A sophomore at a school in rural Pennsylvania hides her religious beliefs from evangelical Christian friends. She said, “With some of my friends I have to undermine my true beliefs so I can maintain a good relationship. I think high school is similar to the political atmosphere of today: Tailor your image to the audience around you for your best benefit. I find it funny when adults say that teens don’t think before they speak, because when it comes to social situations, everything you say and do has an impact, and teens definitely realize this.”
NOAH, PENNSYLVANIA | THE BAND GEEK
Leigh was collecting bags of recycling for Noah to shuttle to volunteers’ cars. On Noah’s second trip back, he saw several students helping Leigh—and not just the regular volunteers. One of the least popular students in school lugged two heavy bags to the curb. People may not like him, but he’s willing to help, Noah thought.
The next day, Noah saw the unpopular boy sitting alone in the library. Noah went over to him. Students avoided the boy only because he seemed to be in his own world, an indoor street musician playing his guitar in the halls. “Hey, I wanted to thank you for helping us out the other day,” Noah said.
The boy smiled. “Oh sure, no problem. You’re awesome, Noah Giancoli!”
Noah was shocked that he knew his name. They had never spoken before. Within minutes, Noah recruited him as a regular volunteer.
Slowly, Noah’s year was improving. Volunteers were finding fewer pieces of trash in the recycling bins, an encouraging sign. Noah had persuaded a popular girl, a nerd, and a quiet boy from his calculus class to join the club and a student with autism in the school’s special needs program signed up. Nearly every week, administrators asked Noah how the program was going. He was proud to inform them that students had recycled more than four tons of paper.
Bolstered by his success with the recycling program, Noah turned his attention to another interest. He was spearheading an effort to persuade the administration to set up a dual-enrollment program with a local university for Mandarin and Arabic classes. Two outcasts whom he didn’t know approached him in the hall. “Can you explain what the whole Chinese thing is about? Is it a class? Do I sign up?” Several other students asked him similar questions.
Noah explained the process. He added, “If you have any other questions, let me know. I’d be happy to talk with you.” Maybe it’ll only be one or two people at a time, he thought, but hopefully, I’ll come to be known by more people.
In English, Noah noticed Bill, a wannabe jock, throwing a tissue into the recycling bin. Bill was a heavyset boy whom athletes harassed because he was on JV. “Hey, Bill, c’mon, read the sign,” Noah protested. “We can’t recycle those.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize it was such a ‘big deal,’ ” Bill said, lifting the tissue from the bin.
“Well yeah, it’s a big deal because the environment is important, and we’re trying to start our new program. You know Adam? He’s getting volunteer hours and bidding for our scholarship!”
“Whoa, really?” Bill seemed genuinely interested in hearing more.
At that point, two jocks put Bill in a headlock and gave him noogies. “Oooh, Bill’s gonna be a tree-hugger! How gay are you?!” one of them said. Bill wasn’t laughing.
Offended, Noah scowled at them. “All right guys, that’s enough,” he said. He tugged Bill from the headlock. Noah wasn’t sure whether he interpreted correctly that the jocks glanced at him with a silent respect before they walked away.
“Thanks, Noah,” Bill said as he dusted himself off.
“Bill, you shouldn’t hang out with them. Seriously, they just bully you.”
“But, like, we’re teammates. Next year it’ll be better!”
Noah couldn’t remember the last time he had been bullied. Frederick had left him alone since the apology. In fact nobody had picked on him for anything—the band, his ethnicity—for months. Mostly when non-friends approached Noah these days, it was to ask him a question about recycling or the Chinese class. Soon, Noah had more than double the signatures he needed on the petition for the Chinese class, and Bill had joined the recycling club.
Within days, Bill backed out of the club, citing schedule conflicts. Noah was dispirited. “I just want to apologize for how my challenge has gone downhill,” he told me. “I’ve been canvassing people at lunch, asking them to help, and it’s just not working. They smile, they laugh with me, we get into discussion. I’m getting to know people, but they just don’t show up to help.”
