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

by Alexandra Robbins

  The line to Noah’s right completed its maneuver and began moving toward Noah. He knew a collision was inevitable unless he continued to attempt to squeeze into the gap. He slammed on the accelerator, trying to scream through the din of the instruments for the drum majors to cut, as he careened toward the space that was shrinking by the beat. He almost made it. “Look out!” someone hollered.

  Half of the band, unseeing, continued to advance toward Noah, while the other half marched in place, staring with horror as the front bumper hit a trombonist’s leg below the knee, knocking him over. “Oh my God!” someone yelled. “What the hell are you doing?” another bandie screamed. From behind, Noah heard other shouts. “What’s going on?!” “Is he okay?”

  Noah stared in shock, terrified. He had just hit one of his best friends with a golf cart. The director cut off the band, made sure the trombonist was okay, then came over to talk to Noah. When the director ascertained that nothing had been damaged save Noah’s ego, he resumed the rehearsal. They only had an hour to practice before the school needed the parking lot available.

  On the next band bus ride, Noah saw Leigh sitting near the back of the bus. He recalled something his father had said: “Push yourself into conversations and become more involved.” He plopped down next to Leigh and cheerily talked about every subject that came to mind, made her laugh with jokes and songs, and otherwise tried to show her he cared. He tried to be her friend.

  Over the next several days, Noah and Leigh talked on the phone for hours. They went out for a friendly dinner. After a recycling presentation, Noah and Leigh had breakfast together before school. At the end of the week, Leigh asked him to get back together. Elated, Noah agreed.

  DANIELLE, ILLINOIS | THE LONER

  At the first National Honor Society meeting of the year, an officer told the club about two girls with disabilities who spent their days at Stone Mill and looked forward to having student visitors. “Not very many people are able to do it,” the officer said. “It can be kind of weird for some people.” Danielle liked the idea that most students couldn’t work with the girls. She was up for the challenge.

  When Danielle walked into Emily and Viv’s classroom for the first time, she was nervous. The sisters were both in wheelchairs. Emily, a short, round-faced girl in pajamas, perched on a platform where a machine massaged her back. Viv, taller and skinnier than her sister, wore a dressy scarf around her neck. One other student sat in the room, a prep whom Danielle knew from sophomore year English. Danielle sat next to her. They exchanged uncomfortable looks.

  The sisters’ aide reviewed a long list of guidelines about how to act around the girls. Neither girl could see or talk, and both of them had hypersensitive hearing. Visitors had to enter and exit the classroom quickly so the closed door blocked out the sounds of students in the hallway.

  Danielle returned the following week. When she made spin art with Viv, she had to hold the girl’s hand on the button to rotate the device. Viv’s hand was limp, and Danielle, who had never been around people with handicaps, was apprehensive about touching her. She imagined that Viv’s hand felt like a dead person’s hand. Danielle didn’t like touching people to begin with, which made it that much more awkward to touch a stranger, let alone an unpredictable stranger. Viv’s hand kept falling off of the button—Danielle assumed because she wasn’t enthusiastic about spin art—so Danielle held the button down herself.

  Despite her discomfort, Danielle realized it was a relief to spend time with the sisters and their aide. She didn’t have to force herself to make inane small talk; she could talk about whatever interested her, and the aide told stories about the girls. Also, the hush was nice. The sisters’ classroom was a refreshing oasis amid the superficial pandemonium of high school halls.

  It seemed as if every year Danielle grew quieter; and the less she talked, the more she withdrew from people. She wasn’t sure why this year she was having a particularly difficult time connecting with classmates. Sometimes Danielle’s mother suggested she had a superiority complex. She did sometimes feel superior to other students, because they didn’t have any meaningful aspirations. At other times, Danielle’s mother said she had an inferiority complex. Danielle agreed with both assessments. Physically, surrounded by bone-thin girls at school, Danielle, who fluctuated between sizes six and eight, felt fat, and mentally, she felt unintelligent because she hardly bothered talking in class. Ever since the seventh-grade hate club, Danielle had adopted an Abraham Lincoln quote as a mantra: “Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” She found another kindred spirit in Xenocrates, whose quote hung in her creative writing teacher’s room: “I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.”

