We were the second grades most wanted. Pencils would mysteriously disappear, and the teacher was getting worried. The students had started to notice the absence of pencils too. Everyone was looking for the people who committed the theft. Except for two kids, who seemed perfectly fine with the happenings. Calm and relaxed they just watched the perplexed students look for their school supplies. Those two kids were my best friend and I.
Cameron (who was my best friend at the time) and I would always run out of pencils. One day we decided to collect the pencils we found on the ground. That was how it all began.


Soon we had a bunch of pencils. We got a little out of hand and started taking them off of desks, out of packages, and ask friends for them. It started to become a competition after I said that I had way more pencils than him. The competition got more intense as the days went by.


One day Cameron found ten crayons on the ground. “These could be useful”, he said. He told me what he found, and we knew that crayons were our new things to collect. Crayons proved to be very plentiful because every student was given 48 at the beginning of the school year, and second graders were not very good at keeping stuff together.


Crayons, being too easy, made us go into the big leagues. We started to collect glue sticks and scissors. This new task proved to be very difficult because the teacher usually cleaned those up herself. So when the opportunity came to grab eight at a time, Cameron had to do it. They were on the teacher’s desk. He used all his cunning ability to snag the prize. Somehow he got them without getting caught by the teacher.

By now Cameron had pulled ahead with scissors, glue sticks and crayons. We started to get a little careless with showing people our collection. Once, I showed Cameron something in my desk and a fellow student (who had ‘lost’ a lot of crayons) happened to get a peek of all my stuff. My belly got butterflies and I started to sweat. This was the most intense situation I had ever been in. I had to give him an extensive amount of crayons back so he wouldn’t tell the teacher.

Then the day came when we had to move our desks. Cameron’s back was now facing the teacher’s desk. We completely forgot about the teachers view. When he opened his desk to get out his homework, the teacher saw all of the stuff he had collected in his desk.


Cameron’s punishment was to clean up the classroom for one week. I asked him why he didn’t tell on me. He said with a smile,” When I clean up for the class...you wouldn’t believe how many pencils I collect”.