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Eddie doesn’t make a habit of going through his kid’s stuff.
He really doesn’t. He knows how important privacy is, and after growing up in a house with relatively none, Eddie would be stupid to take that away from his own kid. As long as Christopher keeps his room relatively clean, and doesn’t start storing things that stink up the place, Eddie has no reason to be in here.
But he’d noticed pen-ink stains on Chris’ backpack the other day, and he has the day off today. With Chris at his friend’s house, and two days off from school for the backpack to completely dry, it’s the perfect time to clean it.
Eddie grabs the backpack from where it rests at its place next to Christopher’s desk, heavy with books, pencils, stray pens and a completely empty pencil case with a broken zipper. Eddie huffs out a laugh, setting the case aside to fix the zipper later.
Markers have bled at the bottom of Christopher’s bag, and there are eraser shavings and pencil marks everywhere. Eddie wrinkles his nose as he pulls each book out, shaking them off to get rid of some of the eraser shavings stuck to the plastic cover.
Sometimes, it’s scary just how much Christopher reminds him of himself.
Eddie knows that his backpack was probably worse than Chris’ when he was in middle school, and worse still when he started out on the baseball team. Sweaty socks, disgusting shoes and grime stuck to everything in his duffel bag — it’s a miracle his mom ever let that bag into the house, even if she restricted it to the laundry room only.
Nearly fifteen years later, Eddie finds himself in the same position with his own sixth-grader, tossing stray candy wrappers and broken pencils away so he can clean it.
He breaks out of his thoughts as his fingers brush a crumpled ball of paper at the bottom of the backpack. Eddie frowns, peeking into the bag. He moves his hand, finding not just one, but five of them.
Eddie pulls them out and flattens them as best as he can, freezing when he sees the red letter grade in the corner of the first one.
C+
The next ones aren’t any better — D-, D+, F, F
Five worksheets, all of them math — all of them with ‘have your dad sign and bring back!’ written in his teacher’s familiar quick handwriting, along with a red parent signature requested stamp in the left corner.
Eddie hadn’t even known. He’d helped Chris study for all of these, and every time he’d asked after a test, Christopher had said that he did well.
His kid has been lying to his face for weeks.
The thing that breaks Eddie the most, though, is the pencil practicing of his signature on the back of the first one. Shaky at first, but confident in the last few — all of them light enough to be erased without a second trace, and the bottom few almost close enough to Eddie’s that if he didn’t know better, he’d think it was his own.
No one would ever know if Chris had submitted a forged signature.
Eddie sighs, anxiety thrumming fast in his chest. Failure tastes bitter on his tongue, and for a long moment, Eddie just stands there, running over the last few weeks in his head.
Chris had never looked him the eye about when Eddie asked about the tests. He’d simply chewed his own lip before quietly telling him that he did well, and Eddie, who’s gotten so used to his kid never lying despite the fact that he’s growing into a teenager fast than he can keep up with, had accepted it blindly.
He doesn’t want his trust in his son to break.
As far as Eddie remembers, Christopher has never gotten lower than a B grade before, which might explain why Chris felt the need to lie. But it’s not the grade that Eddie’s worried about. He’s worried about the lying — about the intention to forge Eddie’s signature in an attempt to keep that lie, as if Eddie was never going to find out.
Eddie gathers the papers and takes them into his room, sliding them into his drawer until he can figure out how to approach this.
Because his kid has been lying for weeks.
And Eddie has no clue what he’s going to do about it.
“Okay, what’s up with you?”
Eddie snaps out of where he’s staring at his plate, his mind whirring a mile a minute since the day he found the papers in Christopher’s bag. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
Buck regards him for a long moment, long fingers wrapped around the neck of his beer bottle. Eddie knows he’s been caught, and he also knows he’s not getting out of this conversation — at all.
He finds that he doesn’t really want to get out of it. He thought about approaching any of his other friends that are parents, multiple times, but something in him stops the words in his throat, despite how close he is to them.
The only person he wants to talk about his kid possibly learning to lie is in front of him right now.
“You’ve been quiet. Is everything okay?” Buck asks softly, a little warily.
Buck’s concern makes his heart give a feeble, pathetic thump in his chest.
“No,” Eddie admits. “Chris has been lying to me.”
Buck’s eyebrows crawl straight into his hairline.
It would be funny if it were something else, the gape-faced look that Buck gives him. Eddie gets that, because Chris is unbearably honest most of the time — some might say he’s brutally honest in that way that only kids can be. Both Eddie and Buck have been recipients of his unimpressed stare whenever they utter so much as one half-truth, Christopher easily catching them in the middle of even the whitest of lies.