  When she was comfortable, Danielle wasn’t reserved at all. She could be loud, outgoing, and daring. She had a sarcastic wit and was immensely creative and generous. She donated her own money to charities, volunteered at animal shelters, and regularly saved abandoned animals. She spent her free time learning about the environment and foreign cultures. Yes, Danielle had high standards that set her apart from many of her peers. But she held herself to those standards too.

  JOY, CALIFORNIA | THE NEW GIRL

  In biology, Joy had noticed an odd, silent junior who sat against the wall and usually drew pictures in class. She was so white Joy could practically see right through her.

  Then one day the biology teacher chatted with Joy just before class. “Hey, Joy!” he said. “You know, you don’t have to be so quiet in class. Look over there; that’s Cleo. She’s a nice girl to talk to.”

  Joy glanced at Cleo, who was hunched beneath her backpack as if the weight of the world were strapped to her shoulders.

  When Cleo saw Joy, her face changed. Joy noticed that her eyes shone bright blue. Cleo gave a bashful wave.

  “Okay, class,” the teacher announced, pointing to a stack of papers on his desk. “We’re going to be doing an experiment on cohesion and adhesion today. Find partners!”

  Joy looked at Cleo. “Hey, Cleo, I’m Joy. Do you want to be my partner?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Joy and Cleo laughed as they conducted the experiment, which was more silly than difficult. They talked about the class and, eventually, themselves. Cleo was artistic, could sing, and enjoyed discussing philosophy, all of which Joy felt they had in common. Joy was surprised to find that Cleo was hilarious. She learned that Cleo was quiet in class because she was shy and focused on learning the material.

  Before long, Cleo joined Joy for lunch in the biology classroom every day. Over the next few weeks, Joy grew almost as close to Cleo as she was to Anisha.

  But friends were still few and far between. Too many classmates displayed a level of prejudice that astounded Joy. In between classes, Joy and Xavier, a blond, bespectacled boy in her English class, walked down an outdoor hallway. “I want to be a teacher,” Xavier said. “I think it would be cool.”

  They passed by the English department. “If I were a teacher, I’d be an English teacher,” Joy said. “I love English. Or a drama teacher.”

  “What? I’ve never heard of a black person being an English teacher before,” Xavier said.

  Joy made herself pause before responding. She looked down at the water pooling on the sidewalk. She breathed in the air, crisp from fresh rain. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. “The last time I checked, I was an articulate person and could present myself well.”

  “All I’m saying is that it would be like a Mexican working with computers,” he said, laughing. “I’m not trying to sound racist. I’m just saying.”

  Joy’s eyes bulged. “Wow, you’re not sounding racist at all,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “What a way to show your ignorance! I’ve had impeccable black English teachers, even better than the one we currently have.”

  As they continued to walk in silence, a look of recognition crossed Xavier’s face, as if he had just realized what he had said and to whom. “
Don’t get upset,” he pleaded.

  “I’m not getting upset,” she said calmly. “I’m just telling you: You need to learn what and what not to say. I’m a diplomatic person. I’m not looking for conflict.” As the bell rang, she squeezed in, “Just watch out; some people would punch your lights out.”

  Joy had to deal with racism every day at school. Some Asian students wouldn’t even speak to her when they were assigned to work with her on group projects. In PE, Mexican students referred to her as “black puta” and “black bitch.” During the class’s salsa unit, the boys stood in a stationary line while the girls’ line rotated in front of them so that each person danced with a partner for a few minutes, then moved on to the next. Joy was the best dancer in the class, but the Mexican boys refused to dance with her. Each would stand in front of her with his arms crossed, refusing to move. “It’s okay if you don’t want to dance with me,” Joy would say as her partner glowered. “Just keep moving.”

