Whitney, Shay, and Chelsea were huddled at a table in the library, working on an English group project, when Bianca and Giselle walked in and sat on the couch. A few minutes later, Chelsea stood up and, without a word to her partners, joined Bianca and Giselle for the rest of the period. “Dude, what the fuck?!” Whitney vented. “That’s so annoying.” She began a tirade about Chelsea’s selfishness. Chelsea had wormed her way into the preps’ circle. She had been savvy enough not to try too hard, as Irene had. Chelsea, for example, knew better than to wear anklets as Bianca did.
“Calm down,” Shay told her. “Let it go, it’s not a big deal. She wasn’t helping us anyway.” Whitney liked that Shay didn’t let minor matters bother her. Generally Whitney agreed with classmates’ assessment of her as a melodramatic, high-strung girl. When she was with Shay, though, she felt more relaxed.
The next day, when Bianca and Giselle entered the library, Bianca yelled across the room, “Chelsea, you know you want to sit with us.” Chelsea seemed thrilled that Bianca had gone out of her way to invite her over. The following day, as Whitney again worked with Shay on their project, out of the corner of her eye she saw Chelsea sneak into the library and bolt into the other room, where Bianca lounged with Steph.
Outside of the cafeteria, Whitney hadn’t hung out with the preps as a group since February. The only Riverland students she socialized with after school were Giselle, Giselle’s boyfriend, and Steph. Otherwise, she spent much of her free time with Luke. In school, Whitney was gradually branching out. In Spanish and speech classes, Whitney started to chat with Caroline, the emo who, when asked to write about something that annoyed her, chose to write about preps. The first time Whitney spoke to her, she pointed to Caroline’s Bullet for My Valentine shirt. “I like them. Are they still touring in Europe this summer?” she asked.
Caroline eyed Whitney suspiciously as if to say, “Why are you acknowledging me?” When she realized Whitney was sincere, she answered, “I think so.”
“Oh my God, [our Spanish teacher] is, like, so crazy,” Whitney said, and told a story that made Caroline laugh. Over the next several weeks, Whitney made an effort to ask Caroline questions and smiled at her in the hallway. (Whitney stuck to “small gestures because she’s emo, so she doesn’t like people.”)
For advertising class, Elizabeth and another wannabe were putting on a children’s rock concert. The advertising teacher had asked Whitney to emcee the concert because of her charisma and because she didn’t mind speaking in front of large groups.
When Whitney got to school Friday night, she helped Elizabeth iron tablecloths for a vendor’s booth. As they waited for the audience to arrive, Whitney told Dirk about her latest fight with Giselle. Elizabeth and her partner came over to hear what Whitney was talking about. Realizing that she was upset, they sat down, listened to her, and offered advice. Whitney couldn’t believe that girls who used to hate her were being compassionate. Dirk spent most of the night trying to convince Whitney to go to a punk party. Whitney declined. Partying didn’t seem all that important anymore.
Later, another so-called loser initiated conversation with Whitney. In the past, Whitney would have shot her a why-are-you-talking-to-me look—or the girl would have waited for Whitney to deign to talk to her. Now Whitney engaged in the discussion, talking about school and the girl’s crush on Dirk. In return, the girl smuggled over free cookies from another booth. As she waited to go onstage, Whitney played hangman with Dirk and Elizabeth. Preps wouldn’t have been caught dead playing hangman. Or eating cookies.
ONE NIGHT, WHITNEY AND her mother were finishing up dinner before an honor society event. “I’m going to leave in, like, fifteen minutes to pick up Fern,” Whitney said.
“You should call her before you leave,” her mother replied. “While you’re in the shower, I can do it.”
“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind calling her house.”
Whitney’s mother put down her fork. “You know, I’m really proud of you and how much more grown up you’ve become this year. This is the most pleasant you’ve been basically since you were born.”
