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It’s coming up on noon when Liam finally slinks down the stairs, the gnawing of hunger in his stomach finally outweighing the nervous butterflies that’d taken flight there every time he’d thought of showing his face outside his room. He pauses at the top of the stairwell and listens, crouched like an idiot at the edge of the banister, but he can’t hear anything. He’s pretty sure he’s safe.
He’s not safe.
His dad glances up from his tablet from his position at the kitchen table, and raises his eyebrows.
“Um. Morning,” Liam mutters, and then immediately looks away to scuttle for the fridge. He grimaces when he catches his reflection in the chrome. It’d—maybe been a while since his last shower.
He ignores it, just like he ignores his dad casually echoing, “Morning.”
There’s a neat stack of tupperware containers on one of the shelves from dinner last night; Liam had feigned feeling sick and hadn’t come down, so there’d been extra. He pulls them out now, shoving aside the guilt twisting his guts into knots, and pads over to a clear section of counter to pull down a plate, and start dishing out the food.
Whether his dad is actually watching him or not, the skin between Liam’s shoulder blades still burns. He finds his shoulders hunching up by his ears. He nearly puts his teeth through his bottom lip, he’s biting it so hard.
But his dad doesn’t say anything.
Not when the microwave dings. Not when Liam pulls out his plate. Not when he turns towards the stairs—the tupperware containers dutifully put back in the fridge or rinsed out and slotted into the dishwasher, depending—to go take his food upstairs, and back into his room.
Liam doesn’t know why he stops at the bottom of the stairs, plate in hand. He doesn’t know why he spends a few seconds with his hands on the railing, and he especially doesn’t know why he turns, and heads back to the kitchen table, and pulls out a seat so that he can drop down into it instead.
His dad is smiling slightly when Liam shoots him a glance. Liam colors, and looks back down at his plate. He starts to shovel food into his mouth.
And for a while, that’s the only sound that fills the kitchen: his fork scraping his plate. At one point he gets up to get something to drink, and then it’s his quiet question that fills the air as he asks his dad if he wants something. He pulls out a second can of seltzer when his dad replies in the affirmative. He sets it carefully down by the edge of his dad’s tablet when he comes back to the tablet.
He says, a little hesitantly: “I didn’t know you were going to be home today. I thought you had a shift.”
His dad just shrugs easily, and reaches forward to crack open the can Liam had brought over to him. “I was on-call, but they called to let me know they didn’t need me, so.” He smiles at Liam. “No complaints at getting an unexpected day off, huh?”
“Uh, yeah,” Liam replies, somehow stumbling even over just those two words. He colors again, and jerks his attention back to his plate.
His dad doesn’t mention it, just goes back to his tablet. After a while he starts humming something under his breath, low and distracted. It takes Liam a few seconds to recognize it as a jingle from one of the advertisements that always plays during one of his mom’s favorite shows, and he can’t help his lips twitching. His dad must catch the look on his face because he stops, and then his expression goes desert dry as he apparently realizes what he’d been doing.
He shares that same dry look with Liam. Liam can’t help returning it, his grin splitting his face wide.
But then he catches sight of the time over his dad’s shoulder. He experiences a split-second, reflexive bolt of panic—holy crap is he late for Ms. Kazinski’s third period class—before he remembers. The grin falls right off his face like it’d been yanked off.
He stands, abruptly enough that his chair nearly falls over. It does squeal a protest as the legs skid across the kitchen tile; his dad winces.
“I should, um,” Liam says, and doesn’t bother to finish. He looks down at his plate and then decides he’ll take it upstairs with him, because he cannot even imagine heading over to the sink, and rinsing it off, in the sudden tortuously awkward quiet. He snatches it and his half-empty can of seltzer off the table, and makes an about-face for the stairs.
“Wait, Liam, hold up,” his dad calls, standing up suddenly from the table, too.
Liam freezes, dread coiling in his stomach. He turns around only slowly. His expression must be one big wince, because his dad spots it and winces in turn.
