The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

by Alexandra Robbins

  Joy cycled through fear, excitement, and sadness before her mother told her it was time to get up. A striking girl with large soulful eyes and full lips, Joy brushed her chin-length hair into a tight bun. She slipped into her most proper school attire—best to start afresh at a new school!—and ate a hearty breakfast of fool (an Arabic bean dish), Arabic bread, bacon, and eggs before leaving for the second first day of the rest of her life.

  As she got lost on the way to the attendance office, Joy marveled at the differences she immediately noticed between her old Jamaica school and her new California one. This school was clean. There was no trash on the floor, which was carpeted, to her surprise. Here, decorations plastered the walls and classrooms had TVs and computers, whereas Joy’s old school had only desks, chairs, boards, and plain walls unadorned save for spatterings of graffiti. In Jamaica, students usually remained in one classroom—except for outdoor classes in drama, music, PE, and agricultural science—and the various teachers came to them. In California, the students moved from classroom to classroom. Joy would have to learn how to open a locker by herself.

  This was a lot to take in, coming from a developing country. She loved Jamaica, its vibes and its landscape, if not its poverty and its violence. She wondered if the American school experience would resemble the big party portrayed on the Disney Channel. If so, she wondered if she was ready for that.

  Her heart racing, Joy sat down in her first-period health class as she had been taught in Jamaica: her bag in her lap, feet firmly on the ground, hands at her sides. She had never taken health before. When the teacher announced a test, Joy blinked back the moistness in her eyes—hadn’t she had nightmares about being unprepared for a test? She stared at her paper, scrutinizing unfamiliar terms. Surely her classmates could see her pulse pounding hotly through her skin. They said nothing to her.

  When the teacher told her he would not count her grade, Joy relaxed. She worked diligently until class ended. As soon as the bell rang, students sprang out of their seats. A few of them narrowed their eyes at Joy; she couldn’t help but feel it was because she was the only black person in the room. More than half of the nearly three thousand students at Citygrove, a public high school in an urban valley north of Los Angeles, were Latino, about 30 percent were white, and 12 percent Asian. Only 3 percent were black. Joy remained in her seat, following her Jamaican school’s rules, until the teacher told her it was okay to leave.

  During a break before PE, Joy pulled a box of apple juice out of her drawstring bag and called her mother.

  “Hi, Mommy,” she said.

  “Hi, Joy, how you doing?”

  “I’m fine.” Joy wiped away a rolling tear. She noticed a tall student who sat across from her in second period. She hoped he would say hello, but instead he gazed through her at the wall.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m on break waiting for my next class to start.” With her palm, she tried to catch the rest of the tears before they fell.

  “Do you like the school? How’s your day going so far?”

  What could she say? Everyone here in California had already adjusted to the new school schedule and formed cliques with friends whom they had known for years. Starting over is hard, whether or not you want to do it, she thought. It’s still morning and I want to give up. She promised herself that she would try her best to make this situation work.

  Joy had moved from Jamaica so that her mother and stepfather, whom she loved dearly, could be together after two years of a long-distance relationship. She couldn’t tell her mother that already she yearned to go home. She was exceptionally close to her mother, but Joy didn’t want to tell her anything that would make her feel guilty about moving to the United States for her own happiness.

  The bell rang. Joy wrapped up the conversation, glad that she didn’t have to answer her mother’s question.

  In PE, a stout Asian honors student caught up to Joy and talked at her monotonously. Joy pretended to listen to Natalie while she observed how American students interacted. She was appalled at the differences. At Joy’s Jamaican school the principal had instituted strict rules; for example, students couldn’t embrace a member of the opposite sex for more than forty-five seconds. At Citygrove, students were sexually explicit. She also noticed a distinct difference in the amount of respect afforded to adults. In Jamaica, when a teacher walked into the room, the class stood up and said good morning. Joy could not do that here.

  Joy ate lunch with Natalie at a table in the library, within eyesight of a group of Natalie’s Asian friends, who shot Joy dirty looks. Joy immediately assumed they were angry because Natalie was eating with a black girl instead of with them. She supposed Natalie sat with her merely out of curiosity about the new girl.