  One Mexican student used to spit on the floor in front of Joy, to classmates’ laughter, whenever the teacher took attendance. When he had done this for a few days in a row, despite Joy’s requests that he stop, Joy said, “Why don’t you just fuck off?!” The boy tried to stare her down. “I’m not afraid of a coward like you,” Joy said to him. He didn’t spit at her again.

  Joy only spoke to one Mexican in school because, she said, “She’s the only one who isn’t ignorant and small-minded. I’m not friends with the cholos and Asians because they don’t converse with blacks. I will say hi to Natalie, but I can see her discomfort.” Joy had one black acquaintance, Latrice, the cheerleader from her first English class. Latrice had been begging Joy to tutor her in biology, but the rest of the African-Americans at school still looked at her “weird.” As Joy put it, “Here they say, ‘You either white or ghetto.’ I’m not either, so I don’t see why I should be subjecting myself to any classifications.”

  In the following weeks, Joy continued to talk to Xavier, who made sure to point out, “I dated a black and a Mexican girl, so how could I possibly be racist?”

  JOY WOKE UP ONE Monday morning and knew she had hit rock bottom. Her depression had begun as stress and homesickness, but now, more than two months later, it was picking at her, biting away until she felt like she barely existed. She couldn’t bear the thought of getting up and going to school. She had been through so much worse than anything Citygrove could throw at her, and yet she was at her breaking point and didn’t know why.

  Joy believed that some of her classmates were “green-eyed”—and unnecessarily so. She guessed that people perceived her as someone who was “pretty, smart, and has an excellent life, when in truth they don’t know the half of it.” Indeed there were things that Joy kept bottled up, things she had told no one in Citygrove and few people in Jamaica.

  Joy’s parents had split up when she was two years old. Her Ukrainian mother—who had moved to Jamaica with Joy’s father without knowing a word of English—retained custody, but Jamaican courts forced Joy to visit her father every other weekend. On many occasions, he beat her.

  Sometimes he beat her because he claimed she lied. Sometimes it was because she pronounced a word wrong. Sometimes it was because she cried too much. He would tell Joy or her younger half brother, “Go get the belt,” sending them to his bedroom, where he hung his belts from a hook on the wall. He would take them to the living room and force each sibling to watch while he beat the other. When it was Joy’s turn, her father would grab her by the arm and she’d try to run, but she could only pinwheel around him as he slapped her or hit her with the belt buckle. She could still remember her shrieks when she begged him to stop hurting her. “Daddy, please, I’m sorry!” she’d weep. “I won’t do it again. Oh God, oh God.” He never yelled when he beat her. When he was through, he’d smile and leave her crumpled and bruised on the floor. Her mother, distraught but powerless, once had to take her to a doctor to treat the open wounds that striped her back.

  Usually, the next time he saw her, he would smugly say, “What happened to you? Who did this to you?”—mocking her pain. Then he hugged and kissed her as if nothing had happened. That was the scariest part.

  The abuse wasn’t always physical. He verbally made her feel worthless, or taunted her by insulting her mother. Nearly every night, Joy had nightmares about him coming after her. She cried in her sleep. Joy endured the beatings because her father wasn’t always a monster. She kept going back because she hoped that eventually her father would change, that he would make her feel loved, or at least worthy of his time.

  When Joy was nine, her father invited her to spend Christmas Eve at his mother’s house while Joy’s mother worked at the local hospital. He lured her with promises of presents under the tree and games with her younger half siblings, whom she didn’t know well. Despite her nightmares, Joy was thrilled. He couldn’t possibly beat me at Grandma’s house, she thought.

  Joy’s father picked her up at the hospital. Her mother didn’t speak to him; she only hugged her daughter and told her to be safe. She had not wanted Joy to go, but Joy convinced her to let her spend Christmas with family while she worked. Joy had no other family in Jamaica.

  Joy was supposed to spend the night at her father’s house before their trip to her grandmother’s the next day. When they arrived, her father instructed her to look inside his house for her Christmas presents. She eagerly searched everywhere—no presents. Outside, she found him leaning on his car, in deep discussion with his cousin. They stopped talking when Joy appeared. Her father grabbed her hand, threw it down, and demanded she remove her nail polish.

