The lie started with a key I didn’t have. I was in seventh grade, locked out of the house again, which happened at least twice a month. Usually, I sat on the porch and read or did homework until someone came home. But it had been a long day, and I was tired, so I kicked the door.
When my mom and stepdad got home, they asked what happened to the door. I said I didn’t know. I said it was like that when I got there. They called the authorities, and they matched my shoe to the shoeprint on the door.
Lucky for me, I was generally a good kid and not known for lying, so I only got yelled at a little. One tiny lie, and I turned the front door into a crime scene. When I was in elementary school, my parents left me home alone while they went to pick up my sister from a school event. I thought it would be funny to make a prank call, so I dialed and said, “There’s an escaped terminator in my house,” then hung up laughing.
I got an immediate call back. I panicked, answered, and hung up again. They called again, so I tried to unplug the landline. Just as the authorities were pulling up, my parents pulled into the driveway too.
They confronted my dad and made him prove he lived there. I was terrified of getting in trouble, so I made up a story about a man knocking on the door and trying to force his way in. I said he was a white man with a dark beard and that he ran off into the cornfield. I don’t think my parents ever knew I made it all up.
The next day, something terrible happened in the news, and I was convinced God was punishing people because He was angry at me for lying. In fifth grade, I wasn’t doing my homework. I got home from school one day to find my mom and mama sitting in the living room with serious looks on their faces. My mom told me to sit down and said the school had called to tell them I hadn’t been turning in my homework.
I started crying instantly and said I’d been turning in my work, just not my homework. They would always ask if I was doing my homework, and I always said yes, even though I wasn’t. Mom said, “Okay, well, you better start doing it,” and then told me the school never called. She just knew.
Another time, when I was fifteen, she told me to fold the fitted sheets, and I said I would. I thought she was on the back porch, so I shoved them into the storage container. She was sitting right behind me, watching the whole thing. In sixth grade, we had weekly behavior reports that had to be signed and turned in every Monday.
I was horrible at remembering to get my parents to sign it. One Monday morning, I realized my parents had already left for work, so I decided to forge my mother’s signature. After the tenth try with a pencil, I was proud of how similar it looked. I turned it in, not thinking about the eraser marks from all those attempts.
That night, during a conversation with my mother, she looked at me and said, “I’m really glad you got that report turned in on time today. It’s funny how I don’t remember signing it. ” Then she left it at that. I knew I was caught.
The guilt ate me alive until I slipped a note under her pillow confessing. I never heard anything about it, but I learned fast that I was terrible at lying. When I was eight, I lived down a gravel road about half a mile long. The bus had a turnaround loop at the end, so it would come all the way down to pick me up.
The older kids on the bus hated this. In the afternoons, they would corner me and say it was my fault their ride home took longer because I should walk to the main road. One day, we had a substitute driver. I told the driver the bus takes me down the gravel road to my house.
The older kids jumped up and screamed that I was lying. I, being a child, started crying. The driver felt bad and took me down the road anyway. My parents came home later and could tell I was upset.
As I told them the story, they assumed the driver didn’t take me down the road, and I let them believe it because of all the support I was getting. I never dreamed they would call the school board. I had to come clean so the substitute driver wouldn’t get fired. I once made a Valentine’s Day card for my stepdad from a secret admirer, using a fake kiss mark from my classmate’s lips.
I left it on the bed. It did not go well. Turns out I was always dishonest in relationships. I remember making it in class.
We were given an assignment to make a Valentine’s card for someone in our family. I had my classmate Christopher kiss the card. I traced the pattern in pencil, went over it with white-out so it would be thick like lipstick, painted it red, and added lip balm on top so it would feel like real lipstick. Why did I do this in second grade?
No idea. It wasn’t even meant as a prank. I just did it. I remember thinking how funny it was that he’d get a card with a boy’s kiss mark on it.
They weren’t even mad at me when it all got revealed. They were just mystified. I remember being called into the room. “Did you make this?