It doesn’t make sense for him to do this.
And that’s what scares Eddie.
“Christopher? Are you sure?”
Eddie leverages Buck with a deadpan look, unable to stop the fond curl of his mouth as he looks at Buck’s wide eyes, at the protest building in his expression — always ready to defend Chris to the death. “Yeah, Buck, I’m one-hundred percent sure. I only have the one son, and there’s only one Christopher Diaz living under my roof.”
“But about what? It’s not like him to lie, least of all to you.”
Eddie pulls up the photos he’d snapped of Christopher’s test papers to obsess over even at work and passes the phone to Buck. “Math grades.”
“Oh,” Buck intones, stretching the vowel out like it suddenly all makes sense, like it’s all okay now. Eddie frowns at him, but Buck catches his expression and simply shrugs. “It’s math . Haven’t you ever gotten bad grades in math?”
Eddie sighs, taking his phone back and flipping to the photo he took of Christopher practicing Eddie’s signature. “It’s not about math, and it’s not about the grades, either. It’s about lying to me. And it’s about all the lengths he was willing to go to, just to hide these lies.”
Buck whistles under his breath as he takes in all the attempts, suddenly looking sadder than Eddie can feasibly handle right now. “Man, he’s really growing up, isn’t he.”
Belatedly, it occurs to Eddie that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to bring this up to Buck, because he’s pretty sure he just triggered another memory, but before he can open his mouth to change the subject, Buck asks, “How did you find out?”
Eddie studies him for a minute before deciding to continue. “His backpack was disgusting and had all these ink stains on it, so I cleaned it out to wash it during the weekend. Five of these tests were crumpled at the bottom of his bag.”
“Was he going to talk to you about it?”
Eddie picks at the label on his beer bottle as he thinks, shaking his head. “Each of these tests is almost a week, week and a half apart. If he was going to tell me about it, he would’ve. This means he’s been lying for over a month.”
Buck nods, glumly shoveling a bite of food into his mouth and chewing sordidly.
The sight is so funny and just so… Buck that Eddie has to huff out a light laugh, even if he has to lean across the table to swipe his thumb across where Buck has smeared pesto all over his mouth.
Eddie valiantly tries to ignores the way Buck’s eyes track him as he licks the stray pesto off his thumb. “I have a meeting with his teacher next week, anyway. The regular parent-teacher meetings. If I hadn’t found these, Mr. Monaghan would’ve told me about it and then Chris would’ve been embarrassed, and I would’ve looked like an idiot and the worst father in the world because my kid didn’t think he could come to me about this.”
And therein lies the root of his problem — Eddie hates it when his and Christopher’s relationship starts to resemble the relationship he had with Ramon as a child. Even if it’s the slightest bit that could be explained by a thousand other things.
Growing up, high grades were instilled into Eddie and his sisters as the gospel truth — the only way they’d ever get anywhere in life. Eddie always had to work thrice as hard to make sure he never came home with anything less than an A- on his report cards, because a lot of the time, the concepts blurred to him.
There was one time where he’d come home with a B — ironically in math itself, because they’d just started the calculus chapters in high school and none of it made sense to Eddie. Ramon hadn’t said anything, but his disappointment was much, much louder than any words of anger he could’ve used.
Eddie thinks that maybe chasing after grades made him dislike learning, and dislike school even more. It was a big part of the reason he hadn’t wanted to apply to college — he hadn’t enjoyed any of it the way that he sees Chris enjoy going to school.
It wasn’t until Chris and Buck’s random research drops that Eddie even started enjoying how to learn again. And Eddie likes that Chris enjoys it, and hopes that it’ll be something he always enjoys, even as he grows into being a teenager.
He’s never going to pressure Chris into choosing one way or another, but privately, he hopes that his love of learning will take him to college too, give him the tools to make his space in the world. Eddie doesn’t necessarily regret his lack of college degree, but he knows the disadvantage of not having one in the job market — it’s the whole reason he had to work multiple jobs in the first place, just to stay afloat. He doesn’t want Chris to go through that.
The teenage version of Christopher is someone both Eddie and Buck are getting to know, someone Christopher’s still trying to figure out. Eddie doesn’t want the foundation of those vital years to be as weak as he feels like his own were. He wants Chris to be equipped with all the tools to live an honest, right life, unlike his father, who spent years and years hiding away from his own truths.
Buck’s fingers tap a pattern on the back of Eddie’s free hand, clearly to pull him out of the spiral he’s found himself in. “Hey, you’re overthinking it again. I’m sure he’ll talk to you about it. Maybe he just needs some time.”