Noah was certain he was failing his challenge because the number of recycling club members was not increasing significantly. He didn’t realize that simply by mingling among various lunch tables, he was befriending people in different crowds, weaving together the fringes of the cafeteria.
DANIELLE, ILLINOIS | THE LONER
Danielle practiced her conversational skills frequently. At her Dairy Queen orientation, she chatted with Autumn, a trainee who had been on the softball team with her freshman year. Nikki had told Danielle that people didn’t like Autumn. Nevertheless, Danielle asked her questions about homework.
“Why aren’t you doing softball anymore?” Autumn asked her.
“I don’t know. I didn’t really like it, and Nikki told me [the coaches] said they wouldn’t even let me try out, which I didn’t believe, but I don’t know . . .”
“She did? That’s not true at all!”
Danielle hadn’t been spending much time with her friends lately; they were busy, and Danielle wasn’t itching to hang out with them. She continued to visit Viv once a week. She went to lunch with Trish again. They sometimes chatted on Facebook, but rarely ran into each other in school anymore.
Meanwhile, National Honor Society elections loomed. Danielle wasn’t sure how to campaign. One day in the hall, she approached an emo from her sophomore year English class. “Soo. . . I’m running for Webmaster. Want to vote for me?”
“Oh, wow. That was really random,” the girl responded.
“Oh, yeah . . . sorry,” Danielle said, turning red. “I’m just trying to get votes.”
She was surprised that some people were nice about telling her they would vote for her. As she put it, “Everyone I asked said they would vote for me. So I guess not everyone in high school is that bad.”
In government, Danielle was assigned to partner with Logan, a senior, for a mini-discussion about civil liberties. Normally, after that type of task, Danielle would fall silent and return to her desk. But Danielle figured she might as well practice talking with someone new, and she had a fallback conversation topic. By coincidence, her mother had recently learned through Facebook that Danielle’s stepfather had grown up in a small Missouri town with Logan’s mother. The conversation flowed smoothly enough, however, that Danielle didn’t need to bring up the connection.
By mid-April, Danielle, too, was frustrated because she didn’t think she had made any dramatic progress on her challenge. She was tentatively treading outside of her comfort zone, but felt as if she were taking one step forward and two steps back. “I want to come out of this with at least one good friend,” she said. “Though I’m still not doing so hot in the friends area, I have gotten better at talking to people. I’ll actually talk to a teacher instead of running away at the first opportunity, and I’ll at least try to continue the conversation with people my age rather than falling silent. Unfortunately, as much as I may talk to someone in class, it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever hang out with them outside. I want to come out of this project less socially inept than I was before.”
In Spanish, she partnered with Max, Bree, and Kristy for a game in which the teacher showed a student Spanish flashcards that she would have to describe so that her team could guess the accompanying vocabulary words. As they waited their turn, Danielle and her group tried to think of clues ahead of time.
Kristy brought up one of the vocabulary terms, the Spanish word for failure. “What do we say if the word is el fracaso?” she asked.
“
Max,” Danielle muttered to herself. When she joked, she did so quietly because she didn’t think people usually got her sense of humor. It was too embarrassing when she said something she thought was funny and no one reacted.
The girls burst out laughing and Kristy gave Danielle a high five.
“You may laugh now, but I’m going to go home and cry,” Max said, mock-hurt.
After their turn, Danielle’s group watched the other students play. They saw the teacher flash “el error” at a student. Max looked at Danielle. “Max!” he said. Kristy and Bree laughed and high-fived Danielle again. The teacher kept glancing at Danielle’s group. Danielle was delighted that, for once, she was part of “that group”—the students who disrupted the class because they couldn’t stop talking.
When the National Honor Society held its vote for club officers, Danielle learned she was running for Webmaster unopposed. She was pleased to get the position, but slightly disappointed to win it automatically. She peeked around the room at students’ ballots. People who didn’t like her hadn’t voted for her, even though she was the only candidate, but she noticed that some people whom she never talked to had voted for her. So that was something.
