Find Layla

by Meg Elison

“You have good grades. You’re savvy. You’re organized. You could really go somewhere and be something. I just want you to know that. You’re not stuck.” She says this like I don’t know. Like I haven’t been doing the math since I was twelve. Just a few more years until I can move out, get a job, go to college if I beg for help just right. Four years of high school and planning out how I can take Andy with me. Until then, stuck is exactly the word.

A house like this doesn’t happen by accident, but as a series of contributing events. Like the forming of an ecosystem. And that’s how I start the narration for my video. Filming is hard. I have to hold a flashlight in one hand and the camera with the other.

“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.

“This is me, Layla Louise Bailey. I was born in the wild and cannot be domesticated. However, I’m not yet fully capable of caring for myself, either. I have no money and not enough skills. What I have is a 4.0 and really low standards. I’ll do chores. I’ll be quiet. If you’ve got a garage or a laundry room I could sleep in, I am mostly housebroken. I just want to finish school, adopt my little brother, and go to college.”

I thought this would make me the scientist. I should have known that the thing that slides out of the petri dish never gets to speak for itself. I know there’s no happy ending, but I thought maybe this video could bring me better results. However, I’d have needed a stronger hypothesis. And I didn’t know what I was doing, or really why. I just had to do it. And maybe it will still yield a meaningful finding, but before that I have to live through this feeling of being the thing under the microscope and everybody taking a look, saying my Latin name, guessing at my taxonomy.

I wanted to sound like a scientist. I wanted to describe my observations without having feelings about them. But I’m the subject and the observer, and there’s no way to separate me from me.