The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [106]
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