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R emember my best friend from last month? (She’s still my best friend though I mentioned her in my first column last month when we weren’t such best friends in camp…)

So she called me a couple of weeks ago and she told me “Our class is making a 30-year reunion. Did anyone call you?”

“Nope” I said.

“Were you in our Yiddish class?” she asked.

Now you probably can’t imagine being best friends with someone all your life and then not remembering if your best friend was in your high school class for all four years.

I laughed. “I switched over to the other Yiddish class midyear. And then I was changed about two months later into a Hebrew class. And then the next year when I wanted to switch back into my class I don’t remember exactly what happened.

But I went to the 30-year reunion anyway because I love milchig food and I thought it would be fun to see everyone and I was in that class for at least a year and a half. How does that make sense if I left midway through ninth grade? Here’s the story.

In seventh grade I lost all my friends. I was popular then I wasn’t. Long story. I woke up every morning with a pit in my stomach and some butterflies flapping around. Maybe some caterpillars too.

I went to camp (the disastrous summer I told you about last time) and by the time I came back I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up until I was married so I could start over. That didn’t work. My mother woke me up one morning and said brightly “How would you like to switch schools?”

Now I love my mother very much but I don’t think she realized just how miserable I was in seventh grade unless she did and she figured out a way to save me. But I think the real reason my mother suggested this was because my little sister was starting first grade in a different school and my mother figured that if I’d switch schools I could walk her to school each morning instead of my mother having to be busy with buses again. My mother grew up in a different country so I don’t think she had any idea how weird and uncool it was for someone to change schools in eighth grade. But it didn’t even take me a second to say “Yes!” It was my ticket out ofButterfly-and-CaterpillarPitLand.

Best thing I ever did.

Within a day I was accepted and registered (in those days you got accepted to any school or camp you wanted to go to even if you weren’t perfect — which I wasn’t) and because my old school was supposed to begin a week later than my new school I actually arrived at school a week into the school year.