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

by Alexandra Robbins

  The principal droned on. For no apparent reason, Mandy turned and glared at Regan.

  NOAH GIANCOLI, PENNSYLVANIA | THE BAND GEEK

  Noah stood at attention exactly three-quarters of a yard beyond the 46-yard line, scoreboard side, tingling with excitement. His crisp white uniform sparkled, the blue-and-gold sash sliced gallantly across his chest. He looked up at the stands, packed with hundreds of spectators, and scanned faces for family, friends, and teachers. He could see them shouting, their voices commingling into a chorus that swelled to a crescendo as the band took the field.

  Few band experiences were as exciting as the moments just before the first performance of the year. Noah tensed and relaxed the muscles he used to grip his flag at a precise 45-degree angle. The ceremonial flag, which Noah would keep motionless in the air for the entire show, was heavy and he knew his arms would ache before the fifteen minutes were up. The drum majors raised their hands to ready the band, and the noise of the crowd drifted into silence as if the wind had swirled it away. The drum majors counted off the first four beats, and the band erupted.

  Noah, a junior, was fiercely proud to be a member of the Redsen High School Marching Band. The group of two hundred students was so talented that it had been chosen to participate in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year, in the band’s first year of eligibility. Noah treasured the band because he’d met his closest friends there. In middle school, Noah joined the band as a saxophonist. He immediately fell in love with the camaraderie and the sense of belonging to something grand. In high school, however, Noah didn’t have room in his schedule for band class. When he asked the director if he could play sax in the marching band without taking the class, the teacher turned him down.

  Freshman year had been difficult. Without the band label to identify him, other students pigeonholed Noah with a more limiting label: Asian. Actually Noah was multiracial, although he had his mother’s Chinese coloring. Both parents were raised in the United States. But as a smart, hardworking student—currently he was the class salutatorian—Noah fit the stereotype of the high-achieving Asian.

  Classmates made fun of Noah’s Chinese heritage. In the lunchroom, jocks and popular kids handed him scrawled caricatures of Chinese people. They greeted him with what he called the “ching-chong gesture,” in which they pulled up the outer corners of their eyes and let loose a stream of nonsense words ending in -hong, -hing, or -wong. People “don’t really like that others are different from what’s ‘normal’ in our white, upper-class bubble of a town,” Noah said. They also made fun of his hair, using it as an excuse to insult his masculinity. Noah kept his hair long, sometimes past his shoulders, for several reasons. He liked that his hair distinguished him from other guys at school, kept him warmer during the winter, and afforded him a versatile tool for self-expression. Best of all, by growing his hair long and then cutting it off in one fell swoop, he could donate it to an organization that created wigs for chemotherapy patients.

  One senior in particular made a point of picking on Noah. Noah didn’t know why Frederick, a popular partier in Noah’s AP Calculus class, zeroed in on him. He had targeted Noah from the first day of school, jeering “Cut your hair!” at every chance. This week, he had loudly remarked, “Your frosted tips look horrible,” and several classmates agreed. Today, he had thrown paper airplanes at Noah’s head during a test. Noah supposed he had to get used to Frederick because they were swimming teammates who would see much more of each other come swim season.

  Noah’s hair didn’t affect his swimming because it fit into a cap, but it bothered his teammates. At the end of Noah’s sophomore season, he qualified for the district meet. A team tradition called for championship qualifiers to bleach their hair one night, which Noah did, and then shave their heads at the pre-competition team dinner. Noah refused.

  “C’mon, it’s just hair,” chorused the other upperclassmen. “Quit being such a little girl!”

  “You’re not being a team player!” a senior yelled, kicking Noah out of the house. “Get out! If you’re not willing to be a part of this team, we don’t want you!”

  Noah was wounded. He had hoped that some of his teammates would at least stand up for him. They averted their eyes and found other things with which to busy themselves. Several months later, Noah still hadn’t cut his hair. He kept the bleached ends because he thought they were “funky Asian.”

