xp_logs | Layla & Kyle | Monday afternoon

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After school gets out for the day Layla meets Kyle, the ambassador from the boarding school her social worker wants to send her to. They talk about life at the school, how Kyle is a mutant version of a Mai and he gets dubbed as a failed Yoda.

The sounds of a skateboard over the sidewalks joined the general cacophony from the street. Hell's Kitchen had gentrified out of that name over the past few decades, but the streets were no less busy than they had been when the neighborhood had been called that in earnest. The skateboard stopped suddenly, the sound of the board's tail meeting the ground before it vanished altogether. Only moments later the sound of running found its way to the apartment's front door and in burst an out of breath teenager. Long blonde hair fell in front of her face, partially obscuring the girl's face in a veil.

"Ohmigod, I'm sorry I'm late!" Layla shut the door and leaned back against it, chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Her Thrasher tee shirt had its collar ripped off and was nearly as long as the skirt that peeked out from under it. Her hands were wrapped around the truck of her skateboard which hung in front of her legs until one let go to brush her hair out of the way.

A slightly perplexed expression stole across her face, as if she wasn't entirely sure she had come into the right place. Sure, the guy who didn't normally belong in this apartment was decked out in a pair of khakis and a tie and everything, but he was like twenty. "Wait. Are you the guy I'm supposed to meet?"

"God, I hope so, because otherwise I've been drinking a lot of pretty decent lemonade for no good reason." Kyle stood up, smiled, and offered a hand. A slightly stiff-fingered hand with weird dark fingernails that despite having been trimmed back looked just ... strange. "Kyle Gibney. Professor Xavier asked me to talk to you, I think he figures if the first person you meet from the school actually knows what Thrasher Magazine is, you won't think we're all old and stuffy. Layla, right?"

"Unless it's changed from the last time I checked. But it's been at least like a week so you never know. I could be Lulu today," she shot back a little dryly with the hints of a smile curling at the edges of her lips. Layla came away from the door to take his hand, which she shook and then held up to stare at his nails. "I know this is probably really rude, but what is up with your nails? Did you and a hammer just have, like, a lot of disagreements or something?"

Kyle shook his head, and his fingers unstiffened at the first knuckle and more of the fingernails came out of the nailbeds. "Retractable claws. I have 'em on my feet too, but just for you, I wore shoes." He took his free hand and pulled up the leg of his khakis to show a pair of motorcycle boots, well-polished and big. He had -big- feet. "And not that rude. I'm here to you know, answer questions, if you wanna ask 'em about my claws, that's not a ... bad.. starting place." He glanced at the social worker, to make sure there wasn't going to be any weird scolding, but she seemed to take it in stride.

"Seriously?" She was poking at the end of one claw now that there was more of it out, still holding onto his hand. "Okay, see, that is cool. Do you have like, super cat balance, too?" Layla looked up at Kyle and finally registered how tall he was. She wasn't used to coming up to people's shoulders much because she was tall for a girl and everyone liked to remind her of that. But this Kyle guy... "Holy shit, you're huge!" She shook her head and refocused. "So cat balance and landing on your feet and shit? You're totally going to shatter my dreams here if you tell me no. Which is possibly because I've been watching Chloe King all summer....and if you repeat that to anyone I will deny like a motherfucker. Just so we're clear."

Sandy cleared her throat and Layla waved a hand in the social worker's direction. "Oh God, Layla said a bad word. I'll do an act of contrition for you or something," she said to the woman, then looked at Kyle. "She's Catholic, I'm not. But it makes her feel better if I go bring snack packs to the homeless and shit." Another throat clearing and Layla looked back over to her. "What? You keep tally, I'll hand out snack packs. Deal? Deal." And back to Kyle. "So, kitty cat superhero, yes no?"

