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

by Alexandra Robbins

  Joy expected that making friends would take time, particularly because she didn’t believe in cliques and didn’t want to be a part of one. “People will always exclude me; it’s up to me to do things on my own terms and become the person I want to be,” she explained. “I don’t believe that everyone should like me. That’s nonrealistic. If you don’t wanna be my friend, I ain’t gonna cry over you, doll.” Instead she hoped to try to talk to individuals from various groups to find a friend.

  The day after Natalie abandoned her, Joy decided to skip the cafeteria and eat in her next period class—biology—where she could spend time on quiet introspection.

  In October, Joy’s parents and teachers switched her to AP English. In order to make the change, Joy had to switch PE classes, too, which weighed on her because another class shift meant being the new girl all over again. She was dismayed to learn that she was the only black person in a class of fifty students, most of them Mexican.

  While she kept up a brave front at school, at home Joy had cried at least three times a day since she first landed at Citygrove. She cried in the shower, while walking to and from school, when she talked to her Jamaican friends, and before she went to sleep. She felt stuck. To her peers, she was neither white enough nor black enough. She didn’t even fit into her classes; she was too advanced for “regular” classes, but refused to succumb to the hyper-competitive undercurrent of her AP classes. She couldn’t see herself belonging to either group socially. She found the “regular” students to be unambitious and pessimistic about their future, and the AP kids to be “lifeless people who are willing to step on others to get ahead.”

  Joy tried to forget her troubles as her new PE class ran the mile for the first time. She maintained a brisk pace despite the heat, ahead of all of her classmates. On her fourth of six laps, Joy was the only student still running. Behind her, classmates either walked or jogged, fanning themselves in the stagnant air.

  “Jamaica!” a boy bellowed. “Usain Bolt! Asafa Powell!” Joy turned around—and suddenly felt a ripping sensation near her pelvis. I can’t stop now, she thought. At the next lap, she mentioned the pain to her teacher, who told her to walk. She slowed down and the pain knifed her in the groin. “Joy!” the teacher said. “Go sit on the bleachers.”

  Joy hobbled to the bleachers and tried to stretch her leg. As her classmates finished their laps, they left her alone in the sun. After a while, an Indian girl with glasses, braces, and a thick, sloppy ponytail sat down beside her.

  “Hey, are you done with the mile? Wow, you’re fast. I was watching you. You’re a really good runner!”

  Joy smiled. “I’m not that good. Thanks, though! I hurt my groin, so I had to stop.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll get better. Hey, where are you from? You have a different accent.”

  “I’m from Jamaica. I’m Joy, what’s your name?”

  “Oh, you probably won’t remember it. It’s Nishantha, but call me Anisha.”

  “That’s an interesting name! Don’t worry, I’ll try to remember.”

  “Yeah, well, at least I won’t get mixed up with anyone else,” Anisha said.

  The girls laughed. When the bell rang, Anisha helped Joy walk to the locker room.

  Joy was relieved that finally someone genuine had reached out to her. Within a week, Anisha and Joy were practically inseparable at school.

  Chapter 3

  WHY ARE POPULAR PEOPLE MEAN?

  WHITNEY, NEW YORK | THE POPULAR BITCH

  Whitney had ignored a cold for about a week, hoping it would go away before Saturday. A guy she had dated from another school invited her to a party he was throwing with a friend and told her to bring other girls. Whitney loved the power trip of being the only popular who knew the guys. She looked forward to this party for days.

  At lacrosse practice on Saturday, Whitney trailed behind her teammates, wheezing uncharacteristically as they ran wind sprints around the field. When the team was halfway done with the last lap, Whitney’s breath whistled and her throat closed. She fell to the ground, on the brink of a blackout. The other girls screamed for the coach. Whitney put her hands over her head and tried to take deep breaths, thinking, I wish Luke were here. Although she had treated him like dirt lately, she knew that if she called him, he’d come running. That was power too. But no one other than Luke would have guessed that she was engaged in a miserable inner struggle between the person she was and the person she wanted to be.

  Whitney supposed she had started acting like a mean girl during the sixth grade, when she was the queen bee. She was cruel to her classmates, shooting them wicked looks, creating drama, acting phony, and feeding off of their adulation. She knew that students disliked her, but she didn’t care. She thought she was better than everyone else. She was on top of the world.

  Then things changed. During one assembly, Whitney’s clique sat on the top row of the bleachers behind two “loser girls.” One of the girls said with a thick lisp to a popular girl, “I like your earringthss.” Whitney’s friends burst out laughing. They turned to each other and exclaimed, “I like your earringthss!” with obnoxiously exaggerated lisps. The girl wept. The preps looked at Whitney strangely for not joining in, but she just couldn’t. She wanted to give the girl a hug.

  When Whitney realized how vicious she had become, she tried to be nicer to people and yelled at her friends when they were mean. The clique didn’t like this new behavior and cast Whitney out of the group. Depressed for the last two months of seventh grade, Whitney tried to cope with having no friends. Eventually she decided to conform to avoid ending up alone.

