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

by Alexandra Robbins

  If to be popular means to be seen, it follows that the students who happen to be labeled nerds or geeks might not be popular because they spend so much time studying or engaging in other solitary pursuits. They don’t have the time, or perhaps the interest, to make themselves visible. The same could be said for students who are passionate about writing poetry or stories, creating artwork, staying abreast of the music scene, working on cars, or reading. Their talents might not thrust them in front of the student body.

  Another major criterion for popularity is being recognizable. (This is one reason that dating someone popular can enhance popularity.) Many studies have found that the students whom classmates deem popular tend to be the ones with whom they try to have the most frequent interaction. As Sacred Heart University psychology chair Kathryn LaFontana observed, “It is interesting that children focus on the quantity rather than the quality of interaction to determine popularity. From a social networks perspective, it seems that children see those peers who have a large number of peer contacts and are more central to the social network as popular.”

  Other research reveals that to be popular means to be influential. People usually prefer the things they see most often, which could partly explain why many students often mimic the populars. Popularity means having an impact on others, and not necessarily a positive one. Bianca, for example, was popular not because she was sweet as pie to her classmates, but because she had power. She gained that power through manipulation. Studies show that the students classified as popular are often able to actively maneuver their position in the social hierarchy. They are savvy about the Machiavellian methods useful to climb into and then cling to the popular label—and they don’t hesitate to use them. These same studies find that the students who are unpopular are also viewed as lacking the skills to vault to the top of the hierarchy. I would submit, however, that in some cases these “unpopular” individuals know the manipulative behavior necessary to be popular; they simply choose not to use it.

  While scientific studies have reported that girls are more likely to associate popularity with social domination, many boys described similar situations. A popular coed clique in Arkansas called itself The Exclusives and wore T-shirts that said, “We are what you wish you could be.” Members adhered to a list of rules they called The Code, which one boy listed for me:

  “No more than one ponytail a week for girls.

  No hair below the collar for boys.

  Jeans have to be designer.

  No dating ‘normals’ but one can have sex with them.

  All sex is to be admitted to the group and scored 1–5.

  All shirts are collared except for Friday for boys.

  Girls can wear dresses but only collared shirts.

  Girls wear heels every day and guys wear either dress shoes or cool flip-flops.

  All weight gain is reported to the group.

  Boyfriends/girlfriends must be approved.

  Weed is a must, but no hard drugs.

  Eating disorders are okay, but they have to be secret.”

  The Exclusives gathered at someone’s house every Friday night. Populars who missed that event without a valid excuse were not allowed to sit with the group at lunch for a week. Any member who broke the rules was similarly banned from the cafeteria table and could not sit with the group at the next football game.

  It’s not uncommon for popular cliques to use these types of rules to keep their members in line. A Canadian junior said that at her all-girls school, the populars hold each other to strict standards. “Hair color has to be blonde or brown and God forbid it’s curly,” she said. “My best friends won’t go out on weekends if their hair isn’t straight. We all strive to look anorexic, which is awful, but it’s reality. We are not friends with fat people. If your eyebrows are not perfect, you will be judged. You have to make fun of everything. You obviously have to drink, not throw up, smoke cigarettes and weed. A popular girl needs to be pretty, skinny, dress nice, party hard on weekends, not be a virgin, [and] be funny, daring, and rebellious.”

  Many adults know that membership in the popular clique does not necessarily indicate the dictionary definition of popularity. A more accurate definition in the high school context could be “a shared recognition among peers that a particular youth has achieved prestige, visibility, or high social status.” It took a long time, however, for developmental psychology literature to catch up to this definition. For decades, when researchers conducted surveys and experiments on popularity, they measured it in terms of sociometrics, which means that psychologists asked students to rate their classmates by how much they liked them or wanted to spend time with them. The researchers would simply tally up the results and consider those with the most votes to be the most popular.

  More recently, however, a funny thing happened. Psychologists started noticing that when they asked students directly to rank how popular they thought classmates were—separately from how much they wished to spend time with them—the two lists were strikingly different. To address this discrepancy, psychologists created a new term: perceived popularity. Perceived popularity refers to how students rank a classmate’s reputation rather than their personal opinion about her.

  Other studies examined the traits that students attributed to perceived popular students versus sociometrically popular students. Students viewed classmates who were sociometrically popular as kind and trustworthy. They viewed classmates who were perceived popular as dominant, aggressive, and conceited. Students reported that those who were perceived popular and sociometrically popular—some students are both—exhibited all of the aforementioned traits. (Anecdotally, many students with no knowledge of these terms call popular subgroups “mean popular” and “nice popular.”)

  Whitney often wondered how she could be popular and yet have so few real friends at school. Eventually, she realized that social standing does not necessarily translate to social acceptance. This is a crucial concept that so many teens—those who are trying to achieve popularity and those who are disappointed that they can’t—tend to miss: To be popular does not mean to be liked.1

  NOAH, PENNSYLVANIA | THE BAND GEEK

  Band practice moved along tediously as the director broke down the show, practicing segments four measures at a time with each instrument, then bringing all of the sections together for a fifteen-second blast of music. Noah and the rest of the Honor Guard raced around, moving props and setting up instruments and microphones.