  Noah’s busy schedule included swimming practices, tutoring, Chinese school, Chess Club practice, audio-video work and newsletter writing for his church, and several hours a week of voice lessons and rehearsals for various musical groups. He was the only member from his entire school district in the community’s regional choir.

  At the end of freshman year, the band had announced that it was accepting applications for the Honor Guard. Honor Guards carried banners and flags and were the band managers, in charge of setting up and moving props and equipment. Noah applied for the position and got it. He loved spending time with his friends every day throughout the football season. More important, he had convinced his girlfriend to be an Honor Guard too.

  In Noah’s opinion, Leigh, a senior, was smart, kind, funny, and mature. They had started going out in the spring of Noah’s freshman year, when she asked him to a movie. Since then, Leigh had been his rock. Noah was stressed from pushing himself academically because both of his workaholic parents had been student overachievers. He was under the impression that “it was necessary to do well because I felt like if I could make them proud of me, I would know they loved me. My parents just don’t show love as easily as I want,” he said. Worst of all, Po’s health was declining. Po and Gung (Cantonese for maternal grandmother and grandfather) had spent weeknights at Noah’s house, helping to raise him and his younger brother when they lived in California. Po, especially, had been a major influence on Noah even after Noah’s family had moved to Pennsylvania when he was nine.

  After the move, Noah would come home from school and read or play video games, learning to be independent. Even now, Noah often took care of his brother, cooking dinner or picking him up from field trips and other afterschool activities. While Noah was able to remain close with his mother, he had a difficult time bridging the distance from his father.

  When Po, who still lived in California, was recently hospitalized with kidney problems, Noah was distraught. He leaned on Leigh. Knowing that someone wanted to spend time with him raised his spirits.

  As the second quarter wound down, Noah and the rest of the band descended from the bleachers again to prepare for their halftime show. Each member of the Honor Guard was in charge of assembling a specific set piece. Noah was assigned to the drum major podium, a six-foot-tall pedestal for the student director. He was also supposed to help another manager set up the bass guitar and its various accessories.

  This year, the band director had promoted Noah to section leader. Now that he was an integral part of the band, however, students at school not only associated him with the band geeks but also ranked him lower in status than the musicians. Noah always defended the band when people said it was stupid. “What instrument do you play?” they inevitably asked, and then called him “the band’s bitch.”

  The visiting team’s band ran over its allotted time, but Noah didn’t have a chance to dwell on the discourtesy. The moment the performance ended, Noah and the other Honor Guards stormed onto the field, lugging equipment while the Redsen band members took their places. As Noah set up the podium, he came across an item that he had never seen before: a podium skirt, folded in a box. Already the setup was taking too long; the managers had practiced, but never in real time, and they hadn’t rehearsed taking the field together afterward. Noah yelled, “I need help!”, gesturing to four other managers. When they finished assisting Noah, they rushed to the sideline.

  The band was ready before Noah was. Noah frantically opened the bass guitar case on the sideline as the managers lined up to join the musicians. He was plugging the guitar into an amp while
the other managers strode in step to their spot on the field, arms crossed, front and center of the band. As Noah turned on the battery, the introduction began over the loudspeakers. Panicking, Noah sprinted onto the field. He noticed that he had accidentally set up the podium five yards to the left of where it should have been, which could cause conducting problems. But the band was playing now and it was too late to do anything about it.

  Despite Noah’s concerns, the halftime show ended up running smoothly until a trumpet player fell down. The gaffe would not help the band’s image at school. Oh well, Noah thought. We still have nearly three months to get ready for Macy’s.

  ELI, VIRGINIA | THE NERD

  The girl who sat two seats northwest of Eli in government turned around as the teacher handed out quizzes. Eli thought she was looking at him. “I don’t know the sixth amendment!” he whispered to her, attempting to commiserate about the quiz. The girl returned her gaze to the front of the room without noticing. Eli then realized that a) she wasn’t looking at him and b) the people around him were smirking because they thought he was talking to himself.

