Every kid knows the feeling of standing at the edge of the room, hoping someone will wave them in. I knew it early. I was bullied as a boy for the way I looked, and I learned to carry it quietly. You get good at that. You tell yourself it's fine. It wasn't.
Then one day a friend sat down next to me. That was all. He didn't fix anything or say the perfect thing. He just sat with me. We are still friends more than forty years later. That one small kindness is the reason I write.
For a long time I didn't know what to do with any of that. Life moved on. I became a manager at a movie theater, and most of my staff are teenagers. And here is the thing nobody warns you about: the cliques don't end when school does. I would watch it happen on a shift. The same little circles, the same kids left standing just outside of them. One night I watched a young employee get left out, and my own childhood came back to me all at once. I went home and started writing.
That night became The Grumble-Gator's Greatest Raft.
Now here is the part people ask me about. I could have written the easy version. The bully shows up, the bully is mean, and in the end the bully gets what he deserves and everyone cheers. We have all read that book. But that is not the story I lived, and it is not the one I believe in.
Because the truth is, the grumpy one at the edge of the pond is usually a lonely one. Barnaby splashes and roars and hides Toby's pebbles. He is not a nice character when we meet him. But he is not a lost cause either. When Toby offers him a kind word instead of a hard shell, something in Barnaby changes. By the end he is not defeated. He is different. He becomes the best raft-builder in Sunny-Stream Pond.
I wanted a book where the bully becomes the hero because I have seen it happen in real life. People can change. A kind word can reach a kid you had given up on. Second chances are real, and they are worth writing about.
There is a line in the book that my own father could have said: "A fist can break a branch, but a kind word can plant a forest." That is the whole idea in one sentence. You do not have to hit back to be strong. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is be kind to the person who was unkind to you.
I write for two kids at once. The one who feels alone at the edge, and needs to know a friend can still come. And the one who has been unkind, and needs to know it is never too late to start again.
If that sounds like a child in your life, I hope you will pull Barnaby and Toby off the shelf and read it together. And if you are a teacher or a parent looking for gentle ways to talk about kindness, I have free printables and a classroom kit on my site, ready whenever you need them.
With the help of Heavenly Father, anything positive is possible. I believe that. I have a raft full of proof.
Cory