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

by Alexandra Robbins

  She repeated the question. Blue looked at her quizzically. She ran out of patience, walked to the cutting block, and picked up a knife. “You better start answering me before I hit you with this,” she said. “Don’t be like your father. I hate that about your father.”

  Blue had no idea what she meant. As she waved the knife a foot away from his face, he came to the conclusion that his mother was crazy. This was a relief. He couldn’t take her demands seriously anymore.

  “Uh, you’d draw . . . a lion?”

  “Don’t fucking play with me!” his mother said, still brandishing the knife. “Be more specific!”

  “Uhh . . . catlike features? A tail?”

  “But how would you draw it so if I looked at it I would know it’s a lion?” she asked.

  Baffled, Blue evaded her questions until she left him alone. The issue went against values he strongly believed in. He couldn’t explain art, even if he tried to, because he didn’t think it should be explained. He felt the same way about English class. How could you teach students to write creatively? Art was passion, to Blue. He tried to infuse his activities with feeling, tucking emotion into skating, gaming, drawing, debating. He couldn’t explain to his mother the process of animating art with a little piece of his soul without sounding like he was crazy himself.

  Later that night, Blue’s mother told him, “Here’s the deal. If you don’t get full scholarships and straight As, you’re going straight to Air Force. I don’t give a shit. From now on, if you aren’t home thirty minutes after school, I’m taking away everything. Everything.”

  When his mother told him that if he failed a class this quarter he wouldn’t have enough credits to graduate, he froze in fear. “I don’t care how late you have to stay up tonight. You’re finishing all of this. You are never going out with your friends or having friends over again! Until you graduate with straight As. Bring your computer here. Right now! You’re not getting it back until you graduate. Actually, you’re selling it. Post it! But not tonight. Do your homework. I’ll compare it to your reports to make sure you did everything. Go!”

  Blue went to his room. His mother was still yelling, but her words were just noise to him now. He thought about running away. But I don’t have any friends who care enough. Where would I sleep? What am I going to do? His resentment chilled him. I hate it here. I don’t have my own life anymore.

  Blue’s room was lit only by the glow of the twenty-four-inch monitor he had stared at for eighteen months. I have poured so many emotions into that window, Blue thought.

  “You have one minute until I unplug you!” his mother shouted.

  He closed the browser. That was filled with the tabs of my life, he thought.

  Blue reached around the back of the computer case and dejectedly disconnected the wires. This computer had taken him ages to build perfectly. He rested his hands for a moment on the chassis. The steel was cold—there was not a trace of heat from the hum that he had just silenced, precisely the way he had designed it. He put the computer next to his mother’s desk.

  When he returned to his room, he assembled an old iMac with various spare parts so that he could do his homework. His mother came in to show him his progress report. She had circled his Fs, even though some were from last quarter. She didn’t understand the grading system.

  “Okay,” he said, exhausted by the evening’s strange events. “I’m going to bed.” It was late.

  “Are you done with your homework?”

  “Yes.”

  “No you’re not. You’re lying.”

  I actually did what I’m supposed to do and she doesn’t believe me, Blue thought. “Mom, I can show it to you.”

  “Then go do it again. I know you didn’t do a good job. You never do.”

  “But I want to go to sleep.”

  “Go do it all over again,” she said.

  A week later, Blue was lying in bed, late at night and sleepless, when the sobs came. He hadn’t cried in five years. Even after he was able to stop the tears, he shook and spluttered for at least an hour.

  Blue considered himself an unapologetic romantic, indulging in giddy crushes on people and things, generally in a good mood with great hopes for each day. When he talked to students and Ms. Collins about his troubles at home, they were surprised that he seemed so unflustered by the tatters of his life. “Don’t worry!” he would tell them. “I’m used to it by now!”

  Recently, however, when he was alone, waves of depression caught him unaware. This has never happened to me before, he thought, his chest tightening as dark frantic images crowded out any chance he had of getting to sleep. He was afraid he was falling back into “the cycle of failure” at school, whereby he would establish an impressive momentum, and then his mother would “come in and destroy it with something” so he would have to start over, again and again. I will never be good enough for my mother.

