Big Nate Lives It Up

Principal Nichols saddles Nate with showing new student Breckenridge Puffington III around P.S. 38, convinced the two will hit it off. Nate isn't so sure — Breckenridge seems like a total fun-sponge, forever doodling plants instead of anything interesting. But as Nate spends more time with him, he starts to realize Breckenridge is oddly familiar.

It turns out Breckenridge was one of the kids who bullied Nate years earlier — and working through that history, awkwardly and honestly, becomes the real story behind Principal Nichols's forced friendship assignment. The seventh entry in Lincoln Peirce's Big Nate series wraps its usual doodle-strewn humor around a story about acceptance and forgiveness.