Find Layla

by Meg Elison

She’s doing that thing where she’s listening to me talk but staring at her phone. I never know if she’s hearing me or not.

I don’t say anything. My solid strategy.

I start to wonder whether anyone else’s house has ever had this kind of biodiversity inside of it. My house is really like its own planet, with different biospheres. Swamps of wet newspaper growing exotic fungi. An enclosed jungle of teeming green life in the dead fridge. Fruit flies and tiny worms and the occasional mouse and this spider, just a few inches away from my face. Do any other humans live like this? Was this what it was like to be Dr. Jane Goodall, living with the chimps she studied?

We only stayed at the Valencia for a couple of months, but it was long enough to get lice. Twice. Andy got his head shaved, but Mom said if we did that to my hair, she would get in trouble. My hair is nothing but trouble, so that didn’t surprise me.

She sat us down at the little breakfast nook in the kitchen and made us some pancakes. She was all cleaned up, with her hair brushed and her eyes bright. She could really look normal sometimes, I have to remind myself of that.

He believed anything she said. He believed her when she said she wouldn’t leave us alone again for three days and go to Vegas. He believed her when she said we’d never see that boyfriend again. He believed her last time when she said this house would be different.

But it is my ecosystem. And it feels good to make a record of it. It feels like the day I took the knife to my hair. It feels like science. I was actually proving something, actually making a change. I have something unique here, and I have the unique ability to describe it.

I need to pick another ecosystem to film. I need to delete this one. But I can’t. Not yet. Right? Right.

Bette’s looking at me like she needs something. Her eyes are sad but still kind of eager. Like I should forgive her, maybe. I don’t have any idea why that would matter.

“Mrs. Bailey—” “That’s not my name. That’s Layla’s name. Not mine.” I have heard that speech so many times. It’s really important to her that Andy and I are Baileys and she’s not.

“Why don’t you come stay at my house tonight?” And then what? I can’t stay forever. And I’m too big to fit in a basket and leave myself on someone’s doorstep. Even someone as nice as Bette can’t adopt me like a kitten she found in a box. And even if she said she could, there wouldn’t be room for two.

Just take me away. I’ll change my name.

“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.

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.

“Is sluggish the language that slugs speak?”

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

She looks at my pockets again, and I swear to god if she touches me this time I will start screaming, and I will maybe never stop.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but that was the moment I realized we were enemies. Not just that she didn’t like us; that was always obvious. But that she probably flat-out hated us and maybe thought we could die quietly one of these cold nights.

I can’t think. I know once he’s gone it’s all over. But I can’t think I can’t think I can’t think they took my brother.

In the kitchen, I make myself a cup of tea and warm up some leftovers I find in the fridge. I sit at their table, in their silence, and I steal their life. It’s okay, they’ll never miss it. They will never miss these twenty minutes of silence and peace. They have so much clean order they’ll never know any of it is missing. I eat it all. The food, the light, the chair, the table. I eat Kristi’s safety and her mom’s love. I eat her stepdad’s job and her sister’s fancy college tuition. I’m stuffed with it when I put my clothes in the dryer. I eat like I’m never going to eat again. Because I probably won’t.

I stopped wondering a long time ago why some people have lives like Kristi’s while I have this one. I don’t think there are any rules on that. It’s just what we get.

Sitting up, I can see myself in Kristi’s mirror. I’m clean. I’m dressed in clean clothes. My mom is gone, and nobody carried me off kicking and screaming. I did this. That’s worth something.

My Twitter account has a bunch of new mentions and DMs. There’s even a couple of nice ones, people asking if I’m alright or if I need help. I could spend the time replying to everybody one by one. Or I could just say this once and then drop the mic.

The worst feeling here is that I’m not the scientist. I’m the subject. Jane’s observations on her Instagram and Bette’s decisions about my habitat will determine my fate. Someone else will get to name me and define me. I don’t want their pity, and I can’t stand the way life just keeps happening to me and I have no control. I am not an experiment. I’m not one of the chimps. I’m Dr. Jane fucking Goodall. And this is the only way I can prove it.

I still don’t know why we’re best friends, but I’d rather have her than nobody.

“I do my own schoolwork. My grades have nothing to do with her.” Amazing how much fire there is in that one assumption. That she should get any kind of credit.