At the NHS luncheon celebrating the newly elected officers, Danielle was excluded once again. When she walked into the room, students were eating at tables pushed into a large square. Every other student had been on the NHS board since middle school. As they gossiped, seemingly all old friends, Danielle didn’t say a word. She sat at a corner of the table, observed the group, and texted her mom. After lunch, the officers went outside to take photos. The group formed a large circle. Danielle was the only student outside of the circle, leaning against the wall.
One day, Max mentioned to Danielle that he was learning how to play tennis. “We’re playing tennis sometime, okay?” he asked her.
“All right,” she said.
Unsure whether Max was sincere, Danielle was hesitant to ask if he wanted to play at a specific time. Playing tennis would be an easy way to hang out with someone outside of school. I can always make fun of him for sucking, so I won’t have to struggle to think of something to say, she thought. Max talked to her frequently now. Almost daily, he’d ask, “Hey, Danielle, how was your day?” Not even her friends asked her that. Another thing Danielle liked about Max was that he seemed to pay attention to her. She could tell Paige and Mona something fifty times and they still wouldn’t remember. She could tell Max something once, and a week or two later he would bring it up.
The next day in Spanish class, Danielle casually leaned against her desk. She was nervous, even though she had overthought this interaction in advance. “Do you have volleyball today?” she asked Max.
“I have a game,” he answered.
“Man, no one can play tennis today!” Danielle said.
“I might be able to around one,” Max said. “Give me your number.” Danielle ripped a piece of paper out of her notebook, scribbled her number, and handed it to him.
“Whoooaaa,” said a student nearby.
Max kept a straight face. “Oh, yeah, we’re dating,” he said. Danielle cracked up. The idea of her dating Max was absurd. He was immature, she wasn’t interested, and she was convinced she had commitment-phobia, in any case.
After school, Danielle waited for Max to call. By 1:30, she gave up. “That’s another reason why I don’t hang out with new people, or even my friends very often,” she told me then. “I can’t trust them to actually do what they say they will. So it really doesn’t matter if it was hard or not to ask Max, because it didn’t work out anyways.”
This single incident caused Danielle to be dejected about her challenge once again, sure that there was no way she could make a new friend who would spend time with her outside of school. “I don’t think people are ever that interested in talking to me, especially since most people have this preconceived notion that I’m a bitch,” she said.
DANIELLE’S AND LOGAN’S MOTHERS had emailed back and forth for weeks. Because both families were going to be in Florida for spring break, they exchanged phone numbers. Logan’s mother emailed that Logan wanted to hang out with Danielle. Danielle’s mother nudged her to call, although Danielle hadn’t called someone new in years. Danielle put it off.
The day before break, Danielle was in an English teacher’s classroom, typesetting the accepted submissions for Stone Mill’s literary magazine. Danielle was the only student who showed up to help. She was surprised to see that one of her submissions was given the highest possible score by the other student staff members. When her creative writing teacher had assigned the class to write a submission, Danielle had dashed off a poem about her dislike of poetry. And here it was, selected for publication. Unfortunately she had turned it in as “Untitled” by “Anonymous.”
More than an hour after school let out, Danielle was still typing as the teacher reviewed other submissions. “I can take some of these with me to type over spring break, since I’m just going to be sitting around in Florida,” she told the teacher.
The teacher looked up. “Really?! You wouldn’t mind that?”
“No. I want to try to get tan, so I can just type the stuff while I’m sitting by the pool.”
“That would be great!” the teacher said, then left the room for a moment. Danielle continued to type. When the teacher returned, she asked, “Would you like to be the editor next year?”
Danielle was stunned. She had always assumed that one of the two boys who attended every meeting and who had been in the club for much longer would be the new editor. “Oh, wow. Yeah, I would. But . . .” She was about to mention the boys, then thought better of it. “Uh, yeah, that would be cool.”