  Joy had never before felt like so much of an outsider. Everything about her was different from her classmates: her walk, her speech, her mannerisms, her looks, her clothes. She wasn’t “highty-tighty,” as they would say in Jamaica; she was “just a together person.” It was going to be difficult to be herself here, she could already tell. She wondered if, one day, someone at school would see the whole of her.

  ______

  EMOS, INDIES, SCENES, AND BROS: TODAY’S STUDENT LABELS

  Imagine, for a moment, that like Joy, you are new to your high school and as yet unlabeled. You can manage your classes because they are structured and supervised, and you can survive the five minutes between them by focusing on getting from one place to another. Then you enter the overwhelming landscape of the cafeteria, where unspoken rules and assumptions overshadow what is, in terms of opportunities for social growth, the most important part of the day.

  When the bell rings, you enter the cafeteria, lunch sack in hand. In some schools, preps and populars are virtually indistinguishable; an Alabama middle schooler described, “Preppy people [are] basically like the popular people, but you wear a lot of pink and you’re really hyper and squeaky.” A substantial percentage of the students I interviewed mentioned that the populars shop at prepster stores such as Hollister, Abercrombie & Fitch, and American Eagle when they’re not focused on more high-end designers. (Among students at one Texas high school, a new trend is to keep the price tags on their clothes so classmates can see that they paid full price at a non-discount store.) When a Midwestern eighth grader transferred from private to public school, she felt so pressured to fit in that she not only revamped her wardrobe, but also changed her email address to “hollisterlover.”

  You scan the tables for an empty seat. A few Goths are engaged in conversation in a corner. They might favor boots, spikes, piercings, or dog collars, and dye their hair black or bleach it blond. They’re often perceived as artistic or creative writers. A Texas teacher observed, “We get a lot of Goths in the art department and they are generally very pleasant and quirky children. They are almost always very well-mannered.”

  Nearby, the reclusive emos brood; they are clad in black and therefore commonly but wrongly lumped together with Goths. Emos don’t bother erecting the prep façade of perpetual chipperness. “Emo” is short for emotional; one running joke is, “I wish my lawn were emo so that it would cut itself.” A Maryland freshman observed, “Goths wear all black and talk like they’re depressed and suicidal but they’re really not. Emos wear all black and actually are depressed and cut themselves.”

  In some schools, emo boys might wear tight pants and the girls might wear thick eyeliner. Their hair might be dyed or partially shaved. An emo in Florida said that emos are misunderstood. “People constantly criticize kids for being emo, like we’re trying to keep up an act, but really, the kids who are more normal-looking are the ones who have the most problems,” she said.

  Students can confuse emos with scenes because of the eyeliner, tight pants, and attention to music. Scene is a relatively new label, typically used to describe people who prefer alternative or obscure bands. Scene kids say they are more musically inclined than hipsters. They might be identifiable by a bandana adorning
a choppy haircut or poking out of a pocket, piercings, funky eye makeup, sparkles, perhaps a vintage look, or long bangs swooping over one eye (which a non-scene described as causing them to “have to do a hotshit head toss every five seconds”). Scenes’ hair might be bleached blonde on the surface and dark underneath, or multiple bright tones. Their T-shirts might advertise screamo or techno, hardcore or ska. Scenes, said a Virginia eighth grader, are “the kind of people who recognize every song in the Apple commercials.”

  Scenes are neither punks nor rockers, although some observers might mistake them for either label. Rockers, said an immigrant in Massachusetts who gratefully found a high school identity in the rocker label, “usually have long hair, wear skater shoes (DCs, Etnies, Vans), and listen to rock, alternative, or screamo.”

  In some schools, students use the Japanese word otaku to describe anime connoisseurs. This is a limited version of the true Japanese definition, in which otaku refers to an obsession with any sphere, whether anime, trains, or celebrities. Anime devotees say that otakus are more knowledgeable than the average “anime kid.” Blue, whose gamer label relates to another supposed obsession, compared the difference between otaku and anime kid to the distinction between geek and dork.