He had to grin, he just couldn't not grin. The effort Kyle was making to not say 'dude' every third word or drop a few f-bombs himself was considerable, and here was this kid who didn't breathe between words and swore all the time. "What's a Chloe King? And yeah, landing on my feet, kung-fu flippy stuff, pointy ears, they're under the ponytail, sometimes people get weird about them, fangs and I can't eat chocolate." He shrugged. "Hey, nothing wrong with food service. There's a... it's hard to explain, Red X, it's like disaster response volunteerism for mutants. Volunteer opportunities all up in there. Oh, and no before you ask, catnip doesn't get me high. It makes my friend Sharon sick though."

"Duh, you're not an actual cat. Why would cat drugs get a not-a-cat high? Wait, is your friend Sharon like part cat or something?" Layla let go of his hand to reach up and try to push his hair out of the way to look at the pointy ears. And they were actually pointy! Layla clearly had not been around many mutants with physical manifestations. "So the no chocolate thing is lame, but can you teach me to do flippy stuff? Theoretically, anyway, since I do not have awesome king-fu kitty powers and stuff?" Clearly she was just fine dropping half the threads of conversation in pursuit of the more interesting ones. She hadn't even touched the real reason the guy was here. It was just sort of novel that this ginormous guy was in her house and he was like the mutant version of a Mai.

"Sharon can turn into a cat. A purple one." Kyle said, making a face as she poked at his hair. "And teaching you to do flippy stuff would probably require, you know that we actually talk about the school and you going there and not just how I have the coolest mutant power ever." He was unsuccessful at resisting the urge to fix his hair after she'd moved it. It tickled.

"Right." Layla took several steps back and her excitement over how cool his mutation was seemed to quickly diminish until it was gone. He was here to talk to her about some new placement Sandy had found for her. Because she had to leave here because she kept freaking people out by bringing insects and mice in traps and stuff back to life. The teenager seemed to become all too self-aware in the time it took her to back away from Kyle. "Do we have to have that conversation in here? With everyone eavesdropping and shit?" She gave Sandy the social worker a pointed look and the woman simply raised her hands as if in surrender.

Oh, it was -that- kind of thing. "As long as they're cool with it, I'm cool with it. Walk, or walk and find food?" Kyle took a cell phone from his pocket as though he was showing that yes, he had one. "They already have my digits. I was all responsible and called ahead." He turned to the social worker and put one hand up. "And I totally promise that despite that I have biker boots, I actually drove in a really boring station wagon, and it will stay parked right where I put it, so even if Layla tries to convince me to drive her to Canada, that won't happen. Also I know a Mountie and he'd probably kick my ass. Butt. I mean butt." Crap. He'd done so well too.

Layla already knew Sandy would be fine with it. The woman had her cell number and Layla was pretty good about keeping it on her. She was pretty sure there was some sort of GPS tracker in it or something anyway. So while Kyle was swearing to Sandy that he was responsible Layla had tuned that part of the conversation out, opened the door and left. She figured he would catch up eventually so she hung out on the sidewalk out front on her skateboard, mostly doing ollies and variations on ollies.

Kyle appeared not much longer after - he'd heard her leave, and even if he hadn't, he'd heard the wheels of her skateboard. "Lemee guess, the system sucks, you don't want to get sent to some stupid boarding school, and everyone's a jerk and hell no you don't wanna talk about it?" As he talked, he was unknotting the tie, and stuffed it into his pocket. "Okay, I hate this stupid tie, we'll pretend I never had it on, if they ask, play dumb." He had a button-down, it wasn't even one of the cheap ones from Target, and he was wearing shoes. Screw the tie.

"I don't care about the boarding school," she told him as another ollie landed. Layla stopped the board from moving with one foot on the ground and looked at Kyle. There had been no indignant teenage anger in her voice. There was no petulance. In fact, there wasn't a whole lot of anything except maybe exhaustion. "Sandy wants it to be my choice because it involves an out of county placement which is a shit ton of paperwork but she thinks it's this amazing, wonderful place where like the birds sing and it's always sunny or something. Look, I get it, I do not have some awesome kitty cat superhero mutation. I have this weird, creepy, totally disturbing mutation. Anyone who would want to take me is liable to be a complete nutjob. Which means I'll end up in a bunch of shitty places until I hit a group home and I hear those places kind of suck because it's where you put the dead end kids no one wants. So she wants me to like fall in love with you and your school and whatever. And you're cool or whatever so far so let's just like hang out for a while and then go pretend you sold me and I'm super excited and jazzed and filled with spirit fingers and shit, okay?" Layla sounded anything but jazzed. She always settled into her new placements, figured them out and got along until she was gotten rid of or she got rid of herself. But she hated the moving and she had liked being back in Hell's Kitchen. It sucked to think of her parents all the time but it was nice to be back anyway.