  Afterward, when Noah waited with Leigh for her father to drive them home, Leigh asked him to come over. “I can’t tonight,” Noah replied. “I really need to study for my physics test. It’s important.” Noah wanted to do well in all of his classes, but he especially wanted to prove himself as the only junior in AP Physics.

  Leigh quieted. Noah knew he had upset her, but wasn’t sure why. On the ride home, she barely spoke to him. Noah, in the backseat behind her, felt guilty.

  Every night, Noah lay in bed, pulled up his Winnie the Pooh comforter, closed his eyes, and listed his joys and concerns, always ending with a joy to hold on to as he went to sleep, a practice instilled by his church. Tonight his concerns centered on Leigh. So did his joy. Let tomorrow allow me to have a better experience, he prayed.

  The next morning, Noah got to school early, anxious about the physics test. At his locker, Leigh approached him, looking uncomfortable. “Can we talk?” she asked.

  Noah’s stomach plummeted. “I’d like to, but I have to get to physics,” he said. She agreed to wait until lunch.

  Noah was breezing through the test when, about midway through the period, he got nauseous. His stomach twinged in painful waves that would have doubled him over were he standing. Two classes later, he was so anxious he could hardly focus.

  When the lunch bell rang, Noah stored his books in his locker and reluctantly walked to Leigh’s, where she waited with a piece of paper folded in half. “Can we talk now?” she asked. They sat on the floor, backs against a row of lockers.
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  “So,” Leigh said, her fingers fiddling with her lunchbox strap. She looked away from Noah, down the empty hall. “I don’t think our relationship is working out anymore.”

  Noah’s eyes watered. He stared down at his palms, which reflexively curled. All the joy in my life is gone. “Is this something we can talk about?” Noah asked, wiping his face with his sleeve.

  “No, we can’t,” she said. For twenty minutes, she explained why they had to break up. They had different outlooks on life, she said. He liked to argue (he preferred the term “analyze”); she didn’t. He was too immature, and yet he was also too serious. She loved him, she said. He was sweet, she said. It wasn’t going to work, she said.

  Noah bent over his knees. His hair fell into his face and dampened. Leigh told him how hard it was to break up with him. She repeatedly urged Noah to read the letter she held. Grudgingly, he skimmed it through tears: thirteen bulleted points of heartache. The letter listed reasons why their relationship was failing. Leigh reached an arm toward Noah to comfort him. He flinched away.

  The lunch bell rang. Noah stood up. “Can we be friends?” Leigh asked, her blue eyes sincere.

  “We’ll have to see,” Noah replied. He couldn’t say yes. He thought he would throw up if he did. He needed to compose himself for school. As he walked away, he glanced back once to see a circle of supportive friends closing in on Leigh. No one looked twice at Noah.

  At home that night, the hurt washed over him. He wrote a song for Leigh that she would never hear. He shuffled through a deck of Star Wars cards, seeking the kind of comfort he could find in doing something he considered geeky. Padmé Amidala, the Jack of Spades, surfaced. The quote on her card read, “I will not let you give up your future for me.” This reminded Noah of his sixth-period conversation with his guidance counselor, whom he had told that he wanted to help his ailing grandmother in California.

  “That’s selfless, but you need to ask yourself what she would want you to do,” the counselor told him.

  Noah stared at the card. His grandmother wouldn’t want him to sacrifice his schoolwork, but he would do anything to keep her around. He momentarily forgot about Leigh as he focused on Po. Noah finished going through the deck, unsoothed. It had been eleven hours since his “life came crashing down,” and he wasn’t in any less pain than he had been that morning. I have no idea what I’ve become. Nothing will be the same. This was one of the worst days of Noah’s life. He fervently prayed that he would find some way to cope. I want to be loved, Noah wrote in his journal that night. I want to be loved, I don’t care what it takes.

  Because of the breakup, Noah had to switch cafeteria tables. Since freshman year, he had eaten lunch with Leigh and her friends, although her friends had never really become his friends. Over the next few weeks, Noah sat alone at a table full of Asian students who spent the period doing homework without conversing.

  Noah’s seating issues repeated themselves on the band bus to football games. Noah typically was the last student to get on the bus because he wanted to ensure that the equipment and instruments were loaded properly before the band left school. He didn’t know why he was the only bandie who felt responsible for this duty. Other bandies mocked his work ethic when he loaded supplies on the box truck or practiced marching formation. “Quit working so hard, man. You’re a band manager,” one senior said to him. “It’s not like working harder is going to get you to be drum major,” another bandie said. Noah knew that people thought band managers were a joke, but he wanted to prove that he deserved to be there. He liked that people considered him responsible. The adult volunteers, parents and staff, always thanked Noah effusively, as if he were going beyond the call of duty.