  Once again, she strutted around school, acting superior, manipulating her peers. In short order, students became afraid to upset her. Common knowledge warned that if you angered Whitney, she would exert all of her energy to try to ruin your life. She would spread nasty false rumors about you, steal your boyfriend, and then turn all of your friends against you. Whitney continued to do these things until partway through freshman year.

  “I hated how I wasted energy like that. I hate who I am. I hate that I feel I can’t trust my friends,” Whitney said now, as a senior. “I suck up to the queen bee so I’m on her good side. No one understands I do it out of fear. I’m a bitch because I, like, have to be tough so people are afraid to kick me out and hurt me again. I would rather have people be a little intimidated by me than take advantage of me. But I always end up being meaner than I want. I just want to be able to be nice and not lose all my friends again because at lunch I’d have no one to sit with, on weekends I would have no one to hang out with. I would be completely alone with seriously no friends. I’d be a loser, and I’m deathly afraid of that. Basically, I’m friends with my friends due to lack of options. I’m forced to be.”

  Terrified of being left out again, Whitney had recently resumed dressing like the populars, digging in the back of her closet to find urban prepwear that looked like her friends’. Now it was all H&M, all the time—vests, cardigans, zip-ups—with Hollister jeans and Uggs. Whitney desperately hoped that at least on the most superficial level, wearing the same clothes would reforge her connection with the group. She also repressed her faith. Catholicism was important to Whitney, but Bianca was an atheist who always blabbered about “how stupid religion is.” So Whitney kept her beliefs under wraps and bit her lip when Bianca assailed religion. Popularity required those kinds of sacrifices.

  She pandered to Bianca more often, inviting her out and showering her with compliments. That’s the way it was with Bianca: If you wanted what she considered to be the enormous favor of her friendship, you’d best have something to offer in return. Whitney tried bringing up memories of good times they’d had as a group. She was mean to the people whom the populars wanted her to be mean to. In the library one afternoon, she found an online photo of an overweight, sweaty classmate. Whitney felt bad for her, but still summoned the populars to the computer to make fun of the girl.

  Whitney’s most difficult compromise was a
llowing her friends to persuade her to push Luke away. “He’s so ugly,” Giselle said. “You can do so much better than a loser like him. You need a guy more fit like you.”

  “I don’t know why you hang out with him,” Madison said. “When he texts you, just be really short and put a period after everything you say.”

  As soon as Whitney returned from the hospital after lacrosse practice, she IMed Bianca. Her doctor had sent her to the hospital for X-rays of her lungs and diagnosed a combination of bronchitis and severe walking pneumonia.

  Whitney: Yo, I don’t think I’m going to go out tonight.

  Bianca: Dudeeeeee. Why? (Bianca knew full well that Whitney was sick.)

  Whitney: Son, I have pneumonia lol. I’m like dying.

  Bianca: Whitney, it’s your senior year, you HAVE to go. I’m not going to let you miss out on ONE SINGLE PARTY your senior year. You have to go out.

  Whitney hesitated. For the populars, everything revolved around their party schedule. If there was going to be a day off from school, the populars absolutely had to socialize the night before. Partying was more than just a way to kick back. It was a way to manage and monitor the preps’ pecking order. Who was in control? Bianca. How did she exert her power? With the party car. Whitney’s group would pile into one car to go to any party thrown by someone outside of the clique. Only five people could fit into a car, but there were, at any given time, eight or nine populars. Bianca automatically got a place in the car. On Friday and Saturday afternoons, the preps raced to talk to Bianca to battle for one of the four remaining spots, each not caring who was excluded as long as she got to the party. Once, Whitney was left out of the car only because she had spent the day with her parents and didn’t have a chance to catch Bianca. It was that clear-cut. If you didn’t get a place in the car, you couldn’t go to the party. (As Whitney sarcastically remarked, “God forbid we take two cars, ever . . .”) Whitney frequently offered to be the designated driver just to claim a spot in the car.

  Whitney wavered when Bianca pushed her to attend the party, even if going would compromise her health, because she would automatically get a seat in the party car. One party won’t make me any sicker, right? she thought. She texted Luke for advice. He told her she was an idiot for contemplating going out, but that she should decide based only on how sick she felt and not on her friends’ opinions. “Think for yourself,” he texted.

  Whitney: Dude I just got back from the hospital and got X-rays. There is no way I can go anywhere tonight.

  Bianca: You’ll be fine. It’s your senior year. You don’t have to drink.

  Whitney: You met the guys a couple times. It will be fine if you go.

  Bianca: Oh, I’m totally not worried about you not going because you’re the only one that knows them . . . I know them too.

  Whitney rolled her eyes. Bianca didn’t know them; she was trying to make Whitney feel less important. Whitney decided that she was too tired to go. “Exactly, you’ll be fine,” she said. “Go and have fun.”

  The following week, Whitney found Bianca and Giselle in the middle of a conversation about the party. They mentioned Chelsea.

  “Oh, Chelsea went?” Whitney asked casually.

  “Yeah, we love Chelsea!” Bianca replied.

