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

by Alexandra Robbins

  Study after study has shown that perceived peer drinking plays an enormous role in a student’s decision to consume alcohol. The more anxious a student is to fit in, the greater the likelihood that he will be influenced by these supposed norms, especially boys, for whom heavy drinking may carry less of a stigma than for girls. Experts say that the factor that most strongly predicts both the initial age and future use of alcohol and drugs is a student’s normative beliefs (perceptions about the pervasiveness and acceptability of a behavior among peers).

  Why is there such a discrepancy between perceived and true student drinking? One answer could rest in the types of kids who are doing the drinking. Studies show that not only do student athletes have “significantly higher levels of perceived drinking” than nonathletes, but also they actually drink more. This could be because sports teams develop tight groups and therefore more stringent behavioral norms, or because jocks are often considered popular, which means they are more likely to be invited to social events involving alcohol. Remember, two of the hallmarks of a perceived popular student are that he is visible and influential. If the populars say that “everyone” is drinking, then many other students will be exposed to this opinion.

  Fortunately, one method of prevention is designed to curb risky behavior specifically by addressing these misperceptions. FCD Educational Services, a small nonprofit, is one of many organizations that uses social norms to change behaviors and attitudes toward substance abuse in schools. Most of FCD’s programs begin with a survey about students’ own actions and their perceptions of peers. “In every single school, almost every single kid grossly overexaggerates peer use of alcohol and other drugs,” said Renee Soulis, FCD southeast regional officer and senior prevention specialist.

  FCD, which has “an enormously high success rate” of changing behaviors, then reveals the actual numbers to students, driving the message home with presentations, school-wide marketing campaigns, and/or classroom activities that reinforce healthy attitudes and debunk the myth that “everyone” is drinking. In some communities, FCD uses high school data to improve middle school attitudes. “The middle schoolers think that everyone drinks in high school. We get nondrinking seniors to talk to eighth graders with the survey data. You can see the false perceptions start to shrink,” Soulis said. FCD also addresses parent and teacher misperceptions. “Parents feel isolated so much of the time,” Soulis said. “When they realize the vast amount of parents who are working with this [and feel the same way], they feel empowered.”

  Regan discovered another way to use social norms to resist the pressure to drink: She publicly identified herself as part of a group that has a substance-free lifestyle as its norm. Straight Edge began as a movement among punks; the hardcore punk band Minor Threat coined the term in a song of the same name. Straight Edge kids often wear the group’s symbol, the letter X, on clothes or the back of a hand, co-opting the sign that clubs and bars use to mark underage patrons. (SXE and XXX are other common Straight Edge variations.)

  For Regan, Straight Edge was both a validation and a defense of her lifestyle. “I like having a term to identify myself,” she said. “I know I’m not the only one resisting. When you offer someone chocolate, and they say they’re diabetic, you don’t ask again. Straight Edge affords me that same respect.”

  JOY, CALIFORNIA | THE NEW GIRL

  A new girl arrived in PE, assigned to the gym locker next to Joy’s. Her clothing and shoes were ripped, her body odor was strong, and she had bruises on her arms and legs. Joy noticed her pretty blonde hair and nice teeth. “Hi, are you new here?” Joy asked gently.

  “Yeah.”

  “Welcome to Citygrove! Where are you from?”

  “I’m from El Dorado.” The girl positioned herself as if to hide the contents of her locker.

  “Did you get in a fight?” Joy asked, eyeing the girl’s bruises.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “Three girls beat me up. If I get in another fight, I’m going to juvie.”

  A hyper classmate came running toward her locker, put her PSP down on the bench next to Joy, and dashed off. A few seconds later she ran back. “Hi!” she said.

  The new girl glanced at the bench. “You should pick up your PSP,” she said. “Don’t leave anything around me. I’ve been known to have sticky fingers.”

  Over the next several weeks, Joy got to know Ariana, a foster child whom social services had taken from the trailer park where she lived with her mother. She had transferred schools after her third fight. She confided to Joy that she used and sold drugs, cut herself, and shoplifted. She said that her foster parents barely fed her and her brother. Once, Joy was afraid Ariana was going to die because she was shaking so badly when she got to PE. It turned out she was high. Her brother had given her a new drug as a joke. Ariana was fifteen.

