I’m way, way behind in telling this one, but here’s a story about bullying that I’m smiling as I’m writing.

Being the victim of bullying brings with it all kinds of trouble–depression, isolation, loneliness, self-blame. But there are some very cool findings in the bullying literature on the one friend phenomenon. What the research shows is that kids who are bullied, even those who are victimized day after day, tend to fare relatively well in terms of psychological outcomes like depression and loneliness if they have just one good friend that they can rely on for support and companionship. One supportive friend can act as a buffer against those terrible feelings. You can imagine that–how much of a difference it is to go from zero friends to one. It can mean the world.

So imagine going from zero friends, from being bullied every day for years, from seeing your peers wear bracelets that say they hate you and seeing the “I hate you” pages on the internet–to having literally thousands of supporters, with letters to prove it. It happened to a girl named Olivia, and it happened because two sisters who heard her story decided to remind her that not every teenager is petty and cruel.

Emily and Sarah Buder read a newspaper story describing Olivia Gardner’s school life. Horrified, they organized a letter-writing campaign and began with the modest goal of collecting 50 encouraging letters to send to Olivia, who lived in a nearby town. Within weeks, they had 500 letters–and then more and more. The letters were from fellow victims, former victims, even former bullies who regretted their terrible behavior. The letters underscored how long-lasting the effects of bullying can be–both for victims, who never forget what it felt like, and for bullies themselves, who spend remorseful years trying to undertstand why they acted so cruelly.

The Buder sisters and other teens like them are my superheroes. And I don’t mean because they did Something Big to help Olivia–because they did something. It just takes one friend, one connection, to help a child who feels like nobody cares. This is where my scientist self and my mom self get to high-five: I read the research about having just one friend, and then I see a story like this, and I’m reminded of the kinds of things I want to teach my daughter.

Many of Olivia’s letters have been published together in a book called Letters to a Bullied Girl. You can browse through some of the letters on the publisher’s website–definitely worth a few minutes of your time.