“No, you’re not—” His dad immediately starts to protest, and then he cuts himself off, and sighs. He sucks in a deep breath, and blows it out in a rough stream. “Let’s,” he suggests, giving Liam a self-deprecating, lopsided smile, “try this again?”
Liam frowns at him, confused but—a little intrigued. He waits.
His dad grimaces again, but it’s still just as clearly self-directed, and then he tells Liam, “I’ve been pretty cooped up in the OR for the past couple of days, you know?” He pauses, and gives the middle distance a blank little look as he corrects, “The past couple of weeks, really.”
He smiles at Liam then, clearly trying to share the joke. Liam can’t quite bring himself to smile back. His dad’s face falls, but just a little, and then he’s dragging that same smile right back onto it.
“I was hoping,” he continues, more than a little doggedly, now, “that you’d maybe be willing to take some pity on me, help me get some exercise?”
Liam stares at him—last he checked his dad isn’t exactly a golden retriever—but then he doesn’t have to wonder anymore, because his dad nods his head towards—
Towards the coat closet by the front door, where Liam keeps his lacrosse bag. Or, more accurately: where he’d kept it, before—everything.
He’s not sure where it is now. He’d thrown it down so hard when he’d gotten back from Devenford for the last time that he’d actually taken a chunk out of the floor: he can still see the too-light section of wood paneling marking the dent if he squints. He’d rushed up to his room after and slammed the door hard enough that he’d actually warped the hinges; he’s had to lift up the entire thing to get it to close, since, this utterly, disgustingly perfect reminder of how completely he’d fucked up.
Anyway, the point is—he doesn’t know where his lacrosse bag technically is. Regardless, he knows that’s exactly what his dad means. He grimaces.
“I-I don’t,” he stammers, because even the idea of picking up a lacrosse stick makes his stomach roll with a noxious mix of shame and guilt and despair; makes him so, so painfully aware of the looming threat of anger poised waiting just behind all those things.
“C’mon,” his dad coaxes gently. “Just you and me,” he assures Liam. “We’ll go to the park at Alameda and Madison. There’s never anyone there at this time of day.”
The look on his dad’s face is so earnest; so hopeful. It’s been weeks since Liam has said more than a few bare words to his parents outside of his mandatory therapy appointments. His shoulders slump.
He says, “Okay.”
His dad’s face splits in a wide grin. He rounds the table and heads for Liam, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and shaking him in a one-armed, easy hug. He says, “Thanks, kid.” Except then he must catch a whiff of Liam because he makes a face, and tactfully suggests, “Maybe, uh. Maybe we can leave after a shower, huh?”
Liam grimaces, and then flicks his eyes up to meet his dad’s, and can’t help the helpless laugh that skids out of his throat. His dad grins, and laughs back, and gives him a gentle shove towards the stairs.
His dad had been right: the park at Alameda and Madison is empty. And Liam had been right, sort of: his lacrosse bag had been in the coat closet, which means either his mom or his dad had put it there after Liam’s—outburst. He sits with it in his lap as his dad pulls into a spot in the park’s lot, his fingers toying with a loose thread on the edge. It still smells like the locker room at Devenford. His jersey is still inside, too; no one had wanted to try and retrieve it from him.
Liam sighs, and follows his dad out of the car.
He trails him over to the field. It’s late in the fall and so most of the grass is yellowed, and brittle; it crunches under their feet. The threads of the nets hung in either of the goals are frayed and snapped in some places, the color weatherbeaten and faded. Liam drops his bag next to one of the metal benches lining the edge, and eyes his dad.
For his part, his dad just takes in a deep breath of the crisp air, and then turns to grin back at him, his lips pulling wide. He bounces a little on his toes. “Alright,” he declares, rubbing his hands together. He makes little gimme motions towards Liam. “Let’s see if we can’t knock some of the rust off this old man’s skills, huh?”
Liam rolls his eyes, his lips twitching, but he dutifully bends over and unzips his bag to pull out two sticks. He tosses one to his dad, and then—while his dad starts performing a series of deliberately overdone stretches; Liam knows when he’s being messed with—he starts scooping the loose balls in his bag out, one at a time, and dropping them a little ways in front of his bag.