"So, is that a yeah, or what? Because I don't know what a spirit finger is. I think they covered that while I was turning into Teen Wolf." Kyle said, and then sat down on the front steps to the house. "Okay, so look, creepy or not, we're used to disturbing and weird. I have a friend who used to have mouths on his hands and had to eat people's bone marrow to live, which, bee-tee-dubs, gross. It's not a shitty place, and we're not all nutjobs." Just some of them. "It's a crapton better than a group home, or juvie, or eighty-nine more foster homes."

"I can't land in juvie without breaking the law, which I've never done," she pointed out. Layla considered sitting on her board but they were closer to eye level now that he was sitting down so she figured standing was the way to go. "I'm not trying to play the 'who has a weird mutation' game. I'm not really interested in it. If I ever want my very own rodent zombie army then I will totally win the prize at the bottom of the cereal box. And there's probably someone totally envious of that out in the world. I don't really care, I just re-kill shit and it's fine. It freaks other people out though so," Layla shrugged. "I'll tell Sandy you got me to drink the Kool-Aid or whatever, it's fine. I'm not really looking forward to being stuck in the ass end of nowhere but I don't really have that much of a choice really."

"We have a gourmet donut shop in Westchester by the college and there's bus trips to the city on the weekends. Also we have a moose." Kyle said, sort of robotically as though he was reading from a tour guide's checklist. "Don't make the moose a zombie. We really do have a Mountie too." He rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands. "No shit, zombies?" He couldn't figure out if she was fucking with him or not.

She was going to say something about how doughnuts weren't doughnuts if they were gourmet, but then Kyle questioned her truth telling. "Yeah, zombies. Unless you have a better word 'stuff that was dead being not dead anymore.' I bring stuff back to life. You would think it would be cool, right? How many people wouldn't kill to be able to bring stuff back to life? But then you get like half decayed roadkill standing up and yowling because all it's blood is being pumped right through the holes in its corpse where the birds have fed on it and people don't think it's cool anymore. I avoid pet cemeteries at all costs now." Layla shrugged. "I'm sure you've got friends or whatever that do freakier shit. Like that guy with the mouths on his hands. But, like, people aren't really used to weird here. Matt and Kristie are nice people but they couldn't hang anymore. It was the mouse in the trap that kept coming back to life and suffocating to death because it's throat was still smooshed in the trap that did it. They might've been okay if it was once but it happened like three times in a row so..." she shrugged again. "It's kind of a level of fucked up people don't really want to like live with and eat dinner with and shit."

Kyle thought, and it took a little while. He wasn't gonna lie, not if she was actually going to talk and not just skate, but he wasn't going to tell her he'd met zombies once and they'd freaked him the fuck out.

"Well, you're in the top ten. Subject change, because you're right, your power's gross, so, freaky power, the ... foster parents can't handle it, and the social worker wants to send you to us because we're where mutant kids go and you're like sure, okay, whatevs, I've got the basic gist, right? Okay, so lets say you had drunk the Kool-Aid, which yo, is kind of a morbid saying for a kid who raises the dead, what would you wanna know?"

"I dunno." Another shrug. "It's a school, right? So I don't have foster parents so who's like in charge of me or whatever? What kind of rules are there? I lived with this one lady who didn't allow speaking before nine a.m. because it disrupted her chi or whatever. And another foster family had like strict rules about meal times and if you weren't there you didn't eat even if you had totally valid school reasons or social worker stuff or whatever. They were kinda...odd. And is anyone going to make me go to church? Because church is boring as shit and I really can't stand it and if another minister or priest or whoever starts telling me to wear skirts below my knee I might have to hit him with my board which I'm sure will get me like a one-way ticket to hell or purgatory or the laundromat on the seedy side of town or whatever they believe in."