” “Yes. ” “Why? ” And I excitedly explained the whole crafting process like a kid showing off a Pokémon card. As I got older, I understood the confusion better when I learned my stepdad had been caught cheating because he hid the receipts for the gifts he bought other women in the glove compartment of the family car.
The same glove compartment the person he was hiding them from sat in front of every time we drove anywhere. I ruined a library book when I was five and thought gum worked like Silly Putty. I hid it between my mattress and box spring and lied to my mother and the librarian for about three months before the guilt got to me. I brought it to my mom crying, and she made me take it to the librarian and confess.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized my mom changed my sheets once a week and must have seen the hidden book the entire time. She was just waiting for me to tell the truth. I grew up and became a librarian myself. My parents had just gotten me a brand-new phone.
A few days later, I took it out of my backpack at school and saw a huge crack across the screen. I had no idea how it happened, probably just from being jostled around. The phone worked, but I was terrified of getting in trouble. I tried to hide it, but my mom noticed a few days later and demanded to know what happened.
In a panic, I lied and said my teacher had taken away all our phones before a standardized test, which was actually true. We had done testing a week earlier and had to turn in our phones. When I got mine back, it was cracked. I thought she’d accept that and it would all be over.
But no. My mom panicked, demanded to know which teacher it was, and started calling the school. She was dialing the number when I broke down and confessed that I had just found it cracked and my teacher had nothing to do with it. She was angrier about the lying than about the broken phone.
When I was a freshman in high school, the athletes wore letterman jackets. To me, they were superhero uniforms. I envied anyone who wore one. My sister happened to be dating one of the guys on the football team, and he owned one.
One day, I came home and saw it lying on her bed. She wasn’t home. I tried it on and looked at myself in the mirror, but that wasn’t good enough. I got my bike, rode down to the mall, and walked around wearing it.
I felt so cool. After a while, I biked home and saw the guy’s car in our driveway. I knew this was going to be bad. The only thing I could think of was to stash the jacket in the garage.
I walked in, and my sister immediately started freaking out. “Where is it? Where is it? ” My mom, the boyfriend, and my sister were all standing in the living room.
I knew I was busted, so I went into the garage and handed it to her. She inspected it like I had tried to damage it while continuing to shriek, “I told you! I told you it was him! ” I felt humiliated.
After it all settled down, I was sitting in my room with my head down. The boyfriend stuck his head in and said, “Hey man, you can wear the jacket if you want. Just don’t lose it, okay? ” That only made me feel like a bigger schmuck.
Him being completely chill somehow made the embarrassment ten times worse. I was twelve. I told my mom I was staying at my friend Eric’s house, and she gave me a ride there, planning to pick me up the next morning. I actually hung out at Eric’s for an hour, then went to meet my girlfriend in the woods behind her house.
She was going to tell her parents she felt like camping and set up a tent out there for the night. A torrential rainstorm hit, soaking through the crappy Walmart tent. She went inside, hid in their garage, and walked to Eric’s house the next morning, soaked, to wait for my mom. My son got sick at school.
We got a call saying he wasn’t feeling well, so I went to pick him up. At home, he still looked ill, so I took him to the pediatrician. They ran lab tests, swabbed his throat, did a decent workup. Nothing showed up except huge bills because we hadn’t met our deductible.
He was much better the next day. A few days later, my wife and I were staring at him at dinner and noticed his bangs looked crooked. We looked at each other and started asking questions. Waterworks ensued, along with the truth.
He had cut a decent chunk of his hair off in class, saying it was in his eyes. When the teacher walked by, he swallowed the hair to dispose of the evidence. He gagged but got it down, then wretched more later. So my son got an expensive medical workup because he ate his own hair to hide the fact that he cut his own hair in class.
I took my dad’s debit card to get ten dollars late one night when I was about sixteen. I put it right back on top of the coffee maker where he had left it, but then realized it had fallen. I told him I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to admit I had taken money without asking. I had to confess when they went to the bank after learning it was used.
The bank was going to pull the video, and the authorities were notified about the missing money. I felt like such a schmuck because I knew if I had just told him, he wouldn’t have cared about ten dollars. A friend and I had plans to go to the mall after school. A girl we knew asked to hang out with us that day.
