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But when the puzzle pieces twist,

And seem like they won't fit their match,

Then I will try and try again,

And hope that someone understands.

(Pop)Ular SciencE: Bayside

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Listen to the Hamster Sing

Chapter 4

I stared at my muffin while I waited for Joel to get his coffee from the counter. It was likely that the muffin would win our staring contest.

Joel leaned against our tall table and dropped his head back to look at me.

“You can go ahead and eat it, you know. Otherwise I might have to take it. And eat it,” he warned. I delicately slobbered over the top of the muffin. “Things that you think might gross me out really don’t.”

With a sigh, I took a large chunk out of it.

“So,” he said, once he’d gotten his coffee and sat down across from me. “How’s life?”

I shrugged, then remembered that conversation required words on my part as well.

“Um, I’m just…doing stuff,” I mumbled. I studied the muffin.

Joel nodded wisely. “It’s crazy how many people are doing stuff. Absolutely crazy. I didn’t know you were insane, Layla.”

“Everybody else knows it,” I muttered, looking around at the other people in the café for the first time since I’d entered. He saw my gaze wander and then slowly leaned in.

“Nobody’s watching you, you psycho.”

I shoved a bite of the muffin I’d licked into his mouth and he sat back in his chair and blinked. His lips twitched and he chewed and swallowed.

“Obviously they’re missing out,” he added. He put his elbows on the table and studied me. “What’s the weirdest skill you have?”

“Reversing time.” I flicked my eyes over to him as I said it and was relieved to see a smile light his face. I cleared my throat. “Do you have to do the time capsule project?” I probably should have returned his previous question, but it didn’t occur to me until I’d already changed the topic. I filed it away to ask him later.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s a pretty cool project. They never did stuff like that at my old school But it had, like, three thousand people.”

Surry County Schools was a small school system.

“Yeah, cool project,” I said morosely. He didn’t seem to know what to make of my downcast expression, so in defense against the unknowable, he slowly slid his coffee towards me.

“Want a drop?”

I stared at the coffee. I absolutely hated it. I’d tasted it once in middle school when I was still trying to be a grown-up ahead of my time, and I hadn’t had any since then.

But then again, I’d despised scalloped potatoes for my entire life and only recently discovered their wonderful taste. Maybe coffee would be just swell in my more adult state.

“Okay,” I said. He burst out laughing, and I paused in reaching for the coffee, wondering what I’d done. “What?”

“You…were just…so serious,” he laughed, speaking between breaths as he strove to keep his voice low. He screwed his face into a stony expression but there was still laughter making his mouth shake in his effort to mock me.

“I hope your face sticks like that and you’re shunned forever because you can’t smile,” I said, taking a sip of the coffee. I nearly spat it back out because it was scalding hot.

I did succeed in dribbling a little on my hand. When it just made him laugh more, I wiped it on his jacket sleeve.

“Well that’ll learn me,” he said after an incredulous pause, adopting a glare and delicately swiping at his wet elbow. I buried my face in my muffin, feeling some strange feeling creeping up in my throat. As he continued to glare, keeping it on me while he jerked his coffee back into the shelter of his hands, the feeling intensified. Oh God, what was it? What was—

I giggled.

There was a long, awkward pause.

“That was an odd noise,” he said finally. I poked at my throat, wondering where the sound had come from. It was completely unfamiliar. I decided to make my observation out loud.

“I don’t know…where that came from.”

“More coffee?” Joel was smiling widely.

“I’m not sure…our relationship is ready for complete sharing of foodstuffs,” I replied. No doubt he would hold this generosity over my head and force me to share any chocolate I had in the future.

“I didn’t propose, woman,” he said.

“Well, that’s good. I’m sure we have different views on the children issue.”

Joel narrowed his eyes. “You don’t want them?” he hazarded.

“I want five,” I replied calmly. I picked at my thumbnail and then suddenly leaned forward to meet his gaze. “Don’t like kids?”

“I’m not sure if I could handle your kids,” he said. He also leaned forward. “But I want six.”

I leaned back, a little unnerved that he was meeting me on my level of oddness. “Well, see, there. No compromise can be reached, unless we agree to half a child.”

“Compromise doesn’t equal mathematical average, you know. I don’t know one married couple that’s settled on one and a half kids.”