  Blue had started to do his homework at Starbucks with a laptop Ms. Collins had loaned him. Away from home, he explained, “My concentration is freaking sublime. But now that my mom has actually ordered me to do [homework], the plan is tainted. She’s constantly hovering over me in my head, taking all the credit.”

  With only thirty minutes to work outside of home, Blue couldn’t complete his assignments. After his mother went to bed, he stayed up late to work on Ms. Collins’ laptop, which his mother didn’t know he had. Then he would oversleep and get to school late. Arriving an hour late to school became a regular occurrence. His grades plunged. His teachers recommended he emancipate himself, but he thought that doing so would create a new list of uncertainties that he wasn’t prepared to handle.

  Sometimes Blue wondered if his efforts mattered. His backup plan was to go to the University of Hawaii, minor in business, and major in future studies, a new field that fused foresight, philosophy, science, and art to postulate worldviews. But when he looked online, he saw that UH required Algebra 2, which Blue hadn’t taken. Blue worried that he wouldn’t be able to go to college at all.

  Because Blue wasn’t allowed to game at home anymore, he snuck out to the arcade more often. To Blue, gaming was “one of the only times where you only have to focus on one thing.” But, even more than that, “It’s like an anchor. As long as I know it’s there, it’s a part of me. It’s some form of continuity that in my life I desperately need.”

  In bed, alone and scared, Blue thought about his social life. I have never had and will never have that friend I’m looking for. He thought about Jimmy. Blue had discovered that they read the same tech blogs, like Engadget and Gizmodo. But Jimmy wasn’t taking Blue’s hints. Their conversations led nowhere. Blue still didn’t know if Jimmy was gay.

  Blue remembered a recent discussion with Jackson about what would happen if they suddenly woke up and were still in kindergarten. He thought about how much he would like that. He thought about killing himself. He mulled over how he would compose a suicide note. It would have to be short. Direct. Something that left no questions as to why he did it. The suicide note is an act of kindness, really. Why would he do it? Because my life is so undeniably hopeless. I can’t even do things for myself anymore. I’m lonely and am sure the rest of my life will be similar. I would do it because I give up and am tired of trying.

  He thought about his fear of change. He thought about how scared he was of his mother’s threat to ship him to the military. It wasn’t the military itself, or combat, that frightened him. He was terrified that he wouldn’t come out the same person. He knew some people needed the kind of change that the military offered, but Blue liked himself the way he was.

  He believed he was struggling to simply survive. I want what other kids have. I’m tired of being different, he thought. Still, the only person I want to be is me. I can’t let her win. He realized why his immediate response to his mother was one of increasing rebelliousness. He didn’t want to live his life doing things to please other people. I’m gonna push her out, he resolved, so I can feel more of my own self-satisfaction.<
br />
  Not long afterward, Blue’s mother informed him that she had signed him up for ROTC, informed ROTC of the colleges to which he would apply, selected his intended majors of Japanese and engineering, and lined up Air Force and National Guard recruiters. Blue, she said, was going into the military.

  NOAH, PENNSYLVANIA | THE BAND GEEK

  On Leigh’s birthday, Noah could hear her friends singing to her four tables away from the “Asian table” where he miserably stared at a textbook. Noah was trying to move on, but lunch was the hardest period of the day. The cafeteria made him feel like an observer of rather than a participant in the high school experience. “I’m just not using the cafeteria to have fun,” he explained later. “All around me, kids are laughing, joking. I feel like I’m not a part of it. I don’t feel like a high school kid; I feel closer to the teachers monitoring it, working on their grades, glancing to make sure there isn’t any trouble.”