He straightens when he’s done. “Ready?” He asks his dad.
“Born ready!” His dad chirps, and takes a few skipping steps backwards so he’s a good few yards away from Liam. He raises the stick in his hand and waves it around pointedly. “Hit me.”
“I hope you don’t mean that literally,” Liam retorts, the snark helpless; there’s something starting to bubble in his chest, a little, some light amused thing connected directly to his dad’s goofy behavior.
He knows it’s deliberate. He knows that’s exactly what his dad’s trying to do. It doesn’t matter.
It’s working.
He tosses the first ball to his dad.
His dad catches the first one—Liam had thrown it extra-lightly, and aimed almost directly at the net topping his stick—and the second, but the third flies past him. He swears colorfully. “Alright, come on,” he goads Liam. “That one doesn’t mean anything.”
Liam snorts. He twitches his stick in a deliberate flick so that the fourth ball arcs sharply through the air, and right over his dad’s head.
“Oh,” he dad shoots back. “Oh, we’re getting clever, I see.”
He gets his revenge: he scoops up one of the balls he’d caught and then released, and whips it at Liam. Liam squawks, flailing and lunging a bit to catch it.
His dad looks inordinately pleased with himself when Liam manages to straighten back up, wild throw successfully caught. Liam gives him a dry look.
He scoops up another one of his balls, and flicks it towards his dad.
They trade throws back and forth like for a while, the ease of it letting his dad warm up, and letting Liam—as much as he hates to admit that he needs it—shake off both the mental and physical cobwebs that’d developed as he’d refused, over the last six weeks, to even think about playing lacrosse.
It takes longer than he’d have expected. It takes longer than he’d have hoped. A thread of fear starts snaking its way through his veins, acidic and insidious. He forces himself to ignore it, and concentrate on his movements; on catching his dad’s constantly-improving throws; on the pleasant burn of muscles that he hadn’t worked in a while.
“Well alright,” his dad huffs eventually; a little out of breath. He braces his hands on his knees, and glances up at Liam—one eye squinting closed in the afternoon sunlight—and tilts his head. “What do you think? Want to do some one-on-one?”
Liam purses his lips and works his jaw back and forth, considering. He glances at the goals on either side of the field; they’re soccer goals and so larger than lacrosse ones, but. He shrugs.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Let’s do it.”
Neither one of them are wearing cleats so they end up slipping and sliding across the brittle grass in their sneakers, and by the time Liam scores his third goal to his dad’s single one, their pants are covered in dirt and their arms—and Liam’s face, because he’d foolishly swiped the back of one wrist across his cheek—are covered in mud where the dirt had mixed with their sweat. They’re also both whooping and crowing and trash talking, and Liam gives absent thanks that his mom isn’t around, or she’d probably be shrieking at them both.
He grins at his dad, arms raised wide in challenge as he hops a little backwards, and away from his latest goal.
“Enjoy it while it lasts!” His dad calls after him, though he has to do it in a few individual chunks; he’s out of breath from chasing Liam down the field. “I’m about to switch into high gear!”
“Uh huh,” Liam agrees vaguely, deliberately mocking. “I’ll make sure to prepare myself.”
His dad makes a face, and scoops up a ball as he sets himself down in the starting position in the middle of the field. He raises his eyebrows in challenge.
Liam snorts and goes to join him, mirroring his position.
They break. Liam manages to smack his stick down on top of his dad’s, knocking the ball loose, and he’s scooped it up and taken off towards his dad’s goal as his dad yelps and tries to put on the brakes, slipping on the slick grass as he skids to a stop and tries to turn around to follow. Liam just grins, and puts on a burst of speed, and then—when he’s close enough—he whips the ball forward, towards the goal.
It sails right by the left side of the goal, missing it completely.
Liam slows to a stop, staring after it. His dad comes to a stop next to him. He glances over at Liam, and then nudges him. “We’ll call that one a mulligan, huh? C’mon, let’s restart.”