She didn’t know we already had plans, and neither of us wanted to bring another person along, so we lied and said we were both busy. Later at the mall, we walked past the food court and ran into the same girl. She was there with her mom, made eye contact, and called out, “Hey, remember when you guys said you were both busy and couldn’t hang out with me? ” It was the most awkward thing ever, and I felt really guilty.
After that, I learned not to tell lies like that because there’s a good chance they’ll backfire and hurt someone’s feelings. In sixth grade, around eleven or twelve, we were playing some kind of educational game in class. If you got an answer wrong, you had to go outside and run a lap around a tree. Our classroom was in the back of the school in a small annex building.
A trailer. I got an answer wrong and had to run. By the end of the game, the teacher was walking around with cookies, offering them to anyone who hadn’t gotten an answer wrong. She got to me, and I pretended I had gotten none wrong and went to choose my cookie.
A fellow student snitched on me. Not only did I not get a cookie, but my teacher made me run six laps around that tree. In fourth grade, I wanted to take the Accelerated Reader test for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire after checking the book out without reading it. My teacher stopped me at first and asked if I had read it.
I said yes because I thought seeing the movie was good enough. I took the test and failed fantastically. Since it was a big book, it was heavily weighted in AR points. My teacher called me out in front of the entire class for bringing our class average down.
I had to admit I had only watched the movie, and everyone gave me a browbeating. My teacher essentially told everyone we couldn’t win the pizza party movie day because I ruined it for everyone. As an adult, I would have handled that differently than she did. My dad’s employer offered him a promotion if he moved from New York to Texas.
He declined. It was near the end of the school year, and even though I knew we weren’t moving, I told everyone in elementary school I was moving to Texas. We were given the name of our teacher for the next year with our final report card. When I came back in the fall, the new teacher had no record that I was supposed to be in their class.
I had to go to the office and get it sorted out. Turns out one of the school secretaries, on her own, had disenrolled me. I remember hearing her say to the principal, “Well, he said he was moving to Texas. ” Maybe don’t take the word of a nine-year-old.
I was five, my sister was six, and my brother was two or three. My dad had money sitting on the mantle of the fireplace. I assumed it was pocket change. Turns out different bills mean different things, and it was rent money, a couple thousand dollars.
I spotted it and decided to take it because I could reach it, and I was raised to believe money was everything. As soon as I held it, I realized we were about to leave for school and my dad would walk in any second and see it was missing. He was very strict, so this was a problem. I was scared to get caught putting it back, so I shoved it into my brother’s backpack.
My brother was special, so my dad treated him differently and gave him a pass. A minute later, my dad came bursting outside, extremely upset the money was missing. Rightfully so. He was paying rent after dropping us off and demanded to know which of us took it.
He checked our pockets. Nothing. Then he went through the backpacks. I thought I was an absolute genius.
Gold star thinking. He checked my bag. Nothing. My sister’s.
Nothing. Then my brother’s. Surprise, surprise. He found the money and turned to me and my sister looking even angrier.
I had made a huge mistake. While I was tall enough to reach the top of the mantel, my two-year-old brother definitely was not. Oops. More yelling followed.
“I’m going to figure out which one of you tried taking from me. ” Then he took us to school. About a week later, I broke down crying from guilt and admitted I took it. The punishment wasn’t enough.
I was branded a liar and dishonest by my dad, and it became one more reason for him to hate me. Looking back, I see it as a pretty funny story, but I had a rough childhood, so I guess it’s up to you to decide if it’s funny or sad. I cheated on a book report by renting the movie. In sixth grade, I had to write a report on a book I didn’t feel like reading.
I was reading The Lightning Thief at the time and didn’t want to put it on hold. So, being a little rebel, I decided to cheat and watch the movie adaptation instead. On the day I got the assignment, after school, I went to a friend’s house to watch the movie and spend the night. I told my parents we had a science project, so they let me go.