  Even with elections looming, Noah didn’t campaign in the cafeteria. He assumed that even other outcasts didn’t want to be approached during lunch. Outside of the cafeteria, however, he boldly delivered his spiel to classmates: “Hey, what’s up? . . . So, I’m running for class president, and”—here he’d give a quick rundown of his agenda. “Would you be willing to vote for me?” Sometimes people said no, but many students at least listened to what he had to say. Mostly, Noah stuck to campaigning among mainstream students. Some kids he was too afraid to approach, like the drinkers, stoners, Goths, and “prostitots,” Redsen’s term for underclassman girls who appeared to be promiscuous.

  After gym, Noah noticed semi-popular students looking at campaign fliers on the wall. “Hey, guys,” he said. “You know, I’m running for president this year.”

  They turned to him. “Again?” asked one. “Didn’t you run last year? Kent beat you, right?”

  Noah nodded. “Yeah, well, I’ve looked at a lot of cool stuff we can do, and I think I can help make this an awesome year.”

  “Yeah, right,” snorted another student. “Haha, I’m just gonna vote for Kent. You’re way too serious.”

  In study hall, he approached a group of classmates and told them how he could improve class trips and other student privileges. The students nodded. “I hate how the popular kids win,” one said. “They don’t care about anyone else. They just sit there and do nothing.”

  Noah’s opponent was not campaigning, content to sit back and “ride the popularity train,” as Noah put it. Noah had about fifty posters. Kent had zero. Noah set up a Facebook group and spent hours sending messages to classmates. Kent had done none of that. Noah believed he had a decent chance to win the election, much better odds than he had the last two years. Maybe this was the year he could “finally overthrow the popular regime.”

  It didn’t matter to Noah that students didn’t understand some of his posters, such as the one that displayed Noah and two friends dressed as ninjas. SUPPORTED BY THE NINJA APPRECIATION CLUB, the poster read in large letters. Small print at the bottom of the poster read, “If you don’t know about the Ninja Appreciation Club, that’s because it’s made up of ninjas. Duh.”

  On speech day, Noah walked into AP Physics boomeranging between excitement and nervousness. As he navigated to his seat, his classmates called out to him from their perches on top of their desks. “Hey, man, are you ready?” one asked. Another playfully rubbed Noah’s shoulders and tried to get him to jump around like a boxer warming up in the ring.

  As class time wore on, the seniors’ silliness grew infectious. “Hey, can we pregame the speech?” a boy asked the teacher. “Yeah, can we tailgate?” another asked, laughing.

  “No,” replied the teacher, with no hint of emotion.

  One senior suggested body paint. Another found a set of speakers, hooked them to his iPod, and blasted dance music. Finally, the teacher handed Noah his ballot. The seniors crowded around him, teasingly bad-mouthing some of the candidates and cheering for others. “You know, it’d be a shame if Kent met with an ‘accident,’ ” a student joked in a Mafia voice. “Is he going to be around any windows later today?”

  The digital whiteboard blinked on. Kent’s speech aired first. Noah listened attentively as Kent coolly emphasized his experience, having been class president for two years. Then it was Noah’s turn. When Noah had taped the speech the prior week, he was confident; he enjoyed public speaking. Watching himself on-screen now, however, he was bothered by his crooked posture and his messy hair. He picked his speech apart as it aired.

  He wondered what Leigh would have thought of his talk. Presently, Noah and Leigh were no more than cordial acquaintances. He found that the best way to get over Leigh was to be angry at her. Now that he believed reconciliation was impossible, at least the pain of losing her was buried deep.

  On election announcement day, a number of students approached Noah in the halls and during classes. “I voted for you!” many of them said. “Good luck today!” One boy said he had persuaded his entire first-period class to vote for Noah. Their words of encouragement buoyed him. They made him believe he could win.

  At the end of last period, a student appeared on the whiteboard to announce the results. Noah tensed. “Junior class president: Kent—” Noah’s heart slowed to a dull thud as his classmates continued their business, unaffected. Nobody so much as looked at Noah. He had lost again.

  MOST BANDS IN THE Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade either marched or stood still. Redsen was going to do the equivalent of a choreographed halftime performance. The director had given Noah the most important job of the Honor Guards: He had to maneuver a modified golf cart decorated like a taxi through the two hundred marching students to transport a performer to the other side of the moving band.