As Whitney showered, she reflected on what her mother had said. She had not stopped to think that in the process of improving her social world, maybe she had also bettered herself. She hadn’t realized that people would notice her efforts.
At the honor society event, students—mostly band kids and nerds—chatted in small circles backstage. Whitney stood in a circle with three band kids, listening to them talk about a concert. While she pretended to be interested, she saw Fern timidly approach a different circle, teeter on its perimeter, and then back away because no one thought to let her in. She tried another circle. Same deal. And another. Whitney’s heart broke. She excused herself from her group and approached Fern. “Hey, so you pumped for college?” Whitney asked.
Fern looked pleased. “Yeah, I have family who live near there.”
While they continued to chat, Whitney slowly herded Fern toward the band kids. Whitney stepped into the group and shifted to create an opening for Fern. As she included Fern in the conversation, the boys did too. The group talked until the ceremony began.
On the drive back, Whitney racked her brain for a topic for the twenty-minute ride to Fern’s house. She settled on a girl who had been the meanest girl at Riverland before she transferred to Fern’s old school. They talked about the girl the entire ride home. Whitney’s stories made Fern laugh. Whitney had never seen Fern laugh before.
At an honor society meeting a few weeks later, Whitney noticed Fern sitting in her usual spot at the back of the room. “Fern! What are you doing?!” Whitney shrieked. “Get over here with us right now!” Fern beamed as she sat down with Whitney and the rest of the group.
______
WHY SCHOOL UNIFORMS DON’T ERASE CLIQUES
Some schools have attempted to ease clique tensions, such as those at Riverland, by requiring school uniforms, to create the illusion of sameness among the student population. Students I interviewed, however, said that uniforms don’t work. “There’s still pressure to act and look a certain way,” said a senior at an all-girls school in Arizona. “If you don’t have the new Vera Bradley design as your backpack, or you’re not wearing the cutest flats or the cool Vans, then you’re not popular. People spend crazy amounts of money on their shoes, backpacks, and designer earrings. The uniforms were supposed to stop girls from spending too much time worrying about clothes or what they look like, but [they] do just the opposite.”
In a study of a Southern middle school’s incentive-based voluntary uniform policy, within the first three weeks the number of students wearing uniforms dropped from 70 percent to less than 40 percent. Eventually fewer than a fifth of the students complied, and even then, mostly on days the school rewarded them for it. At many schools with uniform policies, shoes and accessories end up playing the same roles as clothing does at non-uniform schools. “The people who don’t care wear Birkenstocks (I do),” said a Florida senior. “If you wear fake Uggs, you get made fun of. If you wear other boots, you get made fun of. And if you wear black boots, you get looked at weird.”
If students experience such a strong urge to conform, then why do they resist standardized clothing? The answer returns us to the battle between the group and the individual, the dichotomy of hoping to stand out yet striving to blend in. As writer-performer Quentin Crisp wrote in his 1968 autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, “The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They solve this problem by defying their parents and copying one another.” Although people conform as a way to belong to a group, they nonetheless want that group to seem unique and special. This need to be distinct from other groups can even overtake the desire for a positive group image, which may partly explain why some cliques pride themselves on being mean.
You’ve seen this phenomenon before. Popular students might stop using catchphrases once nerds adopt them, celebrities move on to new designer denim when trickl
e-down versions arrive on discount-store racks. Men are less likely to order a small steak when it is labeled a “ladies’ cut.” British fashionistas deserted Burberry caps once they became ubiquitous among soccer hooligans.
A basic tension exists between the opposing drives for similarity and distinction. According to marketing professor Jonah Berger, “People resolve [this tension] by defining themselves in terms of distinctive category memberships. When people feel overly similar, their renewed need for individuation drives them to emphasize distinctive group memberships (e.g., band member rather than Plainsville High student); when people feel excessively different, they emphasize broad, generic social category memberships (e.g., Plainsville High student rather than Chess Club member). Membership in small groups allows people to feel similar and different at the same time: similar because they are part of a group and different because the group is separate from the masses.” Freud referred to the hostilities that can arise from the perceptions of some of these smaller distinctions as “the narcissism of minor differences.”