Eddie sighs again, trying to center himself to the pattern that Buck keeps tapping out. “He doesn’t have time. That’s the thing. Any day between now and next week, his math teacher is going to call and ask me about the tests I was supposed to sign and send back. And if that happens, Chris will be forced to talk to me about it. He won’t come to me because he wanted to talk to me, he’ll do it because his teacher forced his hand.”
“Maybe you talk to him first, then. He obviously knows you washed his backpack — it’s not a huge stretch for him to think that maybe you figured out what he was hiding, too,” Buck suggests. “That way, the conversation stays between you and him.”
Eddie thinks over it. He doesn’t think anything could be worse than Christopher suspecting Eddie already knows about the math tests and still not coming clean about them, but he’s not going to tempt fate on it. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Hey,” Buck says, ducking his head to catch Eddie’s eye. “This isn’t a failure, okay?”
He doesn’t even think before he blurts out, “then why does it feel like one?”
To Eddie’s horror, he feels tears build behind his eyes, but before the humiliation can even set in, he drops his head to his forearms, resting his forehead against the cool wood of Buck’s dining table as he stares down at his socked feet through blurry vision.
It’s silent for a minute, the scrape of dishes vibrating under Eddie’s forehead. Buck’s legs wind around the table to sit in the chair right next to Eddie, and then his fingers card through Eddie’s hair, scraping soothing patterns along his scalp.
Eddie goes boneless against the touch, leaning into Buck as much as he can without moving from his seat.
They sit in silence for a while, the slow movement of Buck’s fingers bleeding most of the tension out of Eddie’s shoulders and wicking the moisture from his eyes. Unwittingly, his mind drifts towards the peace he, by all counts, shouldn’t be feeling right now.
“It’s scary, as a kid, to get bad grades and then have to bring them back home, you know?” Buck starts, his voice low, private. “Especially when you hear about the punishments and consequences that all your friends’ parents have for bad grades. Chris knows that he can come to you for anything — he’s just a little scared right now.”
On the surface, Eddie knows that. “I’ve never expected Chris to come home with straight A’s. He knows that, I think. I just…we only lie when we’re pushed into a tight spot, right? He’s never gotten grades like this before, and I think that pushed him into it. I just don’t like that he’s learning to lie like this — to his parents, and probably to his teacher, too. Next thing you know, the lies and dishonesty are rolling off his tongue like a third language, and I’m pronounced the worst father in the entire world.”
He also might be panicking a little.
“Eddie,” Buck says, steady as always. His fingers settle on the nape of Eddie’s neck, and Eddie follows the movement until he’s looking his best friend in the eye. “You’re making assumptions right now. You won’t know the full truth until you talk to him. If getting bad grades is new for him, he probably doesn’t know how to deal with it. That’s all — this isn’t a sign that you’re failing as a parent, or that your kid’s on the wrong track or anything.”
Eddie sniffs, scrubbing a hand down his face as he attempts a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I’ll talk to him. Everything else, we can deal with afterwards.”
Buck squeezes his nape once, his hand sliding down to Eddie’s shoulder once before he gets up, grabbing two plates of something off the counter. “For now, drown your sorrows in chocolate cake. Everything else can come tomorrow.”
It’s Eddie’s favorite cake in the world — the one somehow only Buck can make that tastes this good. He relishes every bite on his plate, and by the time even the icing is practically scraped off, he and Buck are laughing again.
His talk with Buck doesn’t automatically fix everything, but instead of spiraling in the middle of a tornado of indecision, he feels more anchored to the crowd, less likely to get swept up into a cloud of overthinking.
He can’t keep the gratitude out of the hug he gives Buck at the end of the night, only barely managing to stop the words pushing at the backs of his teeth to roll off his tongue.
Even though he doesn’t say the words, Buck smiles at him like he knows, anyway.
There’s no easy way to tell Chris that Eddie knows that he’s been lying.
The day after dinner at Buck’s, he tries multiple times. Every single time, the thought of Christopher’s face falling makes him chicken out — he hates when the smile melts off his face, even if Chris might be in the wrong this time.
He gets his chance when he sees Chris working on extra math problems at the kitchen table after dinner, and knows that there’s no escape this time.
“Hey, buddy, can we talk for a second?” Eddie starts, sliding into the seat in front of him.
Chris tenses up immediately, his gaze darting between his bag and Eddie, and that’s when Eddie knows that he’d been right about his worst fears coming true — Chris had been scared to come to him.