  Noah sat in the golf cart on the side of the parking lot, spacing out as the band rehearsed the song, measure by measure. Noah wouldn’t have to do anything until the band played through the entire song. At the appropriate cue, he was supposed to drive the taxi through a tight gap in the crowd with less than a foot of space on either side; if he was too early or too late, the choreography was such that he wouldn’t be able to make it. Sometimes, when he knew he wasn’t going to fit the car into the gap in time, he bailed, stopping or turning to avoid hitting someone. He wouldn’t be able to bail at Macy’s.

  Rather than pay attention to the rehearsal, Noah thought about Leigh, who stood out of sight behind dozens of bandmates. He had recently had a revelation. One of the reasons he had been so devastated by the breakup was because Leigh once told him he was her best friend. Now that he was trying to move on, he couldn’t imagine life without her in any role. They had never been friends; they had gone straight from acquaintanceship to romance. What if the person I’m supposed to be is her best friend? he wondered, swallowing his anger.

  Noah thought he could use another friend; classmates were picking on him again. In AP Calculus, Frederick had reminded him that varsity swimming season began in a week. “I can’t wait to cut your hair,” he added, smirking. He turned to the teacher. “Hey, can we cut his hair in here?”

  “No, Frederick,” the teacher replied. “He’s like Samson. If you cut his hair, he’ll lose his powers of math.” Noah laughed with the class.

  Noah had avoided Frederick in the halls and at lunch. In class, Frederick’s comments were largely innocuous, because the teacher was in the room. The presence of adults didn’t deter other kids from making rude comments, however. A senior in Noah’s computer class constantly made fun of Noah’s ethnicity. This week he had said, “Are you sure you can read that board? Your eyes are pretty squinted.” The senior pulled up the corners of his eyes with his fingers.

  “When I look in the mirror, my eyes don’t look like that,” Noah retorted, copying the gesture. “Maybe you should stop before people start making comments to you.”

  Now that swimming was about to resume, Noah wondered what the season had in store for him. His top swimming goal was to qualify for the district championships. Noah liked swimmin
g, if not all of his teammates, but the beginning of swim season inevitably meant the end of band, his favorite school activity.

  Many of the bandies were ready for football season to end. They wanted their Friday nights back. During the most recent football game, which Redsen won by multiple touchdowns, some band members cheered when the opposing team scored. Word spread to the football players, who angrily blamed the entire band and berated the bandies’ disloyalty.

  A few periods after calculus, Noah’s gym classmates had chatted with a handful of football players about the upcoming game. One player said, “This Friday is going to be close. Maybe if the band”—here he shoved Noah, who stumbled a few feet—“didn’t cheer for the other team, it’d be easier.” The populars in the room cackled. This happened several more times. Noah didn’t bother explaining that he wanted the football players to keep winning so that he could cling to band season for as long as possible. The football team lost the next game.

  Fortunately, Noah had other good things going on in his life. In mid-autumn, Redsen had hosted its annual speech competition. Noah spoke about the advantages of certain expensive swimsuits that, using increased compression technology, could reduce swimmers’ times by an average of 3 to 5 percent. Noah’s speech had won first place.

  Noah jolted back into the present. The band seemed to be playing through. He saw the gap twenty feet ahead of him. Noah panicked. His head spun as he weighed his choices: drive now, and fast, into the spot that the band already expected him to be in, or wait, risking the director’s wrath because he wasn’t in position.

  In the split second he had to make his choice, Noah scrutinized the rapidly closing gap and thought he could squeeze into it. He shot forward, more quickly than usual. Belatedly, he realized that the mallet player who was supposed to be on Noah’s left by now was one step too far forward, followed by the rest of his line. The hole wasn’t big enough. As Noah hurtled toward it, marchers closed in behind him, blocking his reverse. “Stop! Stop, stop! Don’t march!” Noah yelled. No one heard him over the music.