“Really?” I asked, blinking as I struggled for something clever to say. “But all the statistics…I thought there were half-children running around everywhere!”

He looked at me, looked up at the ceiling, and then burst into loud laughter, rocking back and forth in his chair and generally causing a ruckus. I simply waited for him to explain himself. “Just…picturing the bottoms halves of toddlers…running around…so…wrong.”

I cracked a weak, half-smile and waited for him to settle down. Or at least I intended to. But his laughter didn’t stop, and tentatively, I joined in, until tears were streaming down both our faces.

“Look,” he began after we had calmed ourselves, and I was trying to resituate myself in my chair so that I wouldn’t fall off. “There’s…my friends are getting together. Friday. It’s not a huge party, I promise. It’s mostly just them…introducing me to the student body, so to speak,” he said, sounding embarrassed and like he was trying to forestall arguments that I didn’t actually intend to make. I had no problem with parties, I was sure. No one had ever invited me.

He hadn’t asked me anything, but it took the long silence that followed from him to realize that. He blushed. It was surprising in someone like him. “Would you want to go? With…I mean, I could drive you over there.”

Later, Booth collapsed back on the couch with wide, amazed eyes. “You want to go to a party?”

I nodded, attempting nonchalance even though my heart was beating so hard that I wondered whether I was having a panic attack. “Friday.”

“Who’s the kid?”

“Um, Joel.”

Booth eyed me, and I wished I could see the cogs turning in his brain. “You can only go if I go with you.”

I didn’t want him to know how much that relieved me. “Well, he did say he’d drive me.”

“I can follow.”

And suddenly I felt tears welling up and I had to swallow past the lump in my throat. I threw myself at my brother and gave him a tight, messy hug. “Thank you.”

“Wow. This capsule thing is going to destroy you.”

I rolled my eyes and dug my teeth into his shoulder. “Thanks for that, too.”

He wiped at his shoulder with a grimace.

“Just remember,” Booth said, turning brotherly and sticking a warning finger in my face, “you don’t need to drink alcohol to be cool.”

“I don’t think you’re cool.” I sniffed haughtily and then poked him in the stomach. “Doofus.”

“I’m so glad you have us to make mistakes for you.” He sounded like he meant it.

“At least now I know mom put an alarm on the windows. Good to know,” I mused whilst stroking my invisible beard.

“She was trying to catch Titus. I was just unlucky.” Booth was still sore over that capture, even though he’d been dead drunk and totally deserved to get caught.

“Maybe you’re just a dummy head.”

He stuck his tongue out at me but dodged backwards on the couch when I tried to grab the squirmy muscle.

“Darlin’ please,” he scoffed.

My phone rang early in the morning that Friday, about three seconds before my alarm went off, and for about a minute afterwards as I groggily stabbed through my mess of belongings to find my little torturer.

“I recognize the number now. Expect future screening,” I warned the anonymous caller.

“Picking up for my phone calls shows great discrimination. Very wise. I have something important to tell you.”

I commenced silence, waiting for his important words.

“They’re having an assembly today at school,” he finally continued. There was another pause, and I wondered how often he expected me to pipe up when he was the one who had something to say. I gave in this one time.

“You woke me up three seconds before my alarm, so what you have to tell me needs to be excellent.”

“I have a reason,” he insisted. I waited. “Right, anyway, as I was saying. This mysterious ‘they’ is going to call for volunteers to come onstage, and you need to volunteer.”

“Are you the government?”

He evidently had trouble with the bounds my mind takes, because he continued to have trouble with abnormally long silences at periods and question marks. If he ever went into news he would be useless with a teleprompter.

“Layla, if I were the government, I would kill you for asking if I was the government.”

“That’s just what a government agent would say.”

“Look, count yourself fortunate. I’ve decided to be your guardian angel,” he said with a chuckle in his voice.

“Who are you, dammit?” Over the past few days, he had pushed me from uninterested, to vaguely curious, to obsessive. I needed corporeal friends, not some phantasm that dwelt in the phone line.

“Not only am I going to force you into public speaking, but I am also going to tell you every single person you should avoid at that party tonight!”