  Joy’s father and his new wife took her to a plaza to shop for gifts for his mother. After a couple of hours, he received a phone call and escorted Joy and his wife to the parking lot. He strode toward a white car. “Can I go with you, Daddy?” Joy asked. He told her to stay with his wife. Joy saw her father open the trunk of the car. The driver gave him a baseball bat, which he put in the trunk.

  Back at her father’s house, Joy tried calling her mother to check in, but she didn’t answer the phone. At about 1 A.M., while waiting for Joy’s dad to return, his wife was braiding Joy’s hair into cornrows when they heard sirens. A cousin went downstairs.

  Joy ran to her room, frightened without knowing why. She stuck a pack of gum under her pillow for safekeeping. She went outside to join her cousin and stepmother by the large gate that divided the open-air house from the driveway. A police officer shouted for her father.

  Joy peered through the gate. Her mother’s friend rushed out of a police car. “That’s Joy! That’s her daughter. She told us to take her.”

  Joy’s stepmother looked at her nervously. Joy’s hair was only half done.

  “Come Joy, we’re leaving,” said her mother’s friend.

  Joy was confused. “But why? Where’s Daddy? Why do the police want Daddy?”

  “Just come, Joy. I’ll tell you later. We have to go. Get your things.”

  As the police interrogated her stepmother, Joy removed one piece of gum from the package, which she placed under her pillow for next time. She put on a pair of slippers and went downstairs.

  In the back of the police car, Joy’s mother’s friend held her. “What’s wrong?” Joy asked. “Where are we going?”

  “To the hospital,” the officer said. “Your mom has been hurt.”

  At the hospital, Joy’s mother was bleeding and her arm was in a sling. She had stitches in her forehead, a broken hand, and her skull had nearly cracked. She told Joy what happened. While Joy sat contentedly in her father’s house, his new wife combing her hair, Joy’s mother was driving home. There was a white car parked on the hill on the way to Joy’s apartment. When Joy’s mother passed it, the car followed her. She drove to the gate, stepped out of her car, then heard the other car pull up and screech to a halt alongside her. One of the four men in the car, his face covered, came running at her with a baseball bat. She tried to get back into her car, but he blocked her way
. She recognized him. It was Joy’s father. She called out his name. He hit her on the head and the hand with the bat. Joy’s mother fought for her life, screaming and struggling until her ex-husband stole her car and sped away.

  The police arrested Joy’s father that night, but because of his political position, his employer was able to bail him out and secure for him nothing more than a one-year probation. Eventually Joy and her mother moved to another town.

  It had taken a long time, but Joy wasn’t angry anymore. She refused to let her experiences turn her into a victim. Instead, she drew strength from her past. Determined to find a silver lining, Joy believed that because of her pain, she was better at listening to people, doling out advice to the Jamaican friends who constantly called her for counsel, and helping them to “value themselves and pursue their goals.” She was so grateful that she and her mother were alive that she was able to brush off life’s twists and turns by telling herself that things could be worse. They could be dead. She had learned that it was easier to cope when she looked at things positively; if she had faith in herself and hope for her future, her life would continue to improve. And it had. So why, years later, couldn’t she lift herself from her current funk?

  She missed communicating daily with friends who understood her culture, her background, and her morals. No matter how kind her U.S. friends were, they couldn’t relate to her. She missed island life and Caribbean vibes: the sunsets, the breezy air, the verdant mountains, the trees swaying in the wind, and especially the people. She missed playing badminton in the evenings at her apartment complex, dealing cards on the stoop, and riding bicycles with her friends—even just washing cars on the weekends. She said later, “Jamaicans are a rough and loud people, but I love it about them. Even when they cuss, it’s the sweetest thing you’ll hear. I love the music and the food, the dance, the lifestyles. I love the Rastas, superstitions . . . Here it’s like I’m lost. I hate having to pretend to be a certain way, dumb down myself, act less Jamaican.”