  After less than a week of school, senior year was just like any other year. Eli’s awkward moments were already piling up. Upon meeting his new math teacher, he said, “Nice to meet you . . . I like math a lot.” (A classmate told him later, “That was weird.”) Or there was the time Eli was chatting in the hall with a few friends. When Chan, one of Eli’s best friends (who sometimes played Dungeons and Dragons), came by, Chan said, “What is this, a gang?” Shortly thereafter, yet another friend approached. “What’s going on, guys?” asked the newcomer. Attempting to continue the conversation, Eli joked, “We’re having a Dungeons and Dragons gang meeting!” The others stared at him, confused. “Whaa? I don’t get it,” someone said. Welcome to Eli’s world.

  Most people didn’t understand Eli’s sense of humor. He was low-key and cheerful, but it was tough to stay positive at Strattville High, a large public school in Virginia. On the first day of the spring semester of his junior year, Eli approached a cafeteria table and asked the students—known as “black gangstas”—if he could sit with them. Without so much as a second’s hesitation, they said no. He spent the rest of that semester eating lunch in the library.

  Eli still remembered the day in seventh grade when a popular boy knocked a pile of books out of his arms and laughed. As other students joined in, no one helped Eli pick up the books, including a teacher standing four feet away. Eli hated middle school, but the teasing didn’t stop then. Even in high school, sometimes when he walked by a group of jocks, one would follow him, “acting nerdy,” as Eli phrased it, pushing up invisible glasses, mockingly walking in step with Eli, and muttering in a stereotypically nasal nerd voice, “According to my calculations . . .”

  Eli had always felt different from his classmates. They didn’t seem to know what they wanted for lunch, let alone what they wanted to do with their lives, whereas Eli knew he wanted to major in finance at Westcoast University and live in the Pacific Northwest after college. (As for lunch, Eli usually opted for pizza.) “I feel like a forty-year-old living the life of a teenager. I just don’t have any connections with anyone at school,” Eli explained. As cliques began to form in elementary school and middle school, his disconnectedness “evolved into nerdiness, just because that was the ‘group’ I best fit into.”

  Eli liked to think of high school groups as hierarchies of subspecies. The jocks, for example, could be tiered into football players, cheerleaders, gymnasts, soccer players, “random gym abusers,” and baseball players. The nerds had their own hierarchy as well. This was how Eli described them in descending order of status: “The ADD nerds (who obnoxiously freak over everything, like they’ll walk into class on the day of the test and go, ‘Oh. My. God. Kill me! I didn’t study at all! Aaah!’ when it’s so obvious they spent their whole lives preparing for this test and then they get an A+ on it . . . ); the I-don’t-really-care nerds (this is the rarest group. They do well, but they don’t go out of their way to flaunt it.); the try-to-be-cool nerds (who are too oblivious to realize they don’t belong with the popular kids and that the popular peeps make fun of them); the quiet nerds (who stay in the library during lunch and don’t talk to anyone); and the geeky nerds (like, ‘Oh jiminy crickets! Did you see that episode of Battlestar Gallactica last night?!’ with the squeaky voices).” Eli classified himself as “ten percent quiet nerd, ten percent ADD nerd, and eighty percent I-don’t-really-care nerd.”

  Eli had never fallen into the try-to-be-cool nerd category. Why bother attempting that masquerade? As he put it, “I’m not a cool cat.” His school activities consisted of captaining his school’s Academic Bowl team, which competed once a quarter, and participating in the Model UN Club, Spanish Club, and Future Business Leaders of America.