  JOY’S AP ENGLISH CLASS, covered by a substitute teacher, was supposed to be working, but the students were restless. The girl next to Joy, a talented artist, put her pencil down on her desk and sighed. “I’m just gonna draw.” She scratched out an anime character on a piece of paper.

  Joy smiled. Sara, an Asian-American, didn’t usually talk to her. “I used to be like you, sitting and drawing all day. It used to be my passion,” Joy said.

  “I don’t draw that much,” Sara said.

  “You draw every time you’re in this class,” Xavier chimed in.

  “What do you wanna be when you grow up?” Joy asked.

  “My parents want me to be a doctor,” Sara said.

  “A doctor!” Xavier said in surprise.

  “A doctor,” Joy mused. “When drawing is clearly your passion, you’re going to become a doctor.”

  “Joy, you’re so mean!” interrupted Keisha, a girl who had been hostile to Joy lately. “Why do you want to destroy her dreams?! If she wants to become a doctor, then let her become a doctor!”

  “Hold up, did I say that she couldn’t become a doctor?!” Joy snapped. “How exactly am I destroying her dreams? You want to tell me? How will I get in the way of her aspirations?”

  Joy didn’t know why Keisha, who had been nice to her in the fall, had changed her mind about Joy. When Joy spoke in class, Keisha would stare at her as if she spouted gibberish.

  “Nothing,” Keisha said. “If I argue with you, I’m not going to win.” They had crossed words before. She’s not a bad person; she just loses her bearings, Joy reminded herself.

  “I want to be an artist,” Sara admitted.

  “I can see you doing that,” Joy encouraged.

  “But no, I’m going to become a surgeon,” Sara said, resigned.

  “Because of your parents or do you want to?” Joy asked.

  “I can be a surgeon and carve anime into people’s faces!” Sara joked.

  “I don’t think that’s the best idea,” Xavier said.

  “I can be a tattoo artist,” Sara said, brightening.

  “Yeah, you could do that! And you can make a lot of money, if you do the intricate tattoos,” Joy said. “People would pay good money for that!”

  A boy in front of Joy turned around. “Why the hell should she become a tattoo artist?!” he said. “Why would she downgrade from being a doctor to a tattoo artist?!”

  “Maybe if you weren’t so small-minded, you could see that art is something she loves,” Joy said. “And she can make money being a tattoo artist. The more complicated the pieces, the more money she gets.”

  “Why should anyone do crap like art when they can be a doctor or lawyer?!” the boy said.

  “You are so ignorant!” Joy shouted. “Maybe if your parents didn’t embed that level of thinking within you, you could see there’s more to life than being just a lawyer or doctor. You need to seriously wake up.”

  “Don’t argue with her,” Keisha warned him. “She’ll go on and on until she proves her point.”

  In Jamaica, Joy had spent hours drawing, acting, and writing poetry. Since coming to America, she had neglected her artistic side because Citygrove d
idn’t encourage creativity like her Jamaican school did. After the conversation with Sara, Joy returned to spending her free time writing poetry and creating skits to practice her acting. Many of her poems expressed her feelings that the more she grew accustomed to her American surroundings, the more they stifled her.

  NOAH, PENNSYLVANIA | THE BAND GEEK

  Weeks went by without Noah mentioning his challenge. When I finally asked him if he had made any progress, he said he hadn’t. With a bit of prodding, the truth came out. Noah didn’t want to talk to certain crowds in school because he disapproved of the choices they made outside of it. “There’s a reason I don’t befriend them,” he said.

  “You can still be friendly without being best friends,” I said.

  “Yeah, I agree with what you’re saying.” He seemed dubious.

  Several days later, I checked in with him again. “Do you feel like you’ve done anything outside of your comfort zone? Or approached anyone you wouldn’t have approached before?” I asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Noah said. “I just . . . I’m not sure how to do it.”