I watched the movie, wrote the report, and turned it in. The next day, I got a D. My teacher asked what happened. I said I watched the movie adaptation because I didn’t think it would matter.
My teacher called my parents and set up a meeting after school. The situation went downhill fast. I said, “Well, if I knew it made a difference, I would have read the book. How was I supposed to know?
” My teacher did not appreciate the back talk. I was freaking out, trying to tell my disgruntled parents that on any other day they’d be mad at me for not doing homework, since they demanded good grades under serious pressure. They gave me a long lecture about honesty and cheating. I got two hours of detention and had to write a two-page essay on why cheating is bad.
Those two nights at home were not fun. I cut my hair with scissors. My skills as a child were, as you can imagine, subpar. My mom saw and asked what happened.
I told her a kid in class did it. This happened on a Friday. She was mad and fully planned to talk to the teacher to figure out who cut my hair, until she moved the entertainment center to vacuum and found my pile of cut hair. I didn’t flush it, put it in the trash can, or toss it outside.
I put it behind the TV. I was around seven, my brother was nine. I was super shy and introverted. For some reason, my brother confided in me that he had a crush on a girl who was his friend in class.
Then we never spoke about it again. I was really embarrassed about knowing this. The girl eventually moved out of town, and that was that. One day, we got a phone call, and I answered.
It was the girl my brother had a crush on. She asked for him, and I was so tongue-tied that I blurted out he wasn’t home. No idea why. He was in the next room.
She said she was in town briefly. I went back to our room, and my brother asked who it was for. I panicked because I knew I’d be in trouble if I said her name in front of him. So instead, I, the genius, quickly came up with the name of another guy friend of his who had also moved away and said, “He’s in town and wants to meet you.
” My brother went to that guy’s house, and his mother said, “He’s still in a different town. I don’t know what you’re talking about. ” He came back, told my mom, and they yelled at me for a few minutes until I said, “You know what? Maybe I misheard, and it was the girl who was in town.
” I still don’t know if it worked or if my brother just knew his little brother was being weird again. Fifth grade report cards. You had to get them signed by your parents. I had two C-minus grades marked in permanent marker.
Before I went home, I gently used a Sharpie to add vertical lines to the minus signs and make them look like pluses. It fooled my parents. The problem was my sister, who is extremely nosy to this day, approaching her forties. She needed to know everything.
She grabbed my report card, saw the marker shade was different, and ran to tell my parents it was a forgery. They told me they were going to tell my teacher. Since I had an intense fear of authority figures like teachers, I thought my entire life was over. For weeks, I would wake up, remember what I had done, and have panic attacks and intense shame.
Then they finally told me they weren’t going to tell my teacher. I already felt discriminated against by teachers at school. I didn’t need that too. In first grade, desperate to gain acceptance, I told a bunch of kids who frequently pestered me that my house was infested with leprechauns.
To my surprise, it worked. They stopped calling me names for a moment and started asking questions. Suddenly, I was interesting. I basked in the acceptance as I answered their questions.
Imagine my surprise when they asked to come over and go leprechaun hunting. I couldn’t back out now. They were coming over, and they expected to see a house lousy with gold-hoarding, river-dancing leprechauns. What could I do?
I had never seen so much as a leprechaun footprint in my house. So I did what any rational person would do. I put my future well-being in the hands of the universe, hoping it would see my predicament and make a leprechaun appear in my house at the right moment. Despite this approach not deserving even a whisper of optimism, I thought it was a sure bet.
The teasing resumed shortly after a thorough search of my house yielded not one single leprechaun. One time I was skateboarding, and my grandpa called asking why I wasn’t there for dinner yet. I said I was getting ready. He heard me breathing heavily and asked what I was doing.
I told him I was playing with my dog, chasing him around the house. He then said my dog was at his house with my sister. I don’t even remember what I told him after that. Probably another dog or something.
That was an awkward dinner. I lied about being able to duplicate Pokémon when Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance were a thing. I mentioned you had to go to the Pokémon Center, save after using it, and shut the game off. Turns out that’s exactly how you did it.
