What does friendship look like?

At the Boothbay Harbor home of Richard and Melanie Green, it’s the shaved head of 16-year-old Allison Barter.

The daughter of Mark and Leslie Barter of East Boothbay is best friends with Melanie Green’s daughter Chanel Stoddard.

“They’re like sisters,” Leslie Barter said.

“Two peas in a pod,” Stoddard’s mother added.

In early January, Stoddard, 20, began quickly losing her hair to chemotherapy treatment for stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Hair was coming out in clumps, even when she would lean forward.

The chemo didn’t get the last word on Stoddard’s hair loss. After a long cry in the bathroom with her mother, the 2012 Boothbay Region High School graduate took control over the treatment’s side effect by choosing to shave her head. Allison Barter would soon make the same choice, in support of her friend.

“It was just so she’d feel more comfortable,” the Boothbay Region High School junior said. “To lose your hair if you don’t want to, I don’t think it would be easy,” she said.

Leslie Barter had no problem with her daughter’s plan.

“I said, ‘It’s totally up to you. It’s only hair,’ ” the teen’s mother said. She’d already gotten used to her daughter’s other fashion statements with hair, such as dyeing it. But this time, it wasn’t about fashion.

“I’m so proud of her, really. I’m proud of them both, two very strong young women,” Barter said.

Stoddard’s grandfather, Tom Campbell of Boothbay Harbor, said he was proud, too, of the strength his granddaughter and her friend have shown. The two families sat together January 20 in the living room of the Green home off Lakeview Road. The Greens’ Yorkshire terrier Brady-Duncaan made the rounds for pats, but mostly stuck close to Stoddard.

The dog moped through his stay at Tom and Belinda Campbell’s home while Stoddard was in Maine Medical Center for two weeks in December. When Allison Barter took him to visit Stoddard in the hospital, he jumped onto the bed, kissed Stoddard’s face and then laid his head on the pillow next to her shoulder, Melanie Green said.

“I think he was hoping that when Allison left, she would forget him,” Green said.

He followed Stoddard around the house for days after she came home, and still keeps a close watch on her.

“He spells Duncaan with two “A’s” now,” Stoddard said as a reporter took down the dog’s name.

Except for one BRHS teacher and another student, Barter didn’t tell anyone at school that they would soon be seeing her without hair. Since the shaving on January 7, the reaction to her new look has, in great part, been supportive.

“Everyone likes it, and they think it’s pretty nice of me,” even students she hardly knows, she said.

“But there were these two guys that were staring at me, so I just asked if they had anything to say to me...,” Barter said.

“They didn’t.”

Stoddard said her friend’s decision to get her head shaved meant a lot.

The two met a few years ago, in a youth group at the Barters’ church, Boothbay Harbor United Methodist Church.

The church now includes Stoddard in its prayers; she’s also in the prayers of a Florida church: Stepfather Richard Green’s mother, Wiscasset resident Anita Green (daughter of one-time Red’s Eats owner Gladys Light) takes part in a bible study group while she and husband Harry Green winter in Florida.

The Wiscasset couple has been sending Stoddard “care packages” of stuffed animals, candy and bubblegum, her mother said. The gum helps with Stoddard’s taste loss and nausea that have come with the chemotherapy.

She goes through 20 to 30 gumballs a day.

Drawing, horseback riding and playing the video game Grand Theft Auto also help her through her fight with cancer. She’s undergoing 12 weeks of chemotherapy, to be followed by six weeks of radiation treatment, all at Maine Children’s Cancer Program in Scarborough.

Itching that Stoddard’s mother said turned out to be early signs of her daughter’s cancer began in March 2013. The itching stopped over the summer. It returned in October.

Stoddard went to several dermatologists and other doctors. “No one figured it out,” her mother said.

On November 29, after a week of not feeling well, Stoddard developed severe abdominal pain that the family first suspected was appendicitis. Weeks of testing led to the Hodgkins Lymphoma diagnosis on December 11.

Stoddard has a mass inside her right lung, and spots of cancer on her kidneys and liver.

“The itching has stopped, so (the doctors) think the chemo is working,” Melanie Green said. Retesting will come later in the treatment.

Belinda Campbell has started a bank account for donations toward the gas for her granddaughter’s trips to Scarborough for treatment, Melanie Green said. To donate, make checks payable to Belinda Campbell and write “Chanel’s Account” on the memo line. Mail to: The First, P.O. Box 493, Boothbay Harbor, ME 04538. Donations may also be dropped off at the bank’s Boothbay Harbor, Wiscasset or Damariscotta branches, Green said.