The disappointment in himself settles in his chest, right along the steadily-growing self-loathing, heavier than any other weight he’s carried in his life.
Instead of saying anything, Eddie sets the five test papers in front of Chris, now smoothened out by how many times Eddie’s picked them up since he found them. “You want to tell me about these, buddy?”
He keeps his voice low, calm, and tries to keep the crushing disappointment in his chest off of his face, but the look on Christopher’s face has him thinking that maybe he’s not doing a very good job of it.
Eddie can see the defense building in his son’s face, the way it always does before a temper tantrum, and he knows that this conversation is going to get out of hand really quickly if he doesn’t smooth things over.
Eddie places a hand on the papers, sliding them further down the table, away from the space between them. “Chris, I’m not mad, okay? I just want to know what’s going on. You’ve never lied to me like this before.”
It’s a little scary how quickly the anger drains out of Christopher’s expression, in place of a sadness Eddie would do anything to take away.
“I get scared,” he says quietly, in a whisper that breaks Eddie’s heart.
Tears are brimming on Christopher’s waterline, and it doesn’t matter how strung-out Eddie feels, or how much dread is knotted in his stomach about this one lie being a gateway for so many others, he’s not going to let his kid sit over there and cry alone.
Quietly, he holds his arms out.
Chris climbs off his chair to come to Eddie instantly, and with relief that feels like it would’ve buckled his knees if he had been standing, he lifts Chris onto his lap, folding him away until his face is tucked into the crook of Eddie’s neck.
It’s not often that Chris lets him do this anymore, which is a testament to how scared he really was. Gone are the days where Dad can do everything, or where Dad can fight all the monsters under the bed and they’ll never come back, but on days like this, Chris curls up into him as if those days have never gone anywhere.
Eddie feels like the worst person in the world when Christopher’s tears brim over, and he cries like he used to when he was younger, soaking the collar of Eddie’s shirt. His own tears push insistently at the backs of his eyes, but Eddie manages to rein them in. “Oh, kiddo. It’s okay, you’re okay.”
He keeps muttering nonsense as he holds his child close, wiping his face periodically as he smooths a hand down his back. “Chris, come on, buddy, can you look at me?”
Slowly, Chris straightens in Eddie’s lap, his eyes still downcast and ashamed. Eddie hates that look even more.
He tilts Chris’ chin up, wiping a stray tear. “Hey, keep your head up. We’re going to talk about this, and we’ll deal with whatever it is together. That’s our deal, right? We do things together?”
Christopher sniffs noisily but nods. Eddie grabs a tissue from the box on the dining room table and passes it to him, waiting for him to calm down.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” he repeats, wanting this to be a conversation led by his son instead of Eddie making assumptions and Chris playing right into them.
“We started doing order of operations in math to solve equations, and now there are all these letters and it just gets so confusing for me,” Chris explains, twisting in Eddie’s lap to grab the offending sheet of paper. “And then I didn’t do good on the first test.”
The C+ stares at them, and Chris glowers back like it’s mocking him. Eddie sets the paper down, away from them and waits for his son to continue.
“It just kept getting harder and harder. Every time I looked at the next tests, I just kept seeing this first one, and I forgot everything we practiced and studied and I’m sorry, Dad.” Chris is choking up again, and Eddie runs his hand down his spine soothingly, trying to comfort him.
“Were you scared to tell me?”
Chris looks at him in that intelligent way of his, at odds with the way his tears are smeared all over his face. He must find what he needed in Eddie’s expression, because he nods — a single, slow, wary action.
Eddie’s heart cracks and crumbles into a million pieces and he’s not prepared for the lancing pain in his chest at that small movement.
Calmly, he slowly breathes through it, just like Frank taught him to. One slow breath in, hold for three seconds, then one slow breath out.
“Okay, thank you for being honest with me,” he manages, his voice somewhat normal. He can feel the thick of tears in his throat starting up, and clears it so when he talks next, his voice doesn’t come out strangled. “Look, kiddo, I am never going to expect the best grades all the time, and I am never going to get mad at you for getting bad grades. No one can be perfect at everything, and sometimes, we hit roadblocks. I just want you to try your best, and I don’t want you to be scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Chris cries, more tears streaking down his cheeks.
Eddie tries to wipe them as soon as they fall. “Shh, it’s okay. Breathe with me, okay?”
Eddie models a pattern for him, using it to curb his own anxiety. Only once Christopher’s settled again does he continue. He drags the first test sheet back, flipping it to show Chris’ practice of Eddie’s signature.
