Kristi gives me the password.

  Fifteen minutes later, I have an account and a picture that Kristi took with her iPhone.

  “Jane is @angelface787. Mackenzie is @macktheknife and Ryan Audubon is @ryguyshyguy.” She clicks on all of them fast to set my account to follow them, and then scrolls back down their timelines to find the prank plans.

  “Here it is. From last week. God, Mackenzie tweets so many pics.”

  @macktheknife: that wouldn’t even embarrass her

  @ryguyshyguy: a whole Instagram just for pics of her? idk that seems pretty embarrassing

  @angelface787: I sit right behind her in second period, I have sooo many pics of her hair

  @angelface787: it’s so fuckin gross I should get paid for smelling it

  @angelface787: so not fair to me

  @macktheknife: yeah but it’s not like she’ll see it. She doesn’t even have a smart phone

  @angelface787: no but I can hook up my laoptop to the projector in honors English and show it to everyone

  @ryguyshyguy: oh shit

  @macktheknife: u r gonna end up getting in trouble for bullying

  @angelface787: ill put a password on the Instagram

  @angelface787: they’ll never fucking catch me

  @ryguyshyguy: ur cold @angelface787 #bitchesbecold

  @angelface787: dilligaf?

  I’m not in my body right now. I’m floating five feet above it, and where my body used to be there’s just fire.

  “I told them to leave you alone.” Kristi says it very quietly. “I don’t know if they actually made that Instagram. I haven’t seen it, and nobody has mentioned it since then.”

  “What’s dilligaf?”

  “It’s ‘Does it look like I give a fuck?’ It’s an anagram.”

  It’s an acronym. I open up my newly made Twitter account and write my first tweet.

  @airyoddknee: I guess this is how it is now. #bitchesbecold

  Somehow this conversation I’ve never seen before is worse than the ones that involve someone with perfect teeth sneering in my face. I don’t follow their accounts, but I make a list of their @ names. #lurker.

  I am not going to school tomorrow.

  Tuesday 6:30 a.m.

  I have to be at school today—it’s my day on shift in the kitchen.

  I lay out frozen hash browns on the big silver tray and slide them into the oven. When they come out, I eat one too fast and burn the roof of my mouth. That’s life.

  Kristi gave me the camera back, and I was thinking of trying to film part of breakfast this morning. I wish I’d had the camera the day that girl passed out. But who knows what today will bring?

  I’m not on the serving line today, which means once everything is cooked I can get out of my plastic apron and hairnet. In the back of the kitchen, I stand up near the ovens, scarfing down slice after slice of warm ham. I get two whole cartons of orange juice, and it already feels like it’s going to be a great day.

  In second period, I take my usual seat. I sit completely still and wait until I’m sure I hear Jane’s phone taking pictures behind me.

  I turn to face her.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Nothing.”

  “Jane, why are you taking pictures of me?” I let my voice rise until it’s practically hysterical. “Why, Jane? Why would you do that? It’s so weird! Why?”

  She starts to look alarmed just as Ms. Valenti walks over, tall in her black suit and as crisp as ever.

  “What’s all this disruption about? Jane? Are you taking photos of Layla without her consent?”

  Jane’s eyes narrow and she gives me the look of death. “No. She’s lying and being a spaz, like usual.”

  I can barely keep from laughing. I try to channel it into hysteria. “She did! It’s true, she did! She does it all the time! Look at her phone, Ms. Valenti. You’ll see. She’s always bullying me. Sometimes . . . sometimes I think I should just die.”

  At the end of the sentence, my voice breaks because I am going to laugh myself to death. I put my head on my arms on top of my desk and try to make it sound like sobbing. A few years ago, like fourth grade, these sobs would be real. I’ve learned a lot since then.

  “Let’s see your phone, Jane.” Valenti is holding out her hand, palm up.

  “You’re not allowed to take my phone. It’s my property.”

  Valenti sighs, and her thin lips get thinner. “You’re right about that. So how about you pull up your gallery and show me the last photo you took?”

  They stare at each other a minute. Valenti drops her voice. “Jane. You’ve been warned about this before. You need to come talk to me after class.”

  Jane holds up her phone and shows Valenti something I can’t see.

  “Delete that. And if I catch you doing it again, I will not let it slide.”

  Ms. Valenti walks away, and I straighten up in my chair.

  Jane hisses in my ear. “Doesn’t matter. I have lots more.”

  Of course she does. And I guess it doesn’t matter. But it still feels like a great day.

  12:15 p.m.

  It’s still a great day when I tell Kristi what happened at lunch. Kristi’s bento is simpler today, mostly fruit and vegetables. I guess she and her mom are doing better.

  I’m halfway through the plasticky cheese pizza, watching Kristi read over Jane’s timeline from this morning, when today completely goes to hell.

  “Okay, around second period, she tweeted, ‘snitches get stitches lol.’ And then, like an hour later—”

  “Layla!”

  I inhale so sharply that the bite of pizza almost gets sucked into my windpipe. I choke it out onto the plate, my eyes watering. There is no way.

  “Layla!”

  I stand up and turn around slow, like in a nightma
re. It’s Mom. She’s wearing the leggings that are see-through over her ass, and her shirt could not possibly be more wrinkled. Her eyes are wide and wild and she’s coming right at me.

  What can I kill myself with? Even the forks are plastic.

  “Layla, are you wearing my jeans?”

  “What?”

  Her hands are on me, and the shock is so complete that I can’t even move. I stand there like a mannequin while she beats at my pockets.

  “Are these my jeans? Did you take my jeans this morning?”

  I don’t say anything. She grabs both of my shoulders and shakes me a little.

  “No. These are my jeans. I just got them.”

  She looks down for a second, like she’s not really hearing me. There is not a single sound in the lunchroom. I can hear every rattle in her throat when she breathes, and I know she woke up hacking and headed here before she really got the morning cough out of her system. She reeks of old cigarettes and piss and the perfume she tries to spray over that smell. I stumble backward to get her hands off me and end up sitting down hard on the bench again.

  They’re all looking at me. Well, not all of them. Feels like all of them, but a lot of them are looking at their phones, or at each other. Too many are looking at me. I can’t believe they’re not staring at her. Too afraid to, I guess. Maybe she’s what they’re laughing at, the ones who are laughing. Maybe they’re just laughing out of relief that it’s not happening to them. She’s the one who deserves their staring, but they know me. They think they know me.

  I glance back at Mom and she’s only kind of looking at me. It’s like she’s afraid to make eye contact with me; she always seems to talk to the center of my chest or to my shoulder. Like if we gaze into each other’s eyes, something terrible will happen.

  Something terrible is happening. Right now.

  She opens up her mouth, and I can see she’s folding toilet paper over her bottom teeth again. She started doing that about a year ago. I can’t figure out if it’s because her teeth hurt or because she can’t deal with how black and holey they are, or if even she got tired of the smell.

  It doesn’t fool anybody. Any idiot can tell toilet paper from teeth. Sometimes when she’s yelling, she blows the wet wad of spongy white stuff out onto her lip. Then she just mashes it back in and moves on.