"Uh. No church, unless you want to, and there's mealtimes but we're pretty civil about people not having to eat with everyone else, cause some of us eat all the freaking time." Kyle shut his eyes, trying to remember what she'd asked but opened them back up once he started talking again. "I think the Professor ends up being your guardian, but there's RA's, and some college students and most of the staff live there too. It's like, a school but also like a dorm and like apartments, and yeah, there's rules but nothing -stupid-" He thought again. He was so not telling her about the stealth jet or the superhero thing. Someone not him could do that, he so wasn't qualified. "Oh, and hitting people with skateboards is uncool."

In an utterly unapologetic tone Layla said, "Sometimes they deserve worse than a skateboard." No church, that was a plus. She could probably eat whenever she wanted so that was good as long as whoever cooked stuff didn't suck at it. That would blow. "So, wait, this is like a boarding school free-for-all living sitch? I have to live with my teachers? Are you for real? Jesus, that's fucking awkward. And kind of sucks. and there is no excuse in the world for ditching class when your teacher lives with you." A terribly sullen look came over her face as she wailed about the teachers, but was quickly replaced when she changed subjects. "So, what?, is like everyone there a mutant or something? Or is the Professor guy just like a giant hippie who loved everyone and thinks we should all love each other whether we're blue or purple or make zombies or have kitty cat super powers or are boring and gay or republican or whatever?"

"Well, he's kind of an everyone deserves to not have their life suck kind of guy, but he wears suits all the time and has no hair so I don't think he'd be a hippie, but yeah, we're all mutants." Kyle said, trying and failing not to snicker at the idea of the Professor in dreadlocks and rainbow tie-dye. "And yeah, staff lives on a different floor, but it's damn near impossible to ditch class. You'd have, what a year or two? Three on the outside if the system really dicked you and you lost school time?" He was definitely speaking from experience there, the quick frown was difficult to miss.

Layla wrinkled her nose and frowned a bit, obviously not looking forward to how much school she had left. "Two. I just started my junior year. I got moved around to like a dozen different foster homes but I never got like left back or something. I stayed in the same school system for most of the time so maybe that's why, I dunno." She looked up at the windows of the apartment. Sandy was watching them. Big surprise there. "What's it really like? This school place you guys want me to go to? You've given me the advertising pitch, but what's the truth?"

Kyle looked over his shoulder at the social worker, and gave a thumbs up. At least he could try to reassure her, because he was going to lie like hell if she asked him what he and Layla had talked about. "Okay, small classes, because there's maybe six of you total, and it is a pretty good place to be, but it's like anywhere else, there's people who hate each other and bullshit soap opera drama and it gets real weird sometimes, because, hey, big mansion full of mutants and their weird powers. Almost everyone's awesome or at least like, decent, but the people who aren't can be real assholes sometimes. And sometimes people set stuff on fire, because well, fire powers. It's a thing they do."

"Is anyone like legit dangerous? Other than the people setting shit on fire anyway?" She figured if mutant powers got really weird then maybe they got really dangerous too. That would so not be cool. Well, okay, maybe it could be but crazy people who were dangerous were totally not on. And it seemed like the place maybe wouldn't suck but if she accidentally got like her face sucked off or something then the level of suckage would like spike up and stuff.

It took a while to actually come up with a real answer for that that wasn't "fuck yes!" "I can bite through bone and these?" Kyle showed his claws again. "Uh, lets just say, we have a deer problem and I am usually a large fraction of the solution. Venison's delicious. Nobody there's like, harmless, but... " He shrugged again. "I don't wanna lie, because that's a jerkass thing to do and also hell, I think we both know it'd bite me in the face if I did. Shit happens. But nobody who lives there is actively gonna be like, out to get you." At least not ninety-nine percent of the time.

