From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler

by E.L. Konigsburg

(The game was nothing very complicated, Saxonberg. Nothing terribly refined. They played war, that simple game where each player puts down a card, and the higher card takes both. If the cards are the same, there is a war which involves putting down more cards; winner then takes all the war cards.)

Something happened at precisely that moment. Both Claudia and Jamie tried to explain to me about it, but they couldn’t quite. I know what happened, though I never told them. Having words and explanations for everything is too modern. I especially wouldn’t tell Claudia. She has too many explanations already. What happened was: they became a team, a family of two. There had been times before they ran away when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team.

To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love. And it is very rarely, indeed, that it happens to two people at the same time—especially a brother and a sister who had always spent more time with activities than they had with each other.