The venomous octopus is with me again, arms wrapping around my throat from the inside, where no one can see.

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.

I’m like a shaken soda with the cap blown off. What bubbles out of me when she’s gone isn’t like being angry or ashamed or any of the hot terrible things I’ve kept crammed inside me for as long as I can remember. It’s as sharp and as solid as a scorpion stinger—and even with the way I feel right now, I can still remember its name, it’s Leiurus quinquestriatus—and the sound of the pain it causes comes out of me like a scream, like when a whistle blows loud and high right in your ear, like the screech of a big owl swooping through the night. It goes on for a long time. When it’s over, I’m empty and tired.

I wish I had something to show people, like here’s the scar where my mom used to be. I have nothing. That’s life.

There’s no family in the world that would take us both. He’s little, though. Cute, even with his broken front tooth. Somebody could adopt him. He’d be safe. Someone would make sure he got fed and put clothes on him. He’d be better off, really.

No answer. No real answer, anyway. No way to feel better about this, probably ever.

I wanted something from her I wasn’t going to get, but that was how it always was. I remember standing there, wanting to yell or cry or hit her again. Even wanting her to hit me back, just anything.

checked-out Mom was better than usual Mom. Either way, nothing I said mattered. Nothing I did mattered. She had nothing to offer. But at least when she was checked out she was harmless.

Harmless. So I hit her again. She didn’t move or make a sound. It was like smacking a piece of raw chicken. It didn’t matter and it didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t fix Andy’s tooth and it didn’t unshock me. So I dropped my hands. I gave up. She didn’t fight, but she won anyway.

His adopt-me face is going to feature that ugly broken tooth. It’s going to cost someone money to fix. He still remembers that I’m the one who gave it to him. I broke my brother’s tooth, and I hit my defenseless mother. I lie alone in my RV and think about that. And I plan how to take myself to the police station.

Voicemail is the worst. I don’t know why it exists.

I’ve seen the calm of other biomes. I’ve stolen it, like a parasite. What I don’t know is whether I can get my own and maintain it. Peace and homeostasis look expensive.

“Nobody is going to want me. Andy’s little, and he can still be somebody’s kid. I made that video with my report card to show people that I’m not a fuckup. I’d be fine if somebody could offer me a closet to sleep in, and I won’t burn down their house or go to jail or anything, but I can’t become part of somebody’s family. Andy is gonna be like one of those baby monkeys that gets released into the wild and the other monkeys accept him and he forgets there was ever a before-time. I won’t ever forget, because it’s been my whole life. I’ll always be weird, like one of those gorillas that learned too much sign language to go back to the forest.”

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. The blue-ringed octopus is back, and I can’t fight it.

“In fact, your social worker told me that she has a list of people who saw your video who really want you to come live with them.” I drink my tea until that last sip that’s almost all sugar. “They don’t know what they’re signing up for.”

What I want to do is set Jane on fire and post a video of me pointing and laughing, but that won’t prove anything other than that bitches be cold but also flammable.

Parents always tell their kids to finish their food because there are starving people in Africa or Southeast Asia or somewhere, but I’m glad that most of the kids don’t listen, because I’m starving right here.

The times when she was nice to us made even less sense than when she’d just check out or leave us home alone.

Jane is staring me down behind Mackenzie. If looks could kill, we’d have both died a long time ago. But looks don’t kill and words don’t hurt and this is all fake, so nothing matters.

Remove a single organism from its biome and see if it can flourish elsewhere. Can H. sapiens thrive in captivity? Probably not. Ask people in prison. But we adapt. I am adapting.

“Bert.” Everybody is smiling. I think about the chimps smiling at Dr. Goodall, how she smiled back. How it looks like the same thing to both species, but really can’t be.

What does community service do for me, or for anyone else Jane pulled this shit on? What is the point of that? Literally vomiting on them would be more like justice.

If one more teacher calls me “brave” I’m going to bravely swallow my own tongue.

I’m not in charge of where I’m going to be. That’s not a new feeling. Life with Mom was always lived on the edge of maybe waking up in the middle of the night to pack a bag and never come back. Or finding an eviction notice stapled to the door. It wasn’t up to me then and it isn’t up to me now. I don’t know how long I’ll be with the Joels, or if I’ll get put into something more permanent like an orphanage or whatever and have to change districts.