This time, Eddie doesn’t need to prompt him. Chris takes one look, and gets that ashamed look in his eyes again. “I thought if I just signed this like you did, then Mr. Monaghan would look past it and you wouldn’t ever know that I did so bad.”
Eddie sighs. “Chris, what is that I always tell you about lies?”
“That to hide one lie, you have to say a lot more.”
“Right,” Eddie nods. “That’s why we don’t lie — there are a thousand truths you can’t hide with one lie, does that make sense? You have to keep lying and lying, and one day, it’ll catch up with you anyway. I have your parent-teacher meetings next week. Won’t Mr. Monaghan ask me what happened to the tests he sent back home for me to sign?”
Chris nods shakily. “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
Eddie wasn’t even aware his heart could crumble further.
“I’m not worried about your grade, Chris. If we need to practice more, or get a tutor to help, or if we need to talk to your math teacher, we will. And look, you’re practicing these extra problems on your own, and I’m so proud of you for that. I am not worried about your grade, because I know you’re doing your best. But I’m worried that you lied to me. Every time I asked you about the tests, you said you did good. That’s five lies. You were practicing my signature to sign these with. That’s six. That’s what worries me.”
Chris stares with teary eyes at his practicing of Eddie’s signature.
His kid is brutally honest — he doesn’t know how to hide his tracks in the middle of a lie, and somewhere, Eddie’s proud that until today, Chris has never had a reason to pretend to be anything but himself. That he’s never given his kid the impression that he needs to live a lie to be loved.
But today, he felt the need to, and Eddie would do anything to take that impulse away.
“I won’t do it again, I promise. I’ll tell you every grade even if it’s bad, and I won’t sign your name anywhere. I didn’t do it. I was going to, but I didn’t.”
Eddie instinctively knows that Chris is telling the complete truth this time, his eyes wide and earnest where he’s still perched in Eddie’s lap. His kid is not a liar, and somewhere, Eddie’s so relieved that Chris didn’t go through with his master forgery plan.
“Okay, kiddo, thank you for not signing my signature anywhere. I’m going to hold you to that. I promise, we will figure everything out together.” Christopher sniffs but smiles, watery as it is. Eddie kisses his forehead once. “Do you want to talk about how we can be less scared at math now or later?”
Christopher thinks on it for a minute, then moves until his arms are wrapped around Eddie’s neck. “Later.”
He’s getting too big to sprawl out on his lap like this, but Eddie doesn’t care. He simply shifts until they’re no longer in danger of tumbling to the ground, hugging his son close.
“I might not be happy that you’ve been lying to me for weeks, but I love you, Chris, okay? Nothing in the world could ever make me disappointed in you as my son. You are, and always will be the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Eddie whispers, pressing a kiss to the unruly curls on top of Chris’ head. “I just want you to be able to talk to me when you’re struggling.”
Christopher nods against his chest. “I will. I love you, too, Dad.”
The next morning, Eddie sends Chris to school with all five worksheets signed (with his real signature). With Mr. Monaghan’s help at the parent-teacher meeting, Eddie and Chris make a game plan over a few weeks on how to improve Chris’ fear of getting a bad grade.
Eddie teaches Chris to write out PEMDAS at the top of his paper first, so he doesn’t forget the order of operations while he works, and shows him a few tricks that got him through math when he was in school. Buck brings home a few techniques to help Chris practice the variables and equations in a way that makes it fun, and given Buck’s own aversion to math, they both get something out of it.
Eddie sits an extra hour with Chris in the evening to do equations on the chalkboard they buy for this very occasion. They even manage to find games to play that help him become more confident in his skills. They deal with the frustration together, and slowly, they get back on track.
Slowly but surely, the next tests Chris brings back home have improved grades on them, and Chris’ smile gets wider and less dreadful about math. He doesn’t magically learn to love it, but he tolerates it, and he can get through the tests with minimal anxiety.
But more importantly, even the tests with C’s, Chris shows Eddie. He doesn’t hide them away — now, they sit at home and re-do the tests that Chris doesn’t do well on before Eddie signs it and sends it back.
Three weeks after the parent-teacher meeting, Eddie and Buck are sprawled out on the sofa while Chris finishes the last of his math homework at the table.
Buck looks at Chris and tilts his head back against the couch to look Eddie in the eye, beaming proudly at him. “You did really, really good with him, Eddie. He’s so lucky that he has you, and he knows it.”
Maybe a few weeks ago, his impulse would’ve been to brush the words off. But Chris looks up from his worksheet and grins toothily at him, and Eddie’s heart swells twenty sizes at how much more secure his kid looks, even faced with a subject he doesn’t like.
“I’m lucky to have him.”