  Since when?! Whitney thought. She said later, “You love drama within cliques as long as it doesn’t involve you, because, like, everyone runs to you. But it’s dangerous when people start getting close because you never know if you’ll be replaced and left out.” Just as Whitney feared, someone had taken her spot in the party car. Unnerved, she said nothing.

  In the cafeteria, Whitney was sitting with the populars, as usual, when Chelsea said, “Oh my God, turn around, turn around.” The entire group turned to stare. “That really fat girl’s crack is hanging out! That’s so disgusting.”

  One of the guys said, “Damn, I’d like to tap that.” Another said, “Big girls need lovin’ too!”

  The girl pivoted, obviously having heard the populars talk about her. Like the rest, Whitney’s efforts to muffle her laughter were merely halfhearted.

  ______

  UNDERSTANDING THE POPULAR BITCH

  Many of the descriptions of populars that students nationwide reported to me sounded like this: Populars, said a Maryland public school senior, are “the girls who could model in their free time, have the best clothes, shiniest hair, coolest parties, and seem totally together. The guys who have that ‘sweet at life’ confidence, a lazy arrogance you can’t help but admire because they look the way they do. These people play sports, are very rich, have had their cliques formed since middle school, and you look at them and wonder, ‘What exactly did you do in a past life to deserve all this?’ ” Popular students seem to have it all, and what they don’t have, classmates often attribute to them anyway. Then why are so many popular kids so mean?

  Meanness can be divided into two categories: overt aggression and alternative aggressions, which include social aggression (such as excluding) and relational aggression. Relational aggression, also known as relational bullying, covers ignoring, spreading rumors, shunning, eye rolling, glaring, snickering, and sneering. It is intended to harm by damaging or manipulating others’ self-esteem, social status, or friendships.

  For at least half a century, experts considered students who engaged in aggressive behavior to be socially incompetent. This was because researchers measured a child’s rates of aggression alongside rankings of sociometric popularity, or how much other students liked him. Naturally, students didn’t much like those who verbally or physically beat the crap out of them. But when researchers began measuring aggression alongside perceived popularity, they found an undeniably strong link. Recent studies conclude that aggressive behaviors are now often associated with high social status. Psychologists no longer view aggression as a last-resort tactic of social misfits. Now they see aggression as a means toward social success. (This does not, however, mean it is admired. As author Daniel Goleman wrote in Social Intelligence, “being manipulative—valuing only what works for one person at the expense of the other—should not be seen as socially intelligent.”)

  Some researchers describe a “popularity cycle”: Initially, a girl rises through the ranks to popularity. She might stay popular for a while, but at some point, she could be perceived as too popular. Maybe she’s getting too many perks, drawing too much attention from too many boys, or distancing herself too far from old friends. At that point, students either in the popular clique or outside of it might turn on her out of resentment, causing her status to plunge.

  A girl can also provoke such resentment by appearing to think she’s “all that.” At some schools, experts say, a quick path to losing popularity is to act as if you perceive yourself to be popular. In an anthropological study, Ball State University professor Don Merten observed, “Loss of popularity in this manner was especially disconcerting in that being labeled stuck-up used the ‘force’ (to use a judo metaphor) of a girl’s popularity against her to invert her status. Therefore it was precisely when a girl enjoyed popularity that she was most vulnerable to being labeled stuck-up. . . . Any action that suggested that a girl considered herself popular, however, could be taken as an indication that she thought she was superior and hence was stuck-up. Yet to be popular and be unable to express it, and thereby not enjoy it, was less than satisfying. Thus, these girls faced a cultural dilemma that is common for women: They were being implicitly asked to encompass both aspects of a cultural dichotomy—to seek popularity, but when they were successful, to pretend they were not popular.” This attempt to be popular without admitting it is similar to the way students battle for top grades without wanting to confess that they’re competing hard. Or how young women might be expected to appear virginal but, at the same time, put out.

  How can girls demonstrate their popularity while still managing to keep it? Merten studied this exact problem. His answer: Be mean. Some girls, of course, can be both popular and nice. But niceness involves treati
ng other students as equals, while the goal of perceived popularity is to climb recognizably to the top of the social hierarchy, an aim that contradicts the idea that others are equal. Many popular girls aren’t nice to lower-status students because they are concerned about undermining their own popularity. Treating other cliques as inferior creates a social distance that allows popular girls to feel exalted and invulnerable. Meanwhile the cruelty, ignoring, gossip, and exclusion are expressions of power and dominance.

  Merten argued that students would rather be viewed as mean than stuck-up because stuck-up girls could lose their popularity, while mean girls generally didn’t. I asked Merten why a girl with a reputation for being mean could avoid the reputation of being stuck-up. He explained that as a cultural anthropologist, he peered through a lens that focused more on cultural basis than on psychology. “Whereas being stuck-up seems to have nothing positive about it, being mean does. In athletics, having a ‘bit of a mean streak’ is often taken as a compliment,” Merten said. “In the context of middle school, being mean also involves mobilizing peers to support one’s efforts, [which is] also an enactment of one’s popularity. Moreover, it has the effect of intimidating girls who may be inclined to try to undercut one’s popularity. Finally, the girls I write about are not mean to everyone. Often they can be nice to people who don’t threaten them.”