Already, she had come a long way from freshman year, when she was too shy to join any clubs at all. Next year, she would be vice president of the snow team, a position the advisor had created just for her; a senior on the varsity tennis team; NHS Webmaster; and now the editor of the literary magazine. Not bad for someone who rarely talked.
In Florida, Danielle worked up the nerve to pick up the phone. She didn’t know what to say. “Uh, hey, Logan, it’s Danielle. Your mom said something in an email to my mom about you guys wanting to do something . . .”
“Yeah, we’re going to the beach tomorrow if you want to come,” Logan said. Just like that, Danielle had a planned outing.
When Logan and two other Stone Mill seniors picked up Danielle, Logan hopped in the back of the van to talk to her. Danielle recognized Juliana; she didn’t know Tracy, who was driving. To Danielle’s surprise, conversation flowed naturally about teachers and local restaurants. Even when the friends talked among themselves, sometimes Danielle chimed in.
At the beach, Danielle jumped waves with Tracy in chest-high water, while Logan and Juliana stood closer to shore. When Tracy said she wanted to swim out to touch the buoy, Danielle joined her. The afternoon passed quickly. The girls watched dolphins swimming by the pier, ate ice-cream cones, and shopped for souvenirs. On the ride home, Danielle again sat in the back with Logan. The conversation came naturally.
A skateboarder passed in front of the van. “I really want to learn to skateboard,” said Danielle.
“Hah, why?” Logan asked.
“I snowboard a lot during the winter, so it seems like it would help me get better over the summer. Although I’m not really too crazy about the falling on the pavement and getting a bunch of cuts part. . . .” Danielle trailed off. “So do you know what you want to major in?”
“I don’t know. I’m torn between two things. I really want to be a vet, but I also want to work with sharks.”
“Working with sharks would be really cool!” Danielle said. She liked Logan even more now.
“How about you?”
“I’m stuck between two things also,” said Danielle. “There are a lot of things I want to do actually, but the main ones are archaeology and medicine.”
They talked about their parents and the book they had to read for government
. Logan told Danielle to give her a call if she needed any help. When the seniors dropped Danielle off, Tracy thanked her for coming.
“Thanks for inviting me,” Danielle replied. “Bye!” She hurried into her backyard, self-conscious about the girls watching her walk up to the house.
When she was out of sight, Danielle realized that she was proud of doing something social with new people. Maybe, Danielle thought, she wasn’t as socially awkward as she had assumed. She wondered if she could muster the courage to hang out with Logan again. She didn’t count the beach outing as part of her challenge because her mother had set it up.
WHITNEY, NEW YORK | THE POPULAR BITCH
In Spanish, Shay asked Whitney, “Are you doing anything tonight?”
“Nah,” Whitney said.
Shay spoke tentatively. “Could you work for me at the pool this week?” Shay and Whitney were lifeguards at the public pool. “I have choir practice.”
The timing wasn’t convenient, but Whitney figured she could use the extra money. “Yeah, of course,” she said.
Chelsea watched the conversation carefully.
Whitney and Shay were growing closer. Shay helped Whitney with a speech assignment. When Shay pulled ahead of Whitney in the class rankings, instead of holding a grudge as she would have in the past, Whitney allowed herself to be genuinely happy for her.
For an economics group project, the teacher placed Whitney in a group with Shay, a loser, a punk girl, and a badass. Whitney asked their opinions and incorporated their ideas instead of snootily blowing them off as the old Whitney would have done. She tried to temper her bossiness, and she chatted about nonschool subjects like iPhones and baseball. The group shared ideas equally and ended up with the best presentation in the class. A week later, Whitney acknowledged all of her former groupmates in the halls. They said hello back. (“That’s huge, trust me,” Whitney said later.) When Whitney greeted them while standing with preps, the preps stared at her. She was certain that they disparaged her as soon as she walked away.
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Page 35
