By Trudy Ludwig
A boy figures out how to answer a classmate whose put-downs always come wrapped in "just kidding."
D.J. dreads sitting near Vince. Vince is quick and funny, but the jokes keep landing on D.J. There's a crack about his grades one minute and a shove passed off as goofing around the next, and every time D.J. flinches, Vince grins and says, "Just kidding! Can't you take a joke?" So D.J. stays quiet, sure that if he speaks up the other boys will decide he's the one with the problem. It takes his dad, his older brother, and a teacher who doesn't wave it off to help him see the pattern for what it is. Little by little he finds words that name it out loud, so "just kidding" stops handing Vince a free pass.
The hard part of this kind of teasing is that it's built to be deniable. Someone needles you, and the second you object they act wounded and call you touchy, so you learn to swallow it. Ludwig draws that exact squirm, and then she gives the book its real value: D.J. gets actual lines and moves to try, and he's allowed to fumble a few before one works. For a seven-to-ten-year-old, that turns a slippery, powerless feeling into something with a name and a couple of things to do about it.