Dear Dumb Diary,

We’ve entered that part of the school year where you begin to wonder if maybe even the teachers are beginning to lose interest in education. We study something — like igneous rocks, or spit molecules, or one of those countries that looks like where they are going to build a country one day — we glue-stick a bunch of things about it to a piece of poster board, they get hung up in the hallway, and then we never talk about them again.

So toward the end of the year, just to keep things interesting. the school has lots of events like an Art Show, a Talent Show, and Bingo Night, which features a game that was developed long ago so that we’d have something to do until fun was invented.

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If I ever become a teacher, I’m going to jazz it up a bit. Maybe I’ll glue-stick the actual students up in the hallway, and when you walk up to one, he’ll have to tell you what he knows about spit molecules or whatever.

Also, I’m going to make it so that if a kid bothers me, I can legally shoot her out of a cannon. I really may have psychic powers, because I think I’ve read the mind of teacher who was thinking that exact thing one time when Mike Pinsetti got almost all of a crayon stuck in his ear.

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And speaking of shooting somebody out of a cannon, I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this girl to you before, Diary — her name is Angeline?

First, before we discuss Angeline, let’s take a moment to discuss AUTOMATIC FRIENDSHIPS. Automatic Friendships occur like this: Let’s say you and a person from your school who you only kind of know both show up at the same beach one day and there’s nobody else to hang around with. BAM — you’re automatic friends. Maybe only for a day, but still. It’s just the Way the Universe Does Things.

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Or let’s say you go to prison. You committed some cool crime like stealing the weapon of somebody who was going to blast an endangered baby orphan koala in the face. Still, the judge says that stealing is stealing, and he sends you to prison for it. And in prison, you meet somebody who is in for the same kind of crime, but for her it was like an endangered baby orphan panda or just an endangered baby orphan. BAZOOM — now you two are automatic friends.

Ever since Angeline’s Uncle Dan (my school’s assistant principal) married my Aunt Carol, AND Angeline’s dog married my dog and they had puppies together, I’m automatically friends with Angeline. No beach, no orphan koalas, just KABLAM — automatic friends.

You’ll notice that it’s not because I like her. It’s just how things work. It’s like math: Poor little Two got plussed with Three.

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So now I’m friends with Angeline. This is an Automatic Friendship, and I have to just accept it and make the best of things.

See, if I objected, then Aunt Carol might divorce Angeline’s uncle, sending both of them tumbling into a deep pit of depression for the rest of their lives, and Angeline could wind up feeling so guilty that she would have to go be locked up in an old dirty insane asylum for years and years, and Stinker’s puppies would grow up not knowing both their parents — and I couldn’t live with myself for doing something like that to a puppy.

I’ve talked to Isabella about the Angeline thing, since she’s my BFF. That’s what best friends are for, after all. But she seems to think that we should be friends with Angeline, and that if I’m having a problem with Angeline, we should just hug it out.

You know, maybe that would help. When you think about it, choking is just a hug that your hands give to a throat.

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Isabella says that Angeline thinks of the three of us like BFFs. I could have pointed out to Isabella that, last time I counted, there are only two Fs in BFF. And there’s a reason for that. If you get too many Fs, it doesn’t look like Best Friends Forever anymore. It looks like you’re trying to spell the sound a fart makes. Observe: BFFFFFFFFFFFF.

But I didn’t say that, because we’re all automatically such terribly good friends now. Terribly, terribly, good friends. Terribly, terribly.

Excerpted from DEAR DUMB DIARY #9: THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS AREN’T FOR © Copyright 2012 by Jim Benton. Reprinted with permission by Scholastic Paperbacks, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.