Reem Faruqi: My name is Reem Faruqi, and I'm the author of I Can Help. It's illustrated by Mikela Prevost, and it's published by Eerdmans Books. This story was really based on my personal experience, so in the book, the character's pretty young, I would guess maybe first grade. But this story actually happened to me in eighth grade where this book is basically told from the, I don't want to say bully, but yeah, technically the story is told from the bully's perspective or basically somebody who did something wrong and they felt a lot of regret for later. And I remember in eighth grade there was this boy who needed a little extra assistance and I was seated next to him. And I remember getting along with him and helping him out, with just regular little activities.

I remember one day these two popular girls came up to me and they said, "Hey, do you help him? He looks so weird." And almost sort of hinting that you could be popular or a better person if you just sort of ignored him. And I remember feeling really torn up inside about it. And then, I remember going back to class and being really mean to him, really standoffish and just sort of ignoring him. And I remember just feeling so bad about it even to this day because he was just so crushed and so disappointed in me, and I was more disappointed in myself for not helping him.

I think the biggest challenge was just sort of reliving those emotions. I wrote this story, I think the quickest out of all my picture books and out of all the edits, I feel like this was almost the easiest one to type out. I remember, I wrote it out, it took less than an hour, and I was like, "Oh, I'm done." And it just felt a lot more polished than the other books I started out with, just very few words, but I think the challenge was making sure that we portrayed Zahra correctly and Kyle correctly, and just, I didn't want to, I guess, hurt anyone in the process, but rather just show them as fairly and as accurately as we could.

And I feel like Mikela, the illustrator, did such a beautiful job with that. She added a lot of white space in the back of the book, and when I asked her, "How did you come up with that?" And she specifically said she added the white space so that you could process the emotions a little better. So, I think just this book is so heavy on the emotion, and I think that was probably the most challenging part. It's not as say joyful as my other books, but it is hopeful and I hope that readers know that.

I guess I want to tell my readers to really pay attention to every interaction they have with other children, students, people around them. Because if you're being mean to someone just because of peer pressure, you might not regret it right now, but you will probably regret it later and maybe even for the rest of your life. So, really try to be kind to people around you.

This is the beginning of the picture book, I Can Help.

Just when the leaves are thinking of changing colors to look like the spices nana cooks with, school starts. There are 18 kids in my class. One of them is Kyle.

And I'm going to skip to the middle of the book to read a page.

"Zahra, I notice you aren't helping Kyle today," says Ms. Underwood. I want to answer her, but I don't want my mean voice to come out. I blink the right amount of blinks so I don't cry.