TW: past self-harm and mentions of suicide. Lanyon is our POV character so everything is addressed age-appropriately for an eight-year-old
The Marks:
Dad wasn't allowed to work today. Mom stole his computer and everything. Even on days he didn't go to the lab, he spent at least a few hours on the computer doing email or writing papers. Except today, Mom forced him to take a real day off. Lanyon was excited because that meant they could play together. When asked what he wanted to play, Lanyon had requested they play scientist.
"I have an idea for a project we can do, but I need your help setting up," Dad said. "I need you to get honey, dish soap, and a cup of water. Can you do that?"
"Yeah!" Lanyon ran off to the kitchen to gather the supplies. While he dug around in the pantry for the honey, Dad laid out newspaper on the kitchen table.
"This is going to be our lab bench," he explained. Dad added corn syrup, rubbing alcohol, and vegetable oil to the table. Lanyon laid out his supplies next to them.
"What's the project about?" he asked.
"Density."
"Mass divided by volume."
"That's right. But we're going to see how density affects the way different substances interact. But first, we need to make all these liquids different colors."
Lanyon grabbed the food coloring from the cabinet. "I want the honey to stay the same color," he declared.
"Okay. The water and alcohol are the same color, so we need to dye at least one of them so we can tell them apart. Same with the corn syrup and oil."
"Let's make the water blue."
"Perfect."
Lanyon popped the lid off the blue bottle and added a few drops to the water. "We need a spoon to stir it in."
"You're right. Get a few different ones for the different liquids."
"Okay." Lanyon grabbed four spoons from the drawer and stirred the blue food coloring into the water.
"What color should the oil be?"
"Red."
Dad handed him the red food coloring bottle, and he stirred some into the oil until it turned pink.
"Excellent," Dad said. "Now they're all different colors and we can tell them apart."
"Right."
"Now, before we put them all together, I'm going to show you how to use a micropipette." He held up a thing that looked like a chunky pen and a box full of clear blue tubes. "Every good scientist knows how to pipette."
Lanyon turned in his chair so he could watch Dad demonstrate. He grabbed the cup of water and brought it between them so Lanyon could see. "Now, a micropipette has two stops. When you pick up liquid, the first thing you do is press it down to the first stop," Dad explained. He held the plunger out towards Lanyon and demonstrated. "Once you get here, you can press harder to make it keep going, but we don't need to do that yet. First, you try. Stop when you feel it get stuck."
Lanyon took the pipette from Dad and pressed down until it stopped.
"Now push harder."
He did, and the plunger kept going.
"Did you feel that? How it stopped?"
"Yeah."
"That's what you want to do when you pick up liquid." Dad took the pipette back and put one of the tips on it. He pressed the plunger to the first stop and held it above the cup. "Next, we dip the tip into the liquid and release the plunger." Dad placed the pipette in the cup of water and released. "Finally, you push the plunger again to squirt the liquid into the new container where you want it to go. This time, you do push harder when you hit the first stop. It will make a little spurt of air to get all the liquid out."
"Can I try now?"
"Sure thing." Dad handed him the pipette. He repeated the instructions as Lanyon went through the steps. Press the plunger to the first stop, dip in the liquid, release. Then to release, press through both stops.
"I did it!" Lanyon exclaimed when all the blue water ended up back in the cup.
"Great job!" They clapped hands in a resounding high five. "Now, you get to ditch your tip." Bruce showed Lanyon the other button on the pipette and explained that it would release the tip. He held out an empty cup. Lanyon tried to press the other button, but it was hard to push and he ended up launching the tip across the table and onto the floor.
"Oops."
"That's okay. It takes practice."
Lanyon knelt down on the floor to pick up the tip and placed it in the bin.
"Try again," Dad prompted. As Lanyon got another tip and repeated the process, Dad grabbed the biggest glass they had and set it on the table.
"I got it this time!" Lanyon told him.
"Alright! Now, time for the density experiment." He rolled up his sleeves. "We're going to pour all of these different things into the glass."
"Okay."
"You start, pour in the water."
They took turns pouring all the cups of liquid into the glass. Lanyon expected them to all blend together like paint colors and make brown, but that didn't happen. Instead, they made stripes in the glass. "Whoa."
"That's density at work. The most dense liquid sits at the bottom, and everything that's less dense sits on top."
"Cool!"
"Even if you try to change the order of the layers, it won't work," he explained. Dad grabbed a larger pipette and stuck it in the bottom layer of the glass, drawing all the liquid out. Then he dropped it back on the top layer in the glass. Together, they watched as it sank back down to the bottom.
"That's so cool! Do it again."
Dad repeated the process with the layer second from the bottom this time. As he watched his Dad's hands steadily work the pipette, he noticed the dark red lines on his wrists. Lanyon had noticed them before, but he'd never thought to ask what they were.
"Dad, what's that mark on your wrist?" he asked.
Dad nearly knocked over the glass. He gripped the edge of the table and started breathing heavily. Lanyon recognized the look on his face that usually preceded a panic attack.
"Dad?" Lanyon repeated. "Are you okay? Do you need the periodic table?"
Quickly, Dad tugged his sleeves back down and said, "It was just an accident when I was younger."
"But they're symmetrical. Accidents aren't symmetrical." Lanyon overheard that on a show Mom watched about policemen solving murders.
Dad sighed and rolled up his sleeves again, rubbing his thumbs over the marks. It took a long time before he started explaining. "You know the medicine that I take every day?"
"For anxiety and depression?" Dad had explained to him many times that he wasn't sick like having a cold, but inside his brain. The medicine helped him feel better.
"Well, when I was younger, nobody knew I was sick, so I didn't have any medicine to help me. And things got really bad sometimes."
Lanyon nodded. Dad had never sounded this serious before.
"There came a day when things got so bad that I didn't want to deal with them anymore."
"What kind of things?"
"Bad thoughts in my head. Anxiety and depression can make you think sometimes that nobody loves you, even when it's not true."
"I love you," he piped up immediately.
Dad smiled. "I love you too. Never forget that."
He stopped talking then, but he hadn't explained where the marks came from. Lanyon reminded Dad of his initial question.
"I made them," Dad said grimly.
"How?"
"That's not important. At the time, I didn't want them to heal, but I'm very lucky that I had people in my life who made sure they did. And now they're just scars. Memories."
"I'm glad they healed," Lanyon said. They looked like they hurt. He'd gotten cuts before, but never that big. He didn't want his dad to have cuts that hurt.
"Me too," Dad sighed. "And I need you to know that if you ever feel like things are going bad, you can talk to me. I will always be that person who wants you to heal. Your mom too."
"Okay." Dad said things like that a lot, how he wanted Lanyon to talk to him if he ever felt sick or sad or scared. Lanyon didn't know why he repeated it so often, but it sounded important, so he never interrupted. It seemed like Dad never had a person he could talk to about being sad or scared when he was a little boy. Lanyon was glad he did.