  Eli loved Academic Bowl. He was good at Model UN. Other than in those two arenas, Eli felt “kinda out of place. I usually feel like an outsider and looked down upon.” He didn’t know anyone at school whose interests dovetailed with his own. He was a self-proclaimed “geography freak,” often studying a map of the world that hung in his room. He practiced geography trivia, had a goal to visit all fifty states by the age of eighteen (he was missing only three), and in accounting class, while other students played games like Tetris, he was engrossed in the Traveler’s IQ Challenge. His “life to-do list,” which he had written this month, included 124 cities to visit (and 66 things to do). Eli loved the Spanish language and could often be found singing Spanish songs to himself. When he was bored in class, he hunted through his textbooks to find typos or grammatical and factual errors. When he was bored at home, he liked to make up silly conspiracy theories and try to connect the dots. His current favorite was that Scientologists ran the Taliban.

  Eli almost never went out on weekends. Occasionally, he hung out with one or two friends and played cards or board games. Mostly he stayed home. He tried to make new friends and create social plans, but people insisted they were busy. Eli didn’t wallow in self-pity. He knew plenty of people who had it worse. One of his closest friends, Dwight, was a mildly autistic student from another school. Dwight and Eli at first had bonded over their love of travel. As they got to know each other, their friendship deepened because they had a similar sense of humor and were both outcasts. Dwight also had been teased often in school. In eighth grade, when a science teacher joined in on the teasing, Dwight transferred to a private school. For Dwight it was worth waking up at 5 A.M. and taking a two-hour bus ride to and from school just to avoid the gibes.

  Eli supposed that, like Dwight, he looked the part of the nerd, with short, straight reddish blond bangs, pale coloring, and a slouch that shortened his six-foot frame. Eli carried a gigantic backpack and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He used an expansive vocabulary and tended to fill awkward silences with jokes that inevitably made sense only to himself, though he wouldn’t realize it at the time. Sometimes he tried repeating other people’s jokes, like his math teacher’s line: “Six over infinity equals zero. Kind of like my income over the federal debt.” Eli’s friends reacted with blank stares.

  Eli was sure that his manner of speaking caused strangers to think he had Asperger’s Syndrome. Eli would begin to say something, but the words in his mind weren’t necessarily the ones that exited his mouth. He would think, “How are you today?”, change his mind to say, “How are you doing?”, and the jumbled result would be something along the lines of “How are doing?” When that happened, he would close his eyes for a second, take a deep breath, and try again, enunciating each word carefully. People would give him a half-understanding, half-wary look that made him feel even more self-conscious.

  That was better than when they laughed at him, though. He guessed that classmates assumed he was vulnerable, so they took their aggression out on him without worrying about repercussions. Eli was vulnerable emotionally, but he typically didn’t bother to fight back because, he explained, “It’s just not that important to me. I figure I
’ll win the fight in twenty years or so anyways when I end up with a decent life and they’re unemployed and living at home.”

  After classes ended, Eli and two friends walked together to a classroom to turn in homework early for extra credit. Josephine, an ADD nerd, approached the door, also with homework in hand. “Oooh!” she said to one of Eli’s friends. “Let me check my answers with you!”

  While they compared papers, Eli tried to jump in. “Did you get ‘E’ for this, too?” He held up his paper and pointed.

  Josephine gave him a withering glance. “Um, excuse me!” she said. “I’m pretty sure I was talking to her, not you!”

  “Oh, sorry,” Eli muttered, and backed off. But he wasn’t surprised. As he lamented later, “Awkwardness defines my life.”

  JOY, CALIFORNIA | THE NEW GIRL

  On her first day of school, nearly a month later than everyone else’s, Joy rolled listlessly in bed, unready to get up and move forward with her life. Please let things be different here, she pleaded silently. Please let this school be different.

  Joy had worried about this day for months. Not only was she changing cultures, but she was also starting school late. Although she would be a freshman, these weren’t first-time high school jitters—in Jamaica, high school began in grade seven. She had already been told that high school was the “first day of the rest of your life.” But she wondered what she would do in this new country, whether she would make friends, and how long it would take her to stop missing home.