The social process that results from this need for distinction is called divergence. Except in the case of perceived upward mobility, groups generally don’t want to be mistaken for one another. Scene kids don’t want to be misidentified as preps. Geeks aren’t interested in mimicking the punks. Even as Bianca insisted the preps conform to her fashion standards, she wore anklets as a way to distinguish herself.
In an intriguing divergence experiment at Stanford, Berger and his team distributed yellow Livestrong wristbands to freshmen in a target dorm and a control dorm. They told the students it was “wear yellow” month and asked them to wear the bracelet in the upcoming weeks in support of cancer awareness. One week later, the team made the same request of students in a reputed geek dorm located near the target group. During the week after the geeks began wearing the wristbands, 32 percent of the students in the target dorm abandoned the trend, as opposed to only 6 percent of the students in the control dorm, which was on a separate part of campus. Berger’s other divergence studies yielded similar results.
The reputation of a low-status group can have a reverse halo effect, or forked-tail effect, on the trends it adopts; because the dorm was considered geeky, its geekiness spread to wristband wearing. Notice that the effect didn’t go both ways. The geeks were happy to wear wristbands, even though the target dorm had been wearing them for a week. Berger didn’t interview the geeks, but, he said, people “may want to be treated like members of other groups and, to reach this goal, may poach the cultural tastes of those groups.” Or maybe the geeks cared more about the cause than about the superficial image of the trend.
REGAN, GEORGIA | THE WEIRD GIRL
From the middle of the crowd, Regan watched Crystal’s band perform its last show before Regan left Georgia. As she listened to her girlfriend rap, Regan already missed her. After a year of dating, Regan and Crystal thought of each other as spouses. They planned to conduct their relationship long-distance until Regan returned from Bangladesh, at which point both of them hoped to move to the East Coast. “We can make it through anything because we can tell one another the truth,” Regan said.
Regan knew that Crystal loved every bit of her, quirks and all. Once, Crystal had written Regan a list entitled, “100 Reasons Why I Love Regan.” Crystal happened to list many of the same qualities that Johnson teachers had made fun of: Regan’s refusal to drink, for example, her “love and respect for all living things,” her intelligence, her honesty, her independence, her vegetarianism, her creativity, her feistiness, her self-pride, her ability to be profound one minute, silly the next, the inner strength she called upon to stand up for what she believed in, even her love of dinosaurs.
“You’re so sure of yourself,” Crystal wrote. “You’re always ready to take the lead. I adore that about you. I love that you are open-minded alongside strong convictions. You stay true to what you believe. You aren’t afraid to tell me straight up. I love that you have the most vivacious personality I have ever come across. I love that you’re going to Bangladesh to stand up for something that matters. It’s beautiful that you want to live as they live and learn outside of what ‘us’ Americans are used to. . . . Regan, I would actually give you the world if it was mines.”
Crystal took the mic and announced the next song. Regan gave the stage her full attention. Crystal had told Regan in advance that this new song was about her. As the lyrics unfolded, Regan melted with love and pride. Crystal had captured Regan in lyrics, poetically summarizing some of the items from her list and even throwing in a Shakespearean reference. The song expressed something that Crystal had told Regan often: What Crystal loved most about her was her individuality and the way that she followed her heart.
The song meant a lot to Regan. “When I was a teenager, I had a hard time with people wondering why I didn’t want to take the easier path,” Regan said later. “Only as I’ve grown older have I found that people find this characteristic attractive. I think it’s mostly because most people don’t follow their hearts. Most people do what is expected of them; most people take the path well-traveled, just to get by. Now, in the adult world, when someone meets me, they tend to admire me because I know what I want, I know who I am, and I go for it. Every day when I wake up, I know that my dreams are just beginning.” It did not escape Regan—to whom I had not yet explained quirk theory—that the precise qualities that caused people to exclude her in the school setting were the same ones that people admired outside of it.