That wasn't exactly reassuring. Then again, she'd asked if they were dangerous, not if they were a threat. She probably should've found a better way of phrasing that. "Fair enough. So, like, no one with like uncontrollable rage who'll try to shred me like paper for breathing loud or somethin'? Sometimes you end up in foster homes or group homes and people have these tempers...and everyone's capable of violence, you know? But it's only the ones who have a serious temper you gotta worry 'bout. 'Cause they're the ones who make the placement hell or dangerous or whatever. And if there's people I need to watch for so I can bolt to avoid being on the wrong end of their temper then I just wanna know now, you know?"

Yeah, Kyle was pretty sure this kid could probably destroy his record for words spoken without pausing to breathe. Which was fine, he was sick of that trophy anyway. "Nah, seriously most of us are pretty chill and honest, most of us with temper issues just hit the gym and beat up heavy bags. The Professor's big on people managing their own crap." Kyle explained. "I won't say it never happens because that'd be bull but there isn't anyone there I'd feel like I hadda warn you about."

Layla considered that. It seemed like a better situation than a lot of group living whatevers. She couldn't help drawing the parallels between this boarding school and a group home, but it at least seemed less dysfunctional. That was a point in its favor. And they were, supposedly, willing to deal with her whole dead-things-walk-again thing she had going on. Which, of course, led to the really important questions. "Am I gonna have to share a room with someone? Do I get any choice? Are the possible people I'm sharing a room with lame? And how's the food? On a scale of you'd-rather-eat-your-own-puke to ohmigod-I-want-this-every-day-for-the-rest-of-my-life how does it fall? Is there anywhere to skate? What's the town it's in like? Does everyone have lame taste in music? Are the guys pervs I'm gonna need to hit with books and shit so they behave?"

Kyle narrowed his eyes at Layla, and gave her a lopsided grin. "Okay, so if I miss any of those questions, damn, that's a lot of questions. This is totally karmic justice, I know it." He'd done this to so many people, he was pretty sure it was karma. "Food's pretty good, um, I'm not really like qualified to say for other people, but people know how to cook. You'll have a roommate maybe, for you know, social bonding or something, but I dunno who it'll be. None of the rest of the girls are annoying or anything though. Oh, I think Alex's old skate ramp's still there, and the town's decent, but the cops suck."

"Cops always suck if you're on a board," she bemoaned. "Most of the older guys around here are nice, though, 'cause they knew my dad. The young guys are all super arrogant and trying to prove how big their dicks are or some shit so, you know, they pretty much blow. They might even blow each other. And they'd be a lot less tense if they could just own up to their fairy ways. Holding shit like that in can't be good for your chi or chakra or whatever." Layla's foot started to roll her board back and forth, trying to remember which questions Kyle had missed. Mostly she came up with the one about the guys being pervs, but he was probably biased and any answer he gave couldn't be trusted on those grounds so she skipped it.

"You mentioned food before. You like sandwiches? There's this deli like three blocks away. It's awesome and they put like a pound. Of. Meat. on everything! The owner's mad cool and I'm teaching his kid how to skate so he hooks me up for free." Layla broke out into a wide grin and waggled her eyebrows. "You down? 'Cause your ass has to be tired of my stoop and I am so not into the hawkeye stare thing Sandy's been doing."

"I am always into sandwiches." Kyle unfolded from the stoop. He hadn't eaten in at least half an hour, he could kill a sandwich. "I wish it was just that our cops were dicks. They're also kinda bigots, some of 'em, and I'm not the only person there who looks like a mutant. Couple of people with funny hair colors, couple of people with funny skin colors, couple of people who just plain look freaky." He explained. "Sheesh, is she still looking? You'd think my whole 'Hey, I'm an education major and this is training or something' would've given me at least a little room to be trusted."