It became a living legend among my classmates. Once I told them it was complete BS on my end, they never trusted a word I said again. My dad was a professional snooker and pool player. When I had some mates over, they saw all the trophies and were amazed.
“Are these yours? ” “Um, yeah. ” “But your name is A. ” The name on the trophy was S.
“It used to be my name, but I changed it. ” “Wow, awesome. We should play sometime. ” “Uh, yeah.
” So I started going down to the local pool hall and practicing three-plus hours on Saturday mornings by myself, preparing for the big match. I got pretty good. I went to another mate’s house for a party, and there was a pool table. I asked if anyone wanted a game, feeling confident.
“Nah, but you should play P over there. He’s a state champion. ” “Hey P, come play pool against this guy. He’s a snooker champion.
” That’s when my little lie backfired. Did he just say state champion? Postscript: I actually played really well, fluked a shot or two, and won the game. So it was a double backfire, which meant an overall forward fire.
That lie put me through a whole training montage just to somehow become true. My mom made me a salad for lunch that I really didn’t want to eat. I was probably twelve to fourteen, and salad was not cool. I told my parents I ate my lunch and it was good, so I had to get rid of the evidence.
Naturally, I flushed it down the toilet. I went out to hang with friends, and when I came home, my parents were cleaning up the floor with all the bath towels in the house. The toilet had clogged, and water poured out all over the bathroom floor and started coming out of the main floor pot lights. The bathroom was upstairs.
Somehow the clogged toilet didn’t kick up any of my secret salad mess. They never found out what I did. I feel like an awful person. A bunch of lights had to get replaced.
In high school, I did on-site computer tech work for a big box store. I would do initial setups for new computer systems, unboxing, hooking everything up, and showing customers the basics. One time, when scheduling an install with a new customer, she asked if I was qualified because I sounded so young. I was good at the work, but I was also new to it and still insecure.
So when I did the install, I made up a story about my employer sending me to training classes. Six months later, the same lady called for another install on a new computer. I had completely forgotten about her and my fictional training, and I was more confident in the job by then. She called me out.
“How’s the training class going? ” Busted. She was the only customer who ever repeated that kind of install, and the only one I ever told about getting extra training. Of course, the two circumstances collided, and I got caught.
Not a big deal in the grand scheme, but I’ve told that story to my kids to remind them that if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said. In sixth grade, I hated Arabic language class, and it was a pain. My classmates cheated all the time, but they picked on me for some reason. One desperate night before the exam, instead of learning an Arabic paragraph, I wrote it on my hand.
After the exam, a classmate saw my hand and ratted me out to the teacher. A supervisor got involved. Even my dad was called. I was bawling.
The supervisor asked why I panicked, and I wailed, “There wasn’t any paper to write on. ” They didn’t buy it. I once successfully set up a situation in third grade where I embarrassed two troublemakers by making fake love notes from one to the other. I tried it again the next year.
The idiot used stupid logic and decided the heart shape with the letters B plus L stood for Brian. My name starts with a T. That just made him annoy me even more by accusing me of having a crush on him. His mom made really good egg rolls, though.
I’m not going to lie. When I was around ten, my parents were out, and I took my mom’s gold necklace and earrings and shoved them into my pink school backpack’s small pocket. Don’t know why. I guess I liked shiny stuff.
My parents came home, and my mom freaked out, asking where the gold was. A little while later, they found it in the pink bag, caught on that I was behind it, and asked how it got there. They joked about calling the authorities, and I started bawling, pointing at the balcony, and said someone came in, grabbed the gold, saw me, put it in the pink bag, and left. My immaculate lying skills didn’t work, and I confessed.
Young me was an annoying rascal. When I was a wee young lad, my older brother went through a tonsillectomy. There’s a common saying that kids can have all the ice cream they want. My brother had a serious sweet tooth and was smashing ice cream, but I was jealous.
He gets ice cream, and I’m just supposed to watch. I resorted to the tried-and-true method of asking why a million times. My mother was many things, but patient she was not. On about the sixth why, she told me, “You can’t have ice cream because you were born without tonsils.