Liam doesn’t argue. He doesn’t say anything. He follows his dad back to the middle of the field, though he can’t help glancing over his shoulder at the place where he’d just entirely missed the goal.
They reset—a new ball retrieved from the pile by Liam’s bag—and break again. Liam goes to knock his dad’s stick again but his dad whirls away, and takes off for Liam’s goal. Liam curses and scrambles after him, but it’s too late: his dad’s already flicked the ball in a perfect arc, and sent it sailing into the goal.
“Alright!” He crows, catching Liam with an arm around his shoulder as Liam slows to a stop next to him. He shakes him a little. “Alright, so maybe your old man hasn’t completely lost his game, huh?”
Liam manages to dredge up a smile. He bumps his dad with his shoulder, and goes to retrieve the ball from the goal.
He ignores, best he can, that insidious thread of fear that starts squirming in his gut again; reaching ever-thickening tendrils out through his veins, his limbs.
But the next play he tries against his dad fails, too. And the time after that—Liam having successfully maneuvered his way around his dad and to a clear, open field between him and his dad’s goal—Liam misses his shot again.
He throws down his stick in a sudden, helpless burst of frustration. He scrapes his fingers back through his hair, his sweaty palms sticking and pulling painfully at the strands.
He’s so deep in his frustration, in fact, that his dad jogging up to him and soothing, “Hey. Hey, it’s okay,” causes him to jump. Liam colors as he realizes what he’d just done—his stick still lying in the dirt at his feet—and he flinches, and curls in on himself.
“Sorry,” he immediately blurts out. “Sorry. Sorry, I’m—” He doesn’t finish, just leans down and scoops up his stick. He tries to smile at his dad and mostly fails. “Just—just having an off run.”
He can see his dad hesitate. But only for a split second. He grins—though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes—and nods his head in understanding. “Happens to the best of us,” he says loftily, prompting—and getting—an eye-roll from Liam. He sobers a little, and cocks his head. “You want to keep going?”
Liam doesn’t hesitate. He nods firmly. “Yeah,” he assures his dad. “Yeah, let’s go.”
Liam detours to the edge of the field to retrieve a new, third ball. He jogs back to the middle of the field, and takes his place across from his dad.
But things don’t go much better. He tries, desperately, but it feels like the harder he tries, the worse he plays. His dad slips past him with distressing ease. His shots go wide, no matter the fact that he’s aiming at a net that’s at least three times larger than a lacrosse net. At one point he straight-up trips over his own feet, and slams into the ground on his hands and knees hard enough that he actually jars his elbows and jaw, his teeth clacking together.
Liam throws his stick to the side, and slams his fist against the ground. The skin over his knuckles splits; he can feel it, and when he pulls his hand back, wincing, he can see the blood staining his skin.
“Hey, buddy, c’mon,” his dad protests softly, appearing at his side and dropping down next to him. He reaches forward and takes hold of Liam’s injured hand, cradling it between both of his own as he pulls it closer to himself, his eyes narrowing as he clearly assesses the damage.
Liam barely notices. He feels his face screw up as he looks at his dad’s downturned head.
He blurts out, “I’ve ruined everything,” the words feeling like they practically explode out of him.
He can feel his eyes burning as they do, humiliatingly enough.
His dad jerks to look up at him, his mouth gaping. “What?” He demands. “What are you—?”
“Devenford,” Liam interrupts helplessly; can’t stop himself. It’s like a dam had burst in his chest and now all the words—all the toxic, acidic whatever he’d been swallowing down for the last six weeks—is rushing up, and out of his throat. “I-I got kicked out because I was so mad about not being able to play lacrosse, and now—and now—”
His gaze jerks back to the goal, where his last shot had gone embarrassingly wide. His eyes spill over. He goes to dash the tears impatiently away, and only realizes that he’d yanked his injured hand out of his dad’s grip when his dad makes a startled noise. The realization makes Liam startle, and he winds up staring directly at his dad, who winds up staring directly back at him.
