“Does your mom know you’re up there?” asks Bernice, our kindly next door neighbor. “Yeah”, we immediately respond in unison. Her question caught us off guard, we didn’t know anyone had seen us. “Well, ok…”, Bernice says as she begins to climb the steps to her porch. I think to myself, “Wow, that worked?” Then pausing, she turns back to look up at us shielding her eyes with her hand and says, “I’ll just check with your mom.” We quickly scramble back to the open window and crawl inside. Joe looks for a place to hide-under the bed. I look for a plausible reason, and there they are….crayons. I grab a handful and fling them through the open window and onto the roof (Yes, we were on the second story roof). Then I grab a few more and drop them into a plastic cup that had been lying on the floor. “What are you kids doing up here?” mom says as the sound of her footsteps signal her location on the stairs. “Nothing!” we call out. She’s at the top of the stairs and turning to look at us. As she walks down the hallway, I put on the best smile my nervous eight year old self can muster, heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my ears. “Look!” I say, holding out the cup with crayons. “We saw a bunch of crayons on the roof and went out to get them. We knew you’d be mad if the roof was messy.” I offer, proud of my quick thinking. Mom asks, “How did they get out there?” I don’t have an answer for that, so I say, “I don’t know, they must have been left by the last family who lived here.” Mom looks at me and shakes her head back and forth slowly. I rack my brain and say, “Joe must have thrown them out there.” My five year old brother slides out from under the bed hollering, “No I didn’t!” then gives me a shove. Mom sends me to my room, keeps Joe in his room and proceeds to gather the crayons from the roof.

I don’t know for sure why I lied that day. Maybe I was scared of the consequences, confused about why we weren’t supposed to be on the roof, or didn’t want my mom to be disappointed. Lying typically begins between the ages of 3-5, and is a normal and frustrating stage of development. I’m also not sure why my older brother wasn’t on the roof with us, but must have had something more important to do than hang with the ‘little kids’. One thing I know for sure is that I still use crayons, but I don’t use them on the roof.

Crayon art found here.