(I have a guy friend who sits next to me in one of my classes. He jokingly steals pencils and erasers off my desk when I’m focused on something else. He does it so often that I’ve begun to reflexively grab his arm before he takes something.)

Friend: *reaches out*

Me: *grabs arm* “What’d you steal this time?”

Friend: *pulls his arm out of my grasp, takes my hand, and kisses it* “Your heart, milady.”

Me: “Nice try. Now give me back that eraser. I know it’s under your desk.”

Friend: “F***!”

(He’s still one of my best friends.)

(A friend and I are working on the school newspaper. He is in charge of the fun pages, which include comics, quizzes, trivia, games, etc. He is notoriously weird and his section of the newspaper is equally bizarre.)

Me: *after reading his section of the paper* “REALLY? ‘What kind of milk are you?’?!”

Friend: “You said I should tone it down, and it was between that and a crossword where the clues all had something to do with the history of stairs.”

(We ended up using the quiz which, surprisingly, wasn’t the strangest thing we ever published. I am 2%.)

This story is part of our Crossword Puzzles roundup!

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(We have a musical theater program at my school so there are pianos in some of the classrooms. My class is starting, so we are all moving items left behind out of the space. I’m moving the piano, which I usually do because it moves on wheels. It tilts and falls on me.)

Classmate: *screaming bloody murder* “It fell on her! Oh, my God, the piano fell on her!”

(Apparently, one of the wheels was broken, but the previous class failed to notify anyone.)

Me: *dazed and numb* “Can someone help me? I think I’m stuck.”

Teacher: “Don’t move!”

My classmate starts lifting from the opposite end, causing more damage.

Classmate: “I got it.”

Me: “No! Stop! Please stop!”

(A couple of other classmates come and lift it from my side — common sense! My teacher and one of those classmates help me up the stairs to get bandaged up at the office. She even blows on my boo-boos before putting on the bandages.)

Teacher: “Why don’t we go back downstairs to get your stuff? I’ll get some ice for you.” *after getting back* “All right, I’ll see you tomorrow. Can you help her back to the bungalow? Rest up!”

Me: “What?! No! Please! I’ve worked really hard. Please let me stay.”

Teacher: *flabbergasted* “Um, er, oh, ok. Sure!”

(She even let me perform my monologue, albeit sitting down with a chair under my injured leg. I’ll never forget the sweet, motherly kindness and understanding of my teacher that day, the stupidity of that girl further injuring me, and my other classmate carrying me ALL the way from class to my front door, princess style!)

This story is part of our Musical Theater Roundup!

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(In my senior English class, our teacher required us to write one journal page every day of the semester. On the second-to-last day of class, he would go around and count the pages for full credit, not wanting to read them because they might be too personal. My best friend and I are in the class together, and the second-to-last day comes around.)

Friend: “Shoot! I’m behind by like two weeks!”

Me: “Are you serious? What are you going to do? It’s pass/fail!”

Friend: “I’m going to write as fast as I can. I’ll fill fourteen pages. Just watch.”

(Thankfully the teacher starts on the other side of the room, and he doesn’t notice my friend scribbling away behind me. When the teacher gets closer, I check over my shoulder to see how she’s doing.)

Me: “Hold up… Are you even writing WORDS?”

Friend: “Nope!”

(She isn’t just writing nonsense; she isn’t writing ANYTHING. She’s just making scribbles with the occasional “crossed T” and “dotted I” to make it look like very bad handwriting. I think there’s no way it’s going to fly, but then the teacher gets to her.)

Teacher: “All there. Good job, [Friend].”

(Then he looks at mine.)

Teacher: “Wow! You have REALLY good handwriting. So small! You probably have twice as many words in your journal as [Friend] does!”

Me: *looking pointedly at [Friend]* “Probably…”

This story is part of our Handwriting roundup!

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(This student is a girl who can’t figure out that there are five people in her row counting herself; she’s not the brightest.)

Student: “Penguins live on the North Pole by the e… e… What’s it called?”

Me: *oh, Gods, please no, cringes* “The equator?”

Student: *excitedly* “Yeah! Where they live with the polar bears.”

(So now we all know that the North Pole, in the tropics, is full of penguins and polar bears.)

This story is part of our Polar Bear roundup!

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