Teamwork

When I first met Connor Safford in seventh grade, I thought he was crazy. A lunatic. A madman. A loon. An escapee from the insane asylum the next town over. His blond hair had never seen a comb, and his green eyes had an alert sort of paranoia to them. Every once in a while, his brain would lose control of his body and he would twitch. He probably had Tourettes now that I think about it.

I'm sure he thought something was totally wrong with me too. Even if he didn't, everyone else did. Why would a girl like me want to be friends with a guy like him? They certainly made a good point.

Whatever our differences were, we soon got over them and banded together. (It's really funny how things like that happen, isn't it?) Every day was a new adventure, a new chance to get into things that could cause us big trouble. But strangely, we never did get caught. Not even when we egged the principal's house or painted the water tower pink.

Connor always had a plan. Always. It didn't matter if it was some minor thing like setting spiders loose in Candace Palmero's locker or something major like setting up buckets of paint over the doors of the mean teachers. He always had a plan.

But even though he was the master magician, and I was just the assistant who helped put it all together, I would always question his plans. And he would grin like the madman that he was and would say, "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."

And no matter how stupid the idea seemed or how large the chance of getting caught, I would always go along with him. We were a team, after all.