“Joel’s party? You’re going to send me in there with a mental list of people who I’m only going to kind of remember, leading me to avoid everyone whose name sounds similar to one I kind of remember you mentioning and thus forcing me to huddle in the corner, afraid and alone?” It all came out in a rush, and it was probably the longest sentence I’d ever spoken. Mr. Anonymous seemed equally impressed, judging by the silence that followed.

Then: “I wasn’t picturing that scenario at all.”

I sighed. “My brother will be there. He can protect me.”

“Brothers aren’t always—“

“I believe you’ve met my brother?”

Another silence, this one longer.

“You should still volunteer. That still stands.”

I thought about it for all of a baker’s dozen seconds. Long enough for him to draw breath again to speak before I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Alright,” he said slowly. “Can you do me one thing though? Can you call my phone and leave me a message?”

“No. What? Why? That’s silly, Ursula.” He was trying to capture my soul from a voice recording!

“Do you just say no to everything, Layla?”

“If I said yes to that question, it would be a paradox of world-exploding proportions. Way to back us into this spot.”

“Strike it from the record, then, and give me a different answer to the question before it.”

With a sigh, I hung up. After a few seconds I hit ‘talk’ again and got his voicemail. After an irritatingly weird and long message, I got the beep.

“Alright. I still think this is silly, and if you’re planning on using a recording of my voice for some evil purpose…stop it.”

Klein and I were rushing through bowls of cereal—me because I was once again running late, Klein because he decided we were having a cereal-eating contest—when Titus stumbled in, bleary-eyed but with the rest of his appearance in perfect order, per usual.

“Summumabitch,” Klein said in awe, plopping his spoon down and lifting his blond head to stare at our furtive sibling.

“What?” Titus demanded sourly, glancing at me and then away as he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Are you ready yet?”

“For…” I trailed off.

“I’m taking you to school, so make it quick.” Obviously hiding our kinship from the student population was no longer an issue. Klein smiled widely at me.

“We’ve broken down his defenses, Layla,” my oldest brother stage-whispered.

With a huff, Titus shoved the door to the garage open, and then shouted “I’ll be waiting in the car!” over his shoulder.

“Well off you go, cereal-loser.” Klein dumped our dishes in the sink and was gone with a wink. The car in the garage started up at the same time I felt a vibration in my backpack. I stuffed my hand in, squealed when I stuck myself with a pencil, and finally whipped out my phone only to realize that I had a voicemail. Hardly worth getting stabbed over.

Oh, Mr. Anonymous was tricky. I stared at my phone even as I felt impatience boiling over from my brother in the garage.

The voice from my phone was more measured than it had been during our conversation.

“Layla, you might think from my multiple calls that I’m a crazy stalker. Fact is, I am a stalker, but I’m not crazy. And not so much a stalker as a concerned fellow human. So I’m going to say a lot of words right now. If you’re planning on doing evil with this voice recording, you have a lot to work with.

“Step outside yourself for once. Realize that you can depend on other people without them hurting you in the end. Realize that you can get hurt. Realize that if they hurt you, it doesn’t mean they don’t care, and it doesn’t mean it’s the end.

“The Universe may make this world seem tiny and insignificant, but Earth is unique and we are born from it and tied to it. The two of us together, earth and human, are an island. We spin apart from the rest of the Universe, we burn brighter from our perspective and that’s all that should matter.

“You shouldn’t spin apart from the rest of your own race. Brightness comes from energy, and human energy, the kind that lets us do anything, comes from numbers. So you’re different. That’s okay. But you can’t let that take away your ability to care about your fellow human beings and communicate with them. Get out of your head. Stop thinking. Just connect.” There was a long pause like he was going to say something else, and then the message ended.

“Hippie shmuck,” I said fondly.

He was wrong. He had to be. He had also probably read that from a horoscope. My problems weren’t that simple. I didn’t even realize I had a problem until everyone started wanting to help me like I was some lost gaggle of baby geese who need to be led by a determined girl in a plane so that they know to go south in the winter. I hate birds. I am not a bird with one problem.

And anyway, problems cannot be solved by awkward and mysterious stage performances at school assemblies.

I jumped at the car’s horn.

“Thank you, Tighty,” I said, climbing into the car. He cringed at his old nickname but forbore words at that particular moment. We had five minutes before the first bell and it was time to put the pedal to the metal.