Layla pushed off from the sidewalk and rolled along beside Kyle on her board. "It's not about trust, I don't think. She's been stuck with me for like seven years. Almost eight. I think she's scared if she looks away I'll end up coked up, knocked up and on the street. You know, some kids end up that way so," she shrugged. "By people who 'look freaky,'" she made the finger quotes and everything, "do you mean like legit freaky or like you? 'Cause your pointy ears and nail-claw-thingies don't count enough to be 'freaky.' It'll be kinda cool to not be the default freaky one. 'Cause, you know, sometimes cops don't like me just because I'm," Layla gestured down to herself and up to her face with a hand, "me, freaky by like normal people standards or whatever even before the whole zombie rodent thing."

"Naw, not like me. I can pass if I wear a hat and shoes and don't, you know, talk." Kyle's said. "I mean like wings, or like fingers like eight inches long and bright red, or like blue and furry. Hell, we got two of those." He shrugged, because freaky was relative to him. Which was probably a valid point to make. "It's relative. I mean, to my mom, I'm freaky. To my girlfriend's dad, we're all freaky, to my friend Yvette, she's the red pointy one, freaky doesn't start until you stop looking human."

"Huh." Layla remained quiet while she thought about that. She'd like to think that she'd be totally cool with blue furry people or pointy red people or whatever, but she'd never actually met any. Generally she drifted toward the people who were more off the beaten path. The tree huggers or the DIY sort or the vegans surrounded by carnivores or the closet cases. Everyone wanted to think they were open and accepting. Most of them weren't. Layla hoped she didn't freak out over someone's wings or something. Maybe the forewarning would help.

"So Yvette's got eight inch long fingers?" she asked. "Does she play the piano? Or the guitar? She'd be an awesome piano player with fingers that long. But whaddya mean she's pointy? Like really angular? Or her fingers end in tips? Or she has teeth that look filed down to points? Or she's covered in porcupine quills?"

Yvette was actually, now that Kyle thought about it, hard to describe without seeing her. "Imagine like, not really like a porcupine, she doesn't have quills. More like, her skin is hard and really sharp, she can cut through wood, so like, Edward Scissorhands, only really red and tiny." And now he'd either totally scared the kid off, or not. It hadn't started out as a test, not really, but it did make for a good impromptu sort of check to see what her level of freak-out-itude was.

"Sharp? Like," she balanced on her board and reached out to run her fingertips down Kyle's arm, "that would slice you up? Like stitches and spewing blood and 'oh God, oh God my arm?!'? "Cause, dude, that fucking blows." Layla tried to picture it. A tiny, red Edward Scissorhands. Only no scissors. Pointy fingers. It didn't really come into her head all that cohesively. Layla was left with the mental image of sort of a three-foot-tall, red fairy type person. Only sharp. And bloody looking. "She sounds...I dunno. Like what parents woulda told their kids would come to get them if they didn't behave."

"She's like, really sharp. We've got a couple people who are like 'No touchy". Genetics. You know, grab bag of random cool and suck." Kyle explained. "Yvette's also pretty good about warning people and she has gloves and this titanium hair thing and you know, it's a place where mutants live when their powers are fucked up. We've got people who seriously dig finding ways to make people's lives suck less." He pulled a face, and sort of laughed. "Except my whole can't eat chocolate thing. I get carob. It's not the same."

Layla thought about this Yvette chick and the genetic no touchy thing with a contemplative frown as she rolled on down the sidewalk. Eventually she shrugged. "It's cool, I'm not really like the hugs and cuddles sort. I have a personal bubble, mkay? Like, it's sort of squishy so you can like poke it and shit but prolonged contact makes it 'splode and it is so not cool to go bursting people's bubbles, y'know? So, like, I'm cool with their genetic Bubble Boy schtick or whatever. You know someone told me that was a movie? Aren't there actually people who are, like, allergic to the world and really need to live in plastic bubbles or safe rooms or clean rooms or whatever they're called for real though?"

Kyle thought about that. "I'm not sure. I know a couple people I could ask though. We've got doctors on staff, they'd know." Actually, now that he thought about it, Doc Jean had been on tv way back in the day. "I dunno how much you pay attention to like news relating to mutants, but one of 'em, Doctor Grey, she's done a couple of speeches. Or I guess you could probably ask her if you end up needing a checkup or like, whatever. She's friendly."

