Text copyright © 2002 by Nancy Krulik. Illustrations copyright © 2002 by John & Wendy. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of

Penguin Putnam Inc. Published simultaneously in Canada.

S.A.

Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data is available

eISBN : 978-1-101-10020-2

A B C D E F G H I J

http://us.penguingroup.com

Chapter 1

“How many tomatoes are you going to eat?” Katie Carew asked her friend Kevin Camilleri as she plopped down into the seat across from him in the school cafeteria. Kevin had opened his lunch box. Inside were all sorts of tomatoes—tiny grape tomatoes; small, round cherry tomatoes; oval-shaped plum tomatoes; and a big plastic bag filled with sliced tomatoes. And for dessert, he had a bag of tomato-flavored chips.

Kevin picked up one of the oval-shaped tomatoes and bit into it like an apple. “I could probably eat about a million of these. I love tomatoes!”

All the kids at the table laughed. They knew that Kevin had been a tomato freak since kindergarten. Back then they had even nicknamed him Tomato Man.

“You’ve never met a tomato you didn’t like, right, Kevin?” Katie teased.

“That’s not true,” Kevin said. “I’d never eat a tomato from the school salad bar.”

The kids at the table agreed. The vegetables at the salad bar were pretty gross.

“Hey, how do you stop a rotten tomato from smelling?” George Brennan asked, dropping his tray down next to Katie. George loved jokes and riddles. He told them all the time.

“How?” Kevin asked him.

“Hold its nose!” George answered. He began laughing hysterically. He turned to Katie. “Good one, huh, Katie Kazoo?”

Katie giggled. She loved George’s jokes. She didn’t even mind when he called her Katie Kazoo. She thought the nickname sounded sort of cool! She’d even tried signing Katie Kazoo on her schoolwork—until her teacher, Mrs. Derkman, made her write her real name on her papers.

“Whoops,” Katie knocked her spoon off the table when she laughed. “Hold my place George,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”

Katie got up from the table and walked over to the lunch counter. “May I have a spoon?” she asked the lunch lady.

“Didn’t you get one already?” the lunch lady answered in a very grouchy voice.

“I dropped it,” Katie explained.

“Tough toenails,” the lunch lady told her.

“One spoon per customer.”

“But how am I going to eat my pudding?”

The lunch lady rolled her eyes. “Use your hands. Or better yet, don’t eat it at all. I wouldn’t.”

The lunch lady hadn’t been very nice. But she was probably right. The pudding looked disgusting, and it smelled worse. Katie
was
better off not eating it.

Katie went back to the lunch table. She sat down and looked at her apple. If she ate around the rotten spot, it might be okay.

“Got room over here for me?” Suzanne Lock asked.

Katie scooted over to make room for her best friend. Suzanne put down her cafeteria tray and sat beside Katie.

“I thought you were sitting at the other table with Jeremy,” Katie said. She looked over at the long table in the corner, where Jeremy Fox sat with two boys from the other third grade class. Katie had known Jeremy and Suzanne practically since they were babies. Jeremy and Suzanne were pals, but they didn’t think of each other as best friends. Katie considered both of them her best friends, though.

“Jeremy’s looking at some dumb baseball book,” Suzanne explained. “It’s soooo boring!”

She placed her spoon into her bowl of

alphabet soup and fished around. A moment later, she lifted the spoon and smiled.

“Look! I spelled rat!”

Katie looked onto Suzanne’s spoon. Sure enough, the letters R, A, and T were sitting in a sea of light orange water.

Katie giggled.

Suzanne put the spoon in her mouth and made a funny face. “Even a rat wouldn’t eat this stuff,” she said. “It’s terrible—just water with food coloring! It has no flavor at all.”

Katie nodded. “I know what you mean. The food in this cafeteria is awful, and almost everything is made with some sort of meat. All I ever get to eat for lunch is a stale bagel and Jell-O.”

“Oh, come on, Katie. Sometimes they serve gloppy, overcooked macaroni and cheese and old carrot sticks,” Suzanne teased. “You can eat that.”

“Yuck!” Katie exclaimed.

“That’s what you get for being a vegetarian.” Kevin told Katie.

“Did you hear the one about the guy with carrot sticks stuck in his ears?” George interrupted.

Katie shook her head. “No.”

“That’s okay,” George shrugged. “He didn’t hear it either!”

As George laughed at his own joke, Suzanne frowned. “That one was really bad, George,” she said. She turned back to Katie. “The fried chicken nuggets aren’t too bad, and they serve those a lot. I don’t know why you won’t even eat a piece of chicken once in a while.”

“I told you, I won’t eat anything that had a face,” Katie explained.

“But chickens have
ugly
faces,” Kevin pointed out.

“I won’t eat any animals,” Katie insisted. “Of course, that doesn’t leave me with many choices in the cafeteria.”

“Why don’t you ask your mom to pack your lunches?” Miriam Chan suggested as she took a bite of a turkey sandwich her mother had packed.

“She doesn’t have time,” Katie explained. “On the days she opens the store, she leaves for work at the same time I leave for school. Our house is crazy in the mornings.” Katie’s mom worked part time at The Book Nook, a small bookstore in the Cherrydale Mall.

“Well, I’m glad my mom packs my lunch,” Kevin said. “That way, I don’t ever have to face the
Lunch Lady
!” He made a scary face.

“You know what happened to me today?” Suzanne said. “I asked the lunch lady if I could have a banana that wasn’t totally brown and mushy. You know what she told me? She said, ‘If you want fresh fruit, get it from home. Brown mushy bananas are what’s on the cafeteria menu today.’ ”

“She’s such a grump!” Kevin said.

“You’d be grumpy too if you had to dish out smelly, disgusting food all day,” Katie told him.

“That’s true,” Suzanne agreed.

“Speaking of disgusting, look at George!” Zoe Canter exclaimed. “I think I’m gonna throw up!”

Katie looked over at George’s tray. It was totally gross. George had mixed his mashed potatoes and vegetable soup together. Then he’d poured his chocolate milk into the mix. Now he was busy stirring in some orange Jell-O.

“Hey, Katie Kazoo, do you dare me to eat this?” he asked her.

Katie made a face. “Yuck!” she exclaimed.

Suzanne stood and picked up her tray. “Come on, Katie,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before George really does eat that mess.”

As Katie and Suzanne headed toward the playground for recess, Suzanne looked back at George and sighed. “Boys can be so dumb,” she remarked.

Katie shrugged. Some boys could be pretty dumb. But other boys were really cool. Like Jeremy. Katie was about to say that, but she stopped herself. Suzanne got mad whenever Katie talked about Jeremy. Suzanne didn’t like to think that Katie had two best friends.