  Seats on a band bus—Redsen’s band filled five buses, a forty-foot trailer, and a truck—were supposed to hold a few dozen students, volunteers, and a pile of uniforms. Usually by the time Noah got onto the bus, only a couple of seats would be left: inevitably one with the adults and one next to a stack of uniforms. Other kids saved blocks of seats for friends, but since Noah and Leigh’s breakup, the Honor Guards hadn’t been saving Noah a seat.

  Noah knew he was different from “most high school kids who are crazy, outgoing, and fun,” he said. Recently, his Spanish teacher led an exercise in which she asked who in the class best exhibited certain traits. “Who’s nice?” she asked in Spanish. “Who’s tall?” For most traits the students offered various names, but when she asked, “¿Quién es serio?”, the class answered in unison, “Noah!” Noah laughed because it was true.

  He liked his serious side, though he sometimes worried about how it set him apart from his peers. He was in touch with his emotions, rather than airbrushing them with fake happiness. But he was okay with that. And he had thought Leigh would have been okay with that too, after seventeen months.

  Noah had always been in tune with his emotions and unafraid to express them. These characteristics were partly why classmates called him an emo throughout eighth and ninth grades, when he wore all black to reflect his mood. It didn’t mean much to him to be emo, but he identified with the label because he believed he was more emotional than his classmates. He had also briefly considered cutting on several occasions. Once, a student had reported to the school guidance office that Noah was suicidal. He wasn’t, though he had considered suicide in middle school. But classmates were thrown by his attempts to have discussions “on a higher plane” about feelings and deep, hard-hitting issues. They didn’t realize that he tried to help other people with their problems so he wouldn’t have to think about his own.

  THE BREAKUP HAD DESTABILIZED Noah, who was crashing more than usual lately. Crashing was Noah’s term for anxiety attacks that made him at once confused, angry, and morose. Instead of crashing once a month, he was crashing every few days. He got two to three hours of sleep a night.

  But Noah and Leigh set aside their conflict for an important meeting. Before the breakup, they had spearheaded Redsen High School’s first recycling program, for which they received permission from the administration to put recycling bins in eight classrooms. Once a week, Noah and Leigh collected the recycled paper and drove it to a designated bin outside Noah’s church. A recycling company picked up the paper and gave money to the church. At the meeting, Noah and Leigh delivered an impassioned presentation to persuade the church board to give a portion of the revenue to their school for student scholarships. The board listened patiently, then agreed to give Redsen 100 percent of the profits.

  That night, when Noah, distraught over the breakup, was crashing again, his father came into the room. He hugged Noah, who cried in his father’s arms, surprised at the embrace. “There are a lot of good people, but not everyone is compatible,” he told Noah. “Forget about her and enjoy your life.”

  Noah realized that he had been wallowing in the downsides of the breakup rather than enjoying positive aspects of his life, such as looking forward to the Macy’s Parade and other events. He reflected on the dozens of songs he had written about how much he wished his father would show him that he loved him. My dad was there to comfort me, he thought. I wonder if the breakup was “supposed” to happen. I was supposed to find love from my dad because of Leigh.

  Back at school, Noah tried to shift his attention to the upcoming student government elections. Noah had run for class president twice and had lost decisively both times to Kent, a popular jock who’d barely campaigned. Last year, all four students on Noah’s slate had lost to populars. Nevertheless, Noah decided to try again.

  He had wanted to be involved in student government since middle school, where the general student council was selected by teachers who in three years didn’t choose a single boy. In ninth grade, Noah decided to appeal to his classmates. By the day of the deadline, he was the only student who had submitted a form for class president. He assumed that because the school had set a firm deadline, he would win by default. Instead the adviser extended the deadline, leading two other students to announce their candidacies. Noah
graciously accepted his resulting defeat to Kent because he agreed that it was important for students to have options. In tenth grade, a dark horse ran; he was known for shaving his head and reading medieval fiction. He Nadered some of the non-popular kids’ votes from Noah, ensuring that Noah couldn’t collect enough votes to win.

  This year, Noah’s hopes were riding on one of two possibilities: that in addition to Kent, another popular student would run, thus splitting the popular vote, or that no third-party student would run, and somehow Noah would manage to make an impact through his message. Noah liked Kent, but after last year’s loss he had vowed to run every year, “because even if I lose, I’ll be able to use the experience to grow.”

  At the first official election meeting, Noah fervently hoped that the new class advisor would disclose that, somehow, this year’s officers would be selected by the quality of their speeches, their agendas, or, really, any factor other than the student popular vote. No such luck.

  The teacher wrote the name of each office on the board and asked the students to sign up. Noah waited until the room emptied before adding his name under President. As he left the room, he looked back over his shoulder and smiled. This year’s election would be between Kent and Noah alone. Popular versus Unpopular.

  REGAN, GEORGIA | THE WEIRD GIRL

  Regan opened the door to the community theater, rushing to get out of the rain, which hovered thickly in the air, typical of a Georgian September sky. She pulled Crystal into the building behind her, careful outdoors not to clasp Crystal’s hand in any way that could imply a relationship.