"How can you not know these things?" Layla bemoaned with a rather generous helping of intended melodrama, hands thrown into the air and everything. "Dude! You're supposed to be my Yoda here! Yoda knows things. Like he has an encyclopedia in his head and shit! You ask and he is all with the muppety wisdom of life and shit. You're failing me. I need a new Yoda now."

"Hey hey hey, Yoda is short, green and has a lightsaber. I am not short, not green and yeah, no lightsaber." Kyle patted himself down as though he was checking for a sword made of plasma and light fueled by fictional magic. "Here, more selling points, you get a phone when you go to the school, so you can call in emergencies or stuff." Emergencies. Like "Magneto has a giant space laser.". He was so not telling her about the space laser. "And it has internet access. You'll have like, wikipedia in your pocket all the time. You can name the phone Yoda."

"The Yoda phone?" Yodafone? Layla had one of those cheap prepaid deals so Sandy, her social worker, could get hold of her when Layla was out 'traipsing about the city,' as she said. A spiffy phone with internet access was sort of shiny. She wasn't sure what she would actually do with a phone smarter than her but, hey, it could be Yoda-like. She considered this, stroking her chin with her most sage-like expression on her face and avoiding a fire hydrant she didn't appear to be looking at. "It'd need to be green. And have a Yoda ringtone. You realize you're being replaced by tech, right? Just like muppet Yoda. That makes you the muppet." She grinned and the expression at once made something crystal clear: Kyle was going to be stuck with that classification for a good long while.

"I'll make sure that when I check in with Professor Xavier and tell him you're cool with going to the school that you wanted a green case for the phone." Kyle said, attempting to sound calm about the whole thing and ruining it by snickering. "I'm not cool with being voiced by the same dude who is the voice for Miss Piggy. Can I be Kermit instead?"

"I dunno. You're not very," she paused, not sure what the word was for amphibian as an adjective, "amphibian-ian? Amphibiac? Whatever, frog-like. Your Mister Catman Superhero thing is totally not frog-like." A foot came down off her skateboard and Layla stopped moving entirely. Kyle-as-Kermit just didn't jive for her. She supposed Kyle-as-Yoda didn't either but she sorta liked the idea of Kyle-as-muppet. "Let's see your best Kermit dance."

"You are totally wrecking my authority figure vibe here." Kyle said, with a frown that ... really wasn't one. "How am I supposed to like, be all 'and now write forty-million page essays on why Lord Byron was totally the Kanye of his time' if you're all 'do the Kermit dance'?" Yeah, it was going to be weird teaching anyone even close to his age. Maybe he could just go teach middle school. "Tell you what, we get lunch, you walk back and tell your social worker you are down with the whole school thing, and once you're moved in, I'll Kermit -and- Snoopy Dance."

"Oh, so we're resorting to bribery now? I see how it is." Layla pushed off and started moving again. She shrugged and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, meaty-sammich-o-meatiness, then I will tell Sandy that I am totally down with the pod people vibe 'cause, dude, Kitty Superhero Dude says it's totally legit and I won't need to break anyone else's nose with my board. She'll be fucking thrilled because she hates getting the calls from the cops who're all 'we should really take her in for this...but the kid she hit was a punk so just come talk to her and make her hand out snack packs to the homeless drunks, 'kay?' Then I will move my whole, like, back pack and duffel bag worth of shit in and you will dance. And it will end up on youtube and maybe you can end up being an internet sensation. Deal?" She even held out her hand for him to shake.

"Deal." Kyle shook her hand briskly, automatically pulling his claws in as he did. "Hell if the sandwich is that meaty, I'll throw in a truffle shuffle just for that." He had no shame after all.

"Oh, it's that meaty. We'll get your mouth filled with that sweet, sweet meat in no time." She slapped him on the shoulder lightly, mischievous grin making it clear that she knew exactly what innuendo she was throwing out there. "But until I get those dances you're still a muppet."

"Yeah, remind me not to introduce you to anyone named Jay Guthrie, um, ever."