Noodles were on the lunch menu the next day at school. Noodle days still made me a teaspoonful of nervous. In the lunch line, I looked around for Doug Wheatly but he was sitting at the packed-lunch table eating sandwiches.

Lacey was sitting with Lola. They were doing their faces and talking about shopping, restaurants, and Hollywood. I didn’t mind. I was still friends with Lacey and everything, but it wasn’t like before.

I took some sausages and was on my way over to Lacey and Lola’s table when Abi Compton, Kezia, and Benji waved me over. I hadn’t sat with them for ages because I’d spent every second with Lacey. I hesitated for a moment but then I thought, why not?

I sat down and joined in their conversation. I’d forgotten how nice they were. We were talking about birthday parties and our favorite types of cakes, when I noticed their eyes turning to something behind me. I thought Lacey and Lola might be coming to sit with us too.

“Hey!” Benji yelled, standing up.

“Doug, don’t!” Abi shouted, holding her arm up.

NOOOO! I swung around. Doug Wheatly was right behind me clutching a fistful of noodles.

“Arrrgggghhhh!” I yelled, just as he went chuck.

They went plack.

I went huuuggghh!

Noodles. In my hair. On my head.

AGAIN!

Benji jumped up and so did Abi and Kezia. I thought they were jumping to get away from me but they started yelling at Doug and he yelled back, so everyone else joined in shouting, “Beef! Beef!” and there was a huge kerfuffle. The lunch monitor ran over, asked what’d happened and marched Doug out to Mrs. Lefkowitz.

It was so dramatic!

I was still going huuuggghh (it was a long one) when Georgia arrived out of nowhere and started pulling the noodles out of my hair. “Oh, no, Dara,” she said, giggling, “not again!”

I sat there, rigid with horror, hating noodles more than ever. It didn’t bother me that they reminded me of being Cambodian. Not anymore. But it really really bothered me that they were hanging off my head.

As Georgia and Abi plucked them out, I couldn’t help thinking, a real friend will come to your rescue and clean noodles out of your hair without you even asking, and it took two lots of noodles for me to realize it.

Noodles.

Who’d have thought they could teach me what friends were?

Still. It didn’t mean I had to like them or anything.

Later that afternoon, Mrs. Lefkowitz called me to her office. Doug was there too. She made him apologize to me and threatened to exclude him if he threw noodles at me or called me a “noodlehead” ever again. Unbelievably, he tried to make friends with me after that. The others must have given him a hard time or something because he offered me his cucumber slices at recess and tried to start a conversation about the school play.

I was like, umm, I don’t think so. Duh. I do not make friends with nasty boys with brains the size of ant eggs. Especially very small ant eggs with an ugly runty moldy mutant ant inside that should have been eaten by an anteater or crushed by a giant boot long ago but had somehow survived.

At the end of the year, Georgia and I went to see my school’s performance of The Sound of Music. When Ella Moss-Daniels came on as Maria, I knew she got that part because she was the best at acting in our school and she deserved it. I stuck my chin up. I didn’t even want that part anymore.

Not that much anyway.

Actually, I totally did, but I watched the whole play and didn’t once wish Ella Moss-Daniels would trip over something, fall off the stage, and actually break her leg, and that was a first for me.