Babysitting the Player

Chapter 4

I'm met with silence which isn't usually a good sign when there's a four-year-old in the house.

"Layla?" I call. "Layla!"

More silence.

Shit.

I walk up the stairs and see a light blue couch with a matching love seat in the living room. The hardwood floors are a little scratched but nothing too bad and there's a TV next to the fireplace that doesn't appear to be hooked up yet.

Focus, Alex. You have a child to find.

I peek into the kitchen and don't see her.

If I was a little kid all alone in an empty house, what would I do?

Personally, I'd try to find the cookies. Clearly Layla is much more sophisticated than I am.

"Layla!" I yell.

I'm an idiot.

She's four years old, by herself, and there's a weird girl she doesn't know in her house. She's probably hiding under a bed in a dark room.

I start walking down the hallway when one of the closet doors flings open and almost hits me.

"Boo!" a very tiny girl shouts with a laugh as she jumps out of the closet and gives me a heart attack.

"Oh my god!" I jump back and my hand reaches for my chest to make sure my heart is still beating.

"Did I scare you?" she asks as she tucks her light brown hair behind her ear.

Scared is an understatement.

"Yeah." I force a laugh. "Good job."

"Who are you?" she asks.

"I'm Alex," I say. "You must be Layla."

She nods.

"Hi."

"Hi." She waves to me.

"So what are you up to?"

"I don't know." She shrugs.

"Well, what do you want to do?"

"Can you read?"

"I can." I smile.

"Be right back!" She runs down the hall and into a room on the right.

Maggie must've been really desperate for a sitter to trust a girl she's only met once to watch her child, a child she hasn't even met yet. I think about how weird it is that Layla is so open to a stranger. Most little kids are super shy around new people. I wonder what kind of babysitters Layla had when they lived in Maryland. Were her babysitters even babysitters or were they just her mom's boyfriends? Is that how she was hit by the one her mom is considering getting back together with?

Layla returns with a stack of children's books. "Here."

I take the stack from her and she leads me to the couch.

"You sit here." She points to the cushion on the left.

"Okay." I take my assigned seat and she sits down next to me. "Which one do you want me to read first?"

She looks through the stack of books and pulls out the third one in the pile, a white cover with a large picture of a pink and purple butterfly on it. "This one."

"Okay." I put the rest of the books on the arm of the couch and start reading the one she picked out.

The book only takes five minutes to get through and even though the books are short and rarely have any depth to them, I'm still amazed that children's authors can pack an entire story into such a small amount of space and time.