DURING LAST PERIOD, WYATT knocked on Regan’s office door. “Got a minute?” he asked. He plopped down in a chair. “So what’s the plan?”
“I’m going to live with my parents for the summer. Then I’ll be in Bangladesh for three months. Then grad school.” She bustled back and forth from the printer to her desk.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t want to say I don’t want to teach anymore because that’s not true. But I don’t want to be in public education, I guess. So I found this place for community-based education. Sex education.” Regan hoped to work with small organizations to teach students about sexuality, date rape, and other important issues.
“Where did this come from?”
Regan sat down. “When I was in undergrad, I almost switched my major to human sexuality. Then I took this education class that talked about everything that’s wrong with the system, and I thought, ‘I have to be part of the change.’ ” She scoffed, mocking her idealism.
“So what happened?” he asked.
“This place.”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “I get that. I just had a racial issue the other day. And I heard about your issue with [the movie].”
Regan rolled her eyes. “The whole thing is just so stupid. Someone came up to me and flat-out said, ‘People don’t like you.’ It’s ridiculous to have someone say that to you. So now, what, I go to work every day, worried about who hates me?”
“I don’t think anyone hates you, Davis. I think the problem people have with you is that you’re . . . Well, you put yourself in the front of the class, so to speak. You’ve got a personality. And you don’t try to hide it, and you don’t try to please anyone, and people just don’t get that. I mean, you came into school with bright red hair, you’ve made some odd decisions. People can’t understand it.”
“I get that,” Regan said. “It’s been that way my entire life. Do you think this is something new to me? Because it’s not. I’m just disappointed that at the end of the day, it’s adults acting like this.”
“Do you really think that anyone in our department could be classified as an adult?”
“No,” Regan said. “That’s what’s scary to me. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t trust anyone. I hate to say this, but talking to you right now, all I’m thinking is, ‘Who’s he gonna tell?’ And I think that’s awful. That’s not the kind of place I want to work at.”
“Hey. Are we past that?” he asked.
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sp; She couldn’t meet his eyes. “Yeah,” she said, but she wasn’t sure. “Yeah, you know me: overcome, adapt, improvise. I get over things.” She tried to change the subject. “I just don’t need people going around talking about me when they don’t even know me. You know, I had a student tell me that someone said they didn’t like me.”
Wyatt shook his head, knowing Regan referred to Mandy. “Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding me. She didn’t.”
“Oh, she did,” Regan said and explained the story. “I think I’m a pretty good person and I don’t go out to hurt anyone, so I don’t know why people want to hurt me.”
“She’s the school bully,” Wyatt said. “She feeds off of fear. She makes herself known by scaring people.”
“I’m not scared of her,” Regan said. “I just don’t like what she does.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“How can she not? How can she look in the mirror and not see that she’s awful? Did you hear about what happened at that faculty meeting?”
He rolled his head back and looked at the ceiling. “Yes. We got into a fight over that.”
“What?!”
“She told me how Theodore mistook her for you, and how she screamed at him. And I said to her, ‘What is wrong with you?’ She was like, ‘What do you mean? She’s a bitch.’ And I said, ‘No, you’re a bitch. She’s done nothing to you.’ That’s when I realized that girl is poisonous. I told her, ‘I want nothing to do with you.’ I don’t want people to associate me with her.”
When Regan recovered from her surprise, she said, “I just don’t get it. I mean, in this little competition she has with me that’s in her head, didn’t she win?”
“No, she didn’t. How did she win?” he asked. Before Regan could answer, he continued, “You’re prettier. You’re younger. You have more going for you. Her insecurities make it impossible for her to see that she’s just jealous of you. It’s easier to call you a bitch than to own up to her own issues.”
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Page 36