  Geeks and nerds also can find roots in perceived obsessions, nerds with academia and geeks with technological gear. Many students describe nerds as the kids with giant backpacks who, as a Hawaii band geek put it, “even if they aren’t tardy, they run while everyone else is walking.” These types of nerds may overlap with AP or IB kids, but fall below “nerdy jocks” and overachievers on the social totem pole. Various debates have tried to pin down the differences between nerds and geeks. Blue once sent me the following unsolicited table representing his distinctions among “normal” students, geeks, nerds, and dorks. (Note: Blue’s table is biased because, as he said, “People call me a geek. A lot.”)

  I generally subscribe to the idea that although both groups are known for smarts and social marginalization, nerds might be inclined toward unusual intellectual pursuits, and geeks toward unusual recreational ones.

  As you traverse the cafeteria, you notice that many students are absent from the room. Just as some overachievers might opt instead to dine in the newspaper office, for example, the band geeks, or “bandies,” might eat in the band practice room. Band geeks are not to be confused with the reportedly quieter orch dorks, also known as “orchadorks.”

  On one side of the cafeteria you see the area that some students refer to as Africa, with Mexico not far away and Asia in another corner. Of these, Asia has the most subdivisions. A West Coast Filipino junior broke the categories down into “smart Asian nerds, normal Asians, white-washed Asians, FOBs (‘Fresh off the Boat: They don’t speak English fluently and wear Asian-style clothes’), Koreans, Cool Asians, and Filipinos.”

  The religious students also subdivide. When students consider classmates to be more spiritual than average, they might stamp them with one of a number of labels, like Jew Crew, Superjews, church girls, or Young Life addicts, after the Christian ministry.

  Today’s students are so label-conscious that there is even a label for students who consider themselves independent of labels. Students described a range of indie characteristics, from “they wear alternative clothes and are obsessed with global warming or they play guitar and draw weird pictures” (Maine), to “the kind of people who are weird on purpose, but aren’t looked at as losers; they’re looked at as ‘individuals’ ” (Hawaii). Indies gravitate toward “underground concepts,” as opposed to “shallow modern culture,” an indie explained to me, which sometimes gets them mistaken for scene kids. Indies may view themselves as descended from beatniks; many cite Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as influences.

  A California junior said she is proud to be indie. “It makes me more sure about myself. I think, ‘Wow, this is what people call me when I’m real with myself,’ ” she said. She described the label as a mix of geek and fashionable artist that manifests in clothes, music, hair, and concise MySpace About Me’s. “Indie kids are into the abstract things in life. You have to be really in the know about things. Being indie means being artistic and finding your own eccentric identity. The name of the game for being an indie kid is to never admit you are one. If you do, it goes against all your beliefs against labeling, thus making you a hypocrite.”

  On the way out of the cafeteria, you pass the gangsters (or “gangstas”), who are often characterized by baggy pants for the guys, tight clothes and hoop earrings for the girls, and nice sneakers for both genders. Gangsters sometimes overlap with ghetto kids, who supposedly listen to rap and hip-hop and act up in class. At some schools, gangsters are synonymous with fighters. A Florida gangster told me that he participated in a fighting ring in middle school that was supervised by adult gang members. Now a high school junior who wishes he had more social connections, it took until this year for classmates to gradually “become aware that I’m not going to eat them or jump them in a dark alley.”

  Described by some students as a mix of gangster, scene, and skater, “bros” comprise another new student label. Often wearing caps with the brim flipped, these devil-may-care partiers might wear polos and khakis in the South or skater clothing in the Southwest. Bro-hos, their female counterpart, might mix skater attire with Abercrombie.

  You go outside. Following the brick wall past a group of skaters, you see the skanky girls, who are rumored to sleep around and dress the part. Out of the shadow of the school building, you spot the tanorexics, the girls who are overly tan and not in the cafeteria, for obvious reasons. In the distance, the druggies, also known as chronics, fade into the woods.