  “Why can’t it be as simple as just going up and talking to people in different groups as much as you can? You want people to see you as a leader . . .”

  “Part of the problem is that people at our school don’t listen. They just put on their headphones and tune out the world. It’s intimidating.”

  “Sure it’s intimidating, but you won’t know that they don’t listen unless you try.”

  “Yeah, I dunno, I feel like I don’t know how to do it,” Noah said. “People aren’t motivated. The problem is, people that aren’t popular have a few friends and they are perfectly content with that bubble. It’s really infuriating.”

  ELI, VIRGINIA | THE NERD

  In Spanish class, the teacher asked for volunteers to read a passage aloud from a textbook. “Chan! Chan!” Eli shouted, to his friend’s feigned annoyance.

  “Okay, Chan, why don’t you read for us?” the teacher said.

  When Chan finished the paragraph, he looked up with a vindictive gleam. The next paragraph was about forty lines long. “Eli!” he exclaimed. “Let Eli read!”

  Immediately Eli turned bright red and started sweating. “No, that’s really okay. I don’t think so,” Eli said.

  “Come on, Eli. You can do it,” said the best Spanish speaker in the class.

  “How about you only read half?” the teacher said.

  “Okay,” Eli sighed, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it.”

  He started to read, but most of his classmates were chattering. He stopped and waited for the class to quiet, then read another line, then stopped. He waited again for his classmates to simmer down. When he resumed reading, he heard some girls giggle, he guessed because of his accent. Sweating heavily, Eli continued reading, trying to speak over the swell of the other voices in the room. About three-quarters of the way through the paragraph, the jabbering grew loud once more. He stopped and waited, tried to read the next line, and halfway through, stopped reading again. While Eli was mostly glad that no one was paying attention, a small part of him was frustrated that he wasn’t being heard. Every person in the room was engaged in a side conversation. Even his teacher was talking to a French teacher who had stopped by. Nobody’s listening to me, he thought. Story of my life. Eli was so fed up that he uncharacteristically exploded. “IS ANYONE EVEN LISTENING TO ME?!” he shouted.

  Everyone stopped talking and stared at Eli in shock. Then some of the students laughed. “I’m listening, Eli, keep going!” said a girl.

  “Even the teacher isn’t listening to you!” someone else said.

  “No!” the French teacher protested. “She was just saying how great of a reader you are!”

  “Yeah! No, really!” Eli’s teacher said, pleading.

  Embarrassed, Eli resumed reading, but got through only two more lines before the room grew loud once more. Now students were laughing openly, but Eli realized they were laughing with him, not at him. Eli laughed too. “Okay, I have five lines left,” he said. “Can we please just get through this?!” Eli read through the final lines, then looked up when he finished. Unexpectedly the entire class gave him a thirty-second round of applause. Eli gave a modest seated bow and, still blushing, looked down at his textbook.

  That class period was one “of my favorite moments in all of high school,” he said later. “I think it kind of summarized my whole high school experience in one little event. No one listens, then I think everyone’s laughing at me, but maybe I just need to laugh at myself some more, or realize that people are laughing with me.”

  That afternoon, Eli was overjoyed to receive a text from Tad, his neighbor, asking him if he wanted to hang out. Tad, a freshman in college, showed up at Eli’s dad’s house with Willis, another neighbor whom Eli had known for years but hadn’t seen in months. The boys walked around the neighborhood catching up on their lives. They drove to Taco Bell so that Eli could pick up some dinner before going to his busboy job.

  On the ride back, Willis asked Tad, “Do you drink or smoke a lot?”

  “Nah, not too much,” Tad answered. “I drink more than I smoke. You?”

  “Me, too. I think the last time I smoked a lot was Halloween.”

  Eli was disappointed. Were drugs and alcohol really that prevalent? He knew his neighbors drank, but he considered smoking to be pointless and abhorrent. “Wait,” he said from the driver’s seat, “are you talking about cigarettes or pot?”

  “Pot,” Tad replied.

  “Okay, they’re both disgusting,” Eli said.