Liam can feel his expression screw right back up. He forces himself to finish his thought. “And now I can’t even,” he has to stop, and suck in a huge, shuddering breath. “Can’t even play lacrosse.”
“Hey!” His dad immediately protests again, lunging forward when Liam makes a wounded noise and starts to curl in on himself. His arms wrap around Liam’s shoulders but that only makes Liam turtle up more, his face buried against his knees and his hands—including his injured one, his split knuckles throbbing, and throbbing, and throbbing—clutching tight at his knees. “Hey, Liam, c’mon. That’s not true.”
“It is,” Liam disagrees, his voice shaking and muffled and nasally, and there’s a part of himself that’s just absolutely disgusted with his behavior—a part that wants to get angry—but it’s just completely overwhelmed by the despair he feels. “It is, you saw. I couldn’t even—I couldn’t even—”
“Hey!” His dad interrupts, more sharply this time. Liam’s jaw snaps shut. He digs his face harder into his knees; hard enough that his vision starts to spot, neon bursting across his closed eyelids. His dad just presses his mouth to the crown of Liam’s head, and tells him, “One off afternoon doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly lost your ability to play, okay? You were still kicking my ass right up until that first miss, there, and soon enough you’ll be back to doing it again.”
Liam just shakes his head a little wildly, his face still hidden against his knees. “You don’t,” he hiccups. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do,” his dad disagrees. “Yeah, I do,” he insists, when Liam makes a wordless, protesting noise. “And so do you.”
Liam starts to shake his head again, and then he freezes, something else occurring to him. He can feel his eyes start to fill and spill over again as he realizes, “Even if you’re right, it—it doesn’t matter.” He squeezes his eyes shut, his fingers spasming around his knees. “I’m already—already kicked out of Devenford.”
His dad makes a harsh, dismissive noise. “And, what? Devenford’s the only place you’ll ever be able to play lacrosse?” He pulls back, and tries to get Liam to uncurl from his turtled-up position, his hand tugging at Liam’s shoulder. “Liam,” he says, exasperated, when Liam won’t cooperate. “Look at me,” he orders, and then—when Liam reluctantly peeks an eye out to do so—he repeats: “You really think Devenford’s the only place you’ll ever be able to play lacrosse?”
Liam’s expression spasms, because it’s not like he could say no: he knows his parents had already been talking to another school in a different district. Beacon something, he thinks. But.
But.
“I’ll still be sick,” Liam reminds him, in barely more than a whisper.
Still, no matter how quietly he’d said it, the word seems to echo around the empty field and the air between himself and his father, that same way that it’d echoed around the parking lot at Devenford when last period had let out and half the school had poured out to see the damage Liam had done to his coach’s car. Oh, my god, they’d breathed, their hands coming up to cover their mouths. What the hell is wrong with you? Someone had shouted.
You are clearly sick in the head, someone else had concluded, and the rest of the gathered students had seemed to pick it up: the word had rippled through the crowd like a virus: you’re sick, you’re sick, you’re sick.
“I’m—” Liam repeats, his eyes filling and spilling over again. “I’m still sick.”
But: “Hey,” his dad snaps, and his tone is so fierce, and so sharp, that it actually startles Liam out of his downward spiral. He jumps, and looks wide-eyed up to meet his eyes. His dad searches his eyes, his own narrow and his expression furious. Liam starts to curl back inwards around himself, shame curdling in his gut, but:
But his dad tells him, harsh and firm and brooking no argument, “You are not sick.”
Liam stares at him, mental gears grinding. “But—” He starts to protest, because he knows his diagnosis, okay—it’s hard to mistake. Intermittent Explosive Disorder. How much more blatant could you get?
“Liam,” his dad interrupts, before he can. He brings his hands up to anchor them around Liam’s jaw, holding Liam’s head firmly so that Liam can’t look anywhere but at him. “Listen to me. You are not ‘sick.’ You are not ‘broken.’ You are not,” he insists, his expression spasming a little into something softer; more raw, “your condition, okay?”