  And then there are the floaters, friendly with a variety of groups but wholly embraced by none. They could squeeze in at the edge of a lunch table without being rebuffed, but there will be inside jokes they don’t get and rehashing of weekend activities they weren’t in on because each group assumed the floaters were hanging out with another.

  By the time the bell rings, you realize you’ve spent the entire period traveling, searching, torn between your appreciation of the freedom from label stereotypes and your inability to shake the feeling that perhaps you wouldn’t so much mind a label, even an outcast label, if only it accompanied a group that made you feel as if you had a place to belong.

  TO BE SURE, ALL of these characterizations are broad, blanket composites (contributed by combinations of students in various areas of the country). That’s what each label supposedly represents. We take mental shortcuts by clustering people together, making assumptions, and forming stereotypes to shrink our social world into a grid that’s easier to process. But why is the perimeter of this grid expanding, with escalating numbers of labels relegated to cafeteria fringe?

  The evolution of these labels may be illuminating. Between emo and indie, labeling is shifting from targeting what a student does—studies hard, dresses darkly, plays a band instrument—to what a student feels. The shifting of labels into personality compartmentalization illustrates the increasing marginalization of students who don’t conform. Suddenly, there are not only acceptable and unacceptable standards of dress, but also standards of being. All of this points to the reason that student bullying is up, self-esteem is down, and social warfare is fierce: The concept of “normal” has narrowed.

  Late Summer to Early Fall

  The Popularity Myth

  Chapter 2

  QUIRK THEORY AND THE SECRET OF POPULARITY

  Throughout years of meeting thousands of students during my interviews and lectures at schools across the country, I noticed that the people who I was most drawn to—whether because of their personalities or because they had genuinely interesting things to say—were rarely part of the in crowd. Whether excluded by their peers or marginalized by their schools, many of them believed that they were socially inadequate. But there was something special about them that made me both want to get to know them better and believe that they would accomplish interestin
g, creative, and perhaps great things as adults.

  This got me thinking. Many of the successful and appreciated adults I know were not part of the mainstream popular crowd at school: the onetime multi-pierced, combat-boot-wearing artsy girl who inspires hundreds of people with her quirky magnetism; the Goth theater geek who turned into a dynamo in the publishing industry; the green-haired high school “freak” who is now a publicist-to-the-stars. Indeed all of these people are thriving because of at least one of the attributes for which they were excluded as teens. The artsy girl is now a beloved art teacher who has made additional money and a wide circle of friends with her creative freelance ventures. The Goth, whom Midwestern classmates picked on because her intense curiosity diverted her interests from parties and sports to museums, classical music, and books, now prospers in Manhattan, where friends and colleagues can relate. The freak, rejected partly for her willingness to be confrontational, used her place on the margins to become a shrewd people observer. “I’ve been able to use that to my advantage in my life and especially in my career,” she said. “I’m good at dealing with a lot of different personalities, so, for that, I’m thankful that I was a friendless freak. Also, I think it all trained me to be a bit of a bulldog, and I like that about me.”

  Meeting current and former student outsiders like these inspired me to develop the concept of quirk theory. Quirk theory is intended to validate students’ inability or refusal to follow the crowd. It serves as a way to explain that, once they leave the school setting, their lives can improve.

  Students are excluded for many reasons that depend, of course, on their environment, their peers, and their school. Each of the main characters in this book was snubbed for assorted combinations of attributes. Danielle, the Loner, was cynical and droll with a disdain for superficiality; she was the ultimate outsider, whose seventh-grade rejection made her want to reject her classmates in return. Noah, the Band Geek (also labeled the Asian), whose discipline and dogged sense of responsibility gave students the impression that he was too serious, was at the same time emotionally expressive, occasionally to the point of melodrama. Joy, the New Girl (also labeled the Foreign Girl and the Black Girl), refused to temper her strong cultural pride or her feistiness. She battled to maintain her precocious focus on the positive even through shockingly trying times.