  Tad and Willis seemed amused by Eli’s emphatic opinion. “Sorry to disappoint you,” Willis said from the backseat.

  As much as he liked these guys, who had always been nice to him, Eli was disappointed. Their conversation worried him. He said later, “Personally, I don’t know how I’m going to fit in in college without smoking or drinking. Then again, it’s not like I want to be with those people anyways, so I guess I’ll have to find a small group of friends who also don’t smoke or drink? I mean, I don’t think I’d mind going to parties, even if people are drinking there, but I won’t drink. But I think going to a party where people are smoking is too much for me.”

  ...

  THE GIRL WHO SAT in front of Eli in calculus turned around and asked, “Eli, are you really going all the way [across the country]?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Josephine tuned in to the conversation. “But won’t you miss your family?” she asked.

  Eli shrugged. “Not really. I mean, are you going to live with your parents forever?”

  “No,” said Josephine, “but, like, you’ll just be so far away. Won’t you miss them?”

  “It’s not like I’m really close with my family, anyways. I don’t hate them or anything, but it’s not going to be difficult.”

  He was surprised to see Josephine, who was usually aloof toward him, flash a sympathetic look.

  Later that week, Eli was at home rummaging through photographs of himself for a scholarship application. He found his sophomore school picture and, pleased, laid it aside. To his delight, he had just been accepted into WCU’s business program. This had been a good day.

  His mother walked by. “What’s that for?” she asked. She pointed to the photograph.

  “A scholarship application,” Eli said.

  “No! Don’t use this one! You look like you’re in eighth grade!”

  A half hour later, when Eli was watching TV, his mother broached the subject again. “Why don’t you ever change your haircut?” she asked.

  “Does it really matter?” Eli said. “You aren’t the one living with the haircut.”

  “It just looks like a t-t-t-” She stopped herself.

  “A t-t-t- what?” Eli asked.

  “Well, a typical geeky haircut.”

  Eli tried to brush off the comment by baiting her until she grew frustrated. “Mom, why don’t you think about changing your hair? Maybe some b
lack? Black hair? Hmm? A little change? Dye it black? Some black hair, maybe?”

  She didn’t understand that this was what he often felt like in her company. When she insulted his hair, he explained later, “I felt . . . diminished. I mean, this is right after all this exciting college stuff happening, so it just feels like she’s saying, ‘Yeah, that’s great, but what about what other people think about what you look like?’ That just really pisses me off. It’s a depressing social commentary. It’s a lonely feeling more than anything.”

  The conversation reminded him of a recent afternoon when he was playing the Wii while his mother tidied his room. She was gone for a long time. Eli went to his room to see what she was up to. When he poked his head in, she was still making his bed. “Oh, I thought you were going through my homework or something,” he said.

  Eli resumed playing Mario Kart. His mother followed him and sat next to him on the couch.

  “I knew this would happen,” she said. “I knew when you signed up for five APs that you’d spend all your time doing homework.” Eli said nothing. His mother was bugging him about doing too much work while he was playing a video game.

  “Why don’t you want to have any friends over?” she continued.

  “I just want to rest and take it easy!” Eli said.

  “What kid doesn’t want to hang out with his friends?! That’s weird! I just wanted you to have a normal senior year, but you had to take these five AP classes!”

  Eli concentrated on his game. He would have loved to be hanging out with friends. He couldn’t say to his mother, “No one wants to hang out with me.” There was a lot he could not say.

  ______

  PARENTS AND “NORMALITY”

  In my standard interview questions for this book, I did not ask students specifically about their parents; this is, after all, a book mainly about the dynamics and targets of exclusion at school. But as a considerable number of students raised the topic, I realized that if there is a single factor that spells the difference between cafeteria fringe headed for greatness and those doomed to low self-worth, even more than a caring teacher or a group of friends, it is supportive, accepting parents who not only love their children unconditionally, but also don’t make them feel as if their idiosyncrasies qualify as “conditions” in the first place. “My mom likes to compare me to the rest of society, or at least how she perceives it to be, and I just want her to stop,” Eli told me. “I want her to accept me for who I am.”