” Sounded reasonable enough to me at the time. Flash forward several years, and I’m enlisting in the army. I’m at MEPS, having everything tested. Health, eyesight, hearing, lab work.
At the end, my doctor asked, “Is there anything unusual about you that we should know? ” And in that moment, the seed planted many years ago decided to bloom. I said, bold-faced, “I was born without tonsils. ” His eyebrow raised, he scribbled on my records, and everywhere medical I went from then on, I got pestered about it.
Foot doc, hearing doc, all of them. Thanks, Mom. In kindergarten, I was terrified of fire drills. The siren sent a chill down your spine.
One day, we had a fire drill during music class, and the music room was in the area of all the sixth graders. The alarm went off, all the kids scattered like ants. I had no idea where to go, surrounded by older kids outside the school. It made me not want to go to school, so I cried, and my parents had no idea why.
I was too embarrassed to tell them I was afraid of the alarm, but they kept pressing. They asked, “Are you being pestered? ” And I sheepishly replied, “Yes. ” The teacher brought me to the first grade room and told me to point out the person.
In my kindergarten mind, I picked the first kid who looked like a stereotypical troublemaker. But as I pointed, another kid walked in front of my finger, and they thought he was the one picking on me. I always felt terrible about it. Poor guy had never seen me in his life.
When I was younger, I was very sensory seeking and often chewed on or tasted various items without knowing why. Turns out it was autism the whole time. I wish someone had figured that out sooner. One day in first grade, I applied glue stick to my lips and licked it off.
I liked the sweet taste, so I kept doing it until my teacher noticed and sent me to the nurse. The nurse showed me pictures of what can happen to your lungs if you swallow things you shouldn’t. I’m pretty sure they were pictures of smokers’ lungs. At home, my mom kept asking why I did it.
The problem was I didn’t know. Something compelled me to do it, and then I liked it and kept doing it. I decided to lie, hoping she’d get off my back. I told her I had been putting glue on my lips to make a classmate laugh.
I assumed she’d be satisfied and keep it to herself. She told my teacher the next day, and the story became part of family lore about how weird I was as a child. My family probably thinks I had a crush on that random boy. Nope.
I was just autistic. I have two stories. I lied to my mom for a long time about losing weight and having everything under control, even though during that time I ate very little and exercised excessively. That difficult period took me six years to heal from.
When I was six, I took money from my grandfather and put it in an envelope with my brother’s name on it. I thought if my relatives found it, they’d think my brother took it. But my crooked handwriting was easy to recognize, so when my grandma found the envelope, she immediately knew it was me. That day, I was heavily punished and deprived of privileges for several months.
I’m fifteen. It was my sister’s twelfth birthday party, and I had nothing to do after helping set up. I thought it would be a great time to go use something while surrounded by a bunch of funny little kids. Here’s the catch.
I kept all my stuff at my friend’s house, two streets over, so I would never get caught with it. I messaged her, and she said she wasn’t home but I could grab it anyway. I told my mom I was going to let my friend’s dog out since she wasn’t home. I went over, rolled up, and used it on the way home.
When I got back, I managed to get down to my room for a new shirt, some gum, and to wash my hands. It didn’t work because my mom noticed the smell on me as soon as I came up the stairs. She called me out, and my out-of-it self told her it wasn’t me. I blamed my friend’s brother and his friends for using it outside.
My mom asked, “If her brother was home, why did you need to let the dog out? ”
Backstory before the lie. When I was six, I accidentally crashed into another kid while playing a game, and he got hurt. Kids being kids, everyone who saw it picked on me, saying they hoped something bad would happen to me.
I decided the best way to make them stop was to make them feel bad for me. I told a long, convoluted story that made my mother sound quite harsh. Absolutely none of it was true. She’s an amazing woman.
It worked. The other kids called over a teacher, who took me to the principal to retell the very fake story. I thought I would get in trouble if I told the truth, so I kept lying. The principal wrote a letter saying that if she heard any more stories like that, she would contact the authorities.