Liam’s mouth drops open. He can’t speak.
His dad’s expression crumples further. He strokes a careful finger across one of Liam’s cheeks. “You are so much more than your condition. You’re kind, and smart, and—much as it’s sometimes at my own expense—funny. You’re all of those things, and more, and neither your condition, nor anyone at Devenford, or anyone at all, can take them away from you, okay?”
He searches Liam’s eyes again, his own eyes flicking between Liam’s like he wants to be absolutely sure that Liam’s listening to him; that Liam’s understanding what he’s trying to say.
He continues, more quietly—more gently: “You get to decide who, and what, you are. Not anyone else. Not your condition.” He waits a few more seconds, his own expression twisting up some. “Okay?”
He sounds so sure of what he’s saying. His tone, and the line of his shoulders, and the way he’s looking at Liam—no doubt in his eyes, or anywhere else that Liam can see—that Liam…can’t help but believe him.
Does believe him.
“Okay,” he manages to croak out. “Okay.”
His dad searches his face for a few seconds longer, and then he reaches out and gets a hand on Liam’s arm, and yanks him up onto his knees, and into a firm hug. Liam feels his eyes filling again, but this time as they spill over he just feels relief, like all the pressure that had been building up inside him had finally been given an escape route. He finds he can breathe again, deep if still shaky, his lungs finally feeling like they can fully expand inside his ribcage.
He buries his face in his dad’s shoulder, and just holds on.
They stay like that for a long time. His dad doesn’t push him, or hurry him, or even try to directly comfort him: he just holds on, every now and then just rocking slightly side to side. His fingers stay just as tightly anchored around Liam’s shoulders and back as Liam’s are around his. He keeps his temple pressed up against the side of Liam’s head, his steady even breathing ruffling Liam’s hair every now and then.
He doesn’t seem to care, or even acknowledge, his steadily-dampening shirt.
He stays exactly where he is until Liam moves, and only then does he loosen his arms, and sit back on his heels in a mirror of Liam’s posture. He gives Liam a wobbly smile when Liam tries, and fails, to sneak a glance up at his face. Liam flinches, initially—god, he can feel how flushed and splotched his face must be, and he knows he has tear-tracks dried tacky down his cheeks—but then he just…stops, and lifts his hands to tug his sleeves down over the heels of his palms, and start scrubbing at his skin. He finds he isn’t worried—he doesn’t even have to try not to worry—about the fact that his dad is watching.
He drops his hands when he’s done. He looks up at his dad.
His dad grins softly back. He reaches out, and claps a gentle hand on Liam’s shoulder, and shakes him a little. Liam deliberately overreacts to it, letting his head flop back and forth on a loose neck.
His dad laughs, his head tilting back slightly and the skin around his eyes crinkling.
He sobers, some, and studies Liam for a second before pulling him back in for one last, tight hug.
He stands, once he’s released Liam, and starts brushing off his pants. It’s a completely wasted effort: they’re both covered in dirt from the field, and there’s not like there’s anything either of them can do about the giant wet spot dampening the chest of his shirt. Still, he doesn’t seem to care.
He offers Liam a hand up. Liam takes it, and staggers only a little on his feet as his dad pulls him onto them. His dad looks down at him for a moment as they stand there in the middle of the empty field—his lips pursing and his jaw working side to side, just like Liam’s had earlier—and then he tilts his head just slightly sideways.
“What do you say,” he proposes, “that we swing by the Italian market, and pick up everything we need for lasagna?”
Liam squints at him, and then ventures, “…with homemade sauce?”
His dad scoffs and punches him lightly in the shoulder. “What do you take me for!” He protests. “Of course with homemade sauce.”
Liam grins. His dad grins back. He looks down, and checks his watch.
“If we hurry, I bet we can even get everything done before your mom gets home,” he points out.
Liam had already taken off towards his dad’s former goal; the one that he’d overshot several times.
He calls over his shoulder, “I want gelato!”
His dad’s laughter follows him.