I went to school certain that Joel was going to approach me. It was weird being completely assured of social contact.

Once again, it happened at lunch. Singing “Layla, you’ve got me on my knees, Layla,” Joel slipped into the seat across from me and grinned big, his eyebrows lost behind his shaggy brown windblown hair. “And how has your day been, darlin’?”

“Uh, fine…honeybuns.” I took a hesitant bite of my sandwich and waited for him to say something else. He didn’t disappoint.

“Way to elongate the word honeybuns. That’s the only way it should be said.”

“Why are you always so bouncy?” I asked curiously.

“That is not the question.” He slammed his hands on the table and leaned in toward me with a serious look. “The question is, why, on a Friday, are you not bouncy?”

“My intestines are trying to crawl up through my stomach,” I said with complete honesty.

Joel’s brown eyes were amused. “I really hope that’s code for something completely different.”

“Have you heard of an assembly happening during last bell?”

“Yeah, some kind of magic show the hospital is putting on to get students to volunteer for the BeneFit Festival.” He stuck his hands in my backpack to look for food. I closed it around his hand.

“Now you’ve gotten caught in my clever trap,” I said, sawing at his hands with the zipper and at most causing skin irritation. I paused. “Will they be…sawing people at this magic show?”

“I think it will be more like pulling coins out of people’s ears and throwing up multicolored scarves. Kid-friendly and all that. No magical trapeze sex acts.”

“My mind wasn’t even going in that direction.”

“Which is why I chose to lead it there. Give me some food, woman!” He broke past my defenses and took my candy.

“I will not be your friend if you eat my chocolate,” I warned him.

“Wow, fickle.”

“Protective.”

“I can buy you other chocolate.” Joel made a sad face, holding an empty hand out in supplication, even as he grasped my chocolate in his other. “But right now, no dinero.”

“So far all you seem to do is take. You take my food and make me hungry!”

“You’re such an animal, Layla. I like it.” He bared his teeth. “Protect food. Rrawr. Must feed baby Laylas.”

“I don’t have any cubs yet,” I said disparagingly. Now he was grinning widely.

“I like you. I’m glad we met.”

I smiled in return, but was suddenly shy. “Ditto.”

A/N: I do not own the goose-plot of Fly Away Home (1996).

People seem confused about all the siblings, so I figured I’d give you the list I use to keep them straight.

Ophelia 14—black-haired, well-mannered, tries to be open-minded, gray eyes

Birthday: October 11 (same as her father), 1991, freshman

Height: 5’5”

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Melissa 15—curly blond hair, prissy, green eyes

Birthday: September 24, 1990, sophomore

Height: 5’6”

A year and a month older than Ophelia

She’s embarrassed of most of her family, but she does have a heart.

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Layla 16—brunette, crazy, gray-eyed

Birthday: December 16, 1989, junior

Height: 5’9”

9 months older than Melissa

She doesn’t do too well in school, but she is smart. Very smart. She has a very unique view of the world, although there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the differences between she and her family—nothing traumatic in the past.

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Booth 17—blond, angry b/c he’s illegitimate, light brown eyes

Birthday: November 8, 1988, graduating senior

Height: 6’0”

A year and a month older than Layla

Dresses in hoodies and dark colors. The son of a Blockbuster manager that Mr Copperdine had an affair with—the woman couldn’t afford to keep him, or so she said. Of all the siblings, it may seem like he’s closest to Titus, but his protective streak (which centers on Layla and has been known to occasionally extend to Opie, although not Missy) has strengthened the bond between him and Layla so that they seem to be the closest of the siblings (Klein is more like a father, so he’s a little more aloof).

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Titus Hester 17—black-haired, green eyes, smart

Birthday: June 19, 1988, graduating senior

Height: 6’2”

5 months older than Booth

Dresses kind of preppy. Very close to Booth when at home. He has a different last name than the rest because Mr. Copperdine managed to thoroughly piss off a pregnant Mrs. Copperdine by cheating on her in their first year of marriage. In revenge, she gave Titus her last name, but she got over her anger by the time the next children were born.

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Klein 19—blond, unconcerned, rude, loyal and fatherly, dark blue, almost black eyes

Birthday: July 4, 1986, works at a radio station booking guests

Height: 5’11”

A little less than 2 years older than Titus