She put it in an envelope and told me to give it to my parents. I forgot. They found the envelope in my bed four months later. I got into a lot of trouble for that lie.
At my first real job, I had no vacation time and no sick time. I traveled all over for sales pitches, so I always had a banker’s box of brochures, swag, and heels in the trunk of my car. After over a year with no break, I called in sick. I was not sick.
I planned to cross the border at Sarnia, Ontario, to spend the day shopping in Port Huron, Michigan. I deserved it. I got pulled over at the border and brought into secondary for a routine inspection. When they found my box of work things, they questioned whether I was entering the US for work without proper documents.
The guard said they could just call my work to confirm it was a personal trip, and everything would be fine. But I had called in fake sick. I couldn’t have the border calling my work because I was supposed to be sick. So I had to turn back.
When I was eight, I carved letters into my dad’s car with a tree branch because I was mad at him. I know, it was stupid. The next day, he went to work in the morning, and as he walked up to his car, he noticed the words written near the gas tank. He got home later and asked if anyone saw who did it.
In my head, I’m like, “Oops. ” And I said, “I don’t know. ” He asked my older brother, who was twelve, and he didn’t know either. My dad said, “You know what?
I’ll just check the cameras. ” My eyes went wide. I didn’t know he had cameras by the driveway because he never told me. My heart was racing because I knew I was doomed.
I accepted my fate. He checked the cameras, rewound them, and boom. There I was, writing on his car. I got yelled at and was grounded for a week.
I’m honestly surprised he didn’t punish me more. In third grade, I was playing outside in the neighborhood with some kids who were visiting their grandparents. They had a wading pool in their yard, and we were having a blast. I had to use the bathroom really bad, but I didn’t know their grandparents, and I didn’t want to go inside their house.
I also have no idea why I didn’t just go home and use the bathroom. Either way, I accidentally peed my pants, and I immediately panicked. I charged into their wading pool like a water buffalo, screeching and splashing way too enthusiastically to wet myself down before anyone noticed. It worked, but now I was soaking wet and no longer having fun.
I told the kids I was going home to change. They must have thought I was a lunatic. As I barreled into the house, my dad was there eating lunch. I instantly thought, “Shoot.
How am I going to explain why I need to change and go back outside? ” Again, no idea why I didn’t tell the truth. Instead, I made up an elaborate story about getting too carried away playing in the wading pool, worrying I’d get a rash if I didn’t change. My dad stared blankly at me during the whole spiel.
I ran upstairs to change, having successfully lied, and as I shuffled up the stairs, I muttered under my breath, “Good excuse. Good excuse. Good excuse. ” When I came back down, my dad said, “So, what was the good excuse?
” I acted like a deer in the headlights, trying to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, “I heard you muttering ‘good excuse’ the entire way up the stairs. What’s up? ” At that point, I burst into tears and explained that I peed my pants and lied about it.
My dad was so mad that I lied and made a big deal out of nothing. He wouldn’t let me go back outside that day, and I never saw those little kids again. In grade four, my mom, her ex, and I lived in her ex’s parents’ old house. I took the bus to school and back home.
I absolutely loved the bus driver and loved taking his bus. He’s still one of the best bus drivers I’ve ever had. When his parents came home, we moved into a new house just down the street from the school, so I no longer took his bus. My mom kept the house when they broke up, and she started dating a new guy in 2015.
We moved to his house in 2017. They’re actually engaged now. However, sometimes I would go to his parents’ house after school and take his bus there, spend the night, and take his bus to school in the morning. One night in fifth grade, I spent the night there on a school night.
I had a lunch pack for school the next day, and I forgot it at my mom’s. Her ex and his mother both asked if I had my lunch with me. I said yes and even pretended to put it in the fridge. My lunch was in the fridge at home, so I got caught pretty quick once her ex returned home.
I got punished that Friday, but I ended up going to my dad’s, so I avoided it. The punishment was no movies, no TV, no computer. At my dad’s, I had access to all of that. I’ll admit, I knew I was avoiding the punishment, which is why I called him to pick me up.
I never got called out by her ex’s mother for lying, though.