The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [154]
Within days, Bill backed out of the club, citing schedule conflicts. Noah was dispirited. “I just want to apologize for how my challenge has gone downhill,” he told me. “I’ve been canvassing people at lunch, asking them to help, and it’s just not working. They smile, they laugh with me, we get into discussion. I’m getting to know people, but they just don’t show up to help.”
Noah was certain he was failing his challenge because the number of recycling club members was not increasing significantly. He didn’t realize that simply by mingling among various lunch tables, he was befriending people in different crowds, weaving together the fringes of the cafeteria.
DANIELLE, ILLINOIS | THE LONER
Danielle practiced her conversational skills frequently. At her Dairy Queen orientation, she chatted with Autumn, a trainee who had been on the softball team with her freshman year. Nikki had told Danielle that people didn’t like Autumn. Nevertheless, Danielle asked her questions about homework.
“Why aren’t you doing softball anymore?” Autumn asked her.
“I don’t know. I didn’t really like it, and Nikki told me [the coaches] said they wouldn’t even let me try out, which I didn’t believe, but I don’t know . . .”
“She did? That’s not true at all!”
Danielle hadn’t been spending much time with her friends lately; they were busy, and Danielle wasn’t itching to hang out with them. She continued to visit Viv once a week. She went to lunch with Trish again. They sometimes chatted on Facebook, but rarely ran into each other in school anymore.
Meanwhile, National Honor Society elections loomed. Danielle wasn’t sure how to campaign. One day in the hall, she approached an emo from her sophomore year English class. “Soo. . . I’m running for Webmaster. Want to vote for me?”
“Oh, wow. That was really random,” the girl responded.
“Oh, yeah . . . sorry,” Danielle said, turning red. “I’m just trying to get votes.”
She was surprised that some people were nice about telling her they would vote for her. As she put it, “Everyone I asked said they would vote for me. So I guess not everyone in high school is that bad.”
In government, Danielle was assigned to partner with Logan, a senior, for a mini-discussion about civil liberties. Normally, after that type of task, Danielle would fall silent and return to her desk. But Danielle figured she might as well practice talking with someone new, and she had a fallback conversation topic. By coincidence, her mother had recently learned through Facebook that Danielle’s stepfather had grown up in a small Missouri town with Logan’s mother. The conversation flowed smoothly enough, however, that Danielle didn’t need to bring up the connection.
By mid-April, Danielle, too, was frustrated because she didn’t think she had made any dramatic progress on her challenge. She was tentatively treading outside of her comfort zone, but felt as if she were taking one step forward and two steps back. “I want to come out of this with at least one good friend,” she said. “Though I’m still not doing so hot in the friends area, I have gotten better at talking to people. I’ll actually talk to a teacher instead of running away at the first opportunity, and I’ll at least try to continue the conversation with people my age rather than falling silent. Unfortunately, as much as I may talk to someone in class, it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever hang out with them outside. I want to come out of this project less socially inept than I was before.”
In Spanish, she partnered with Max, Bree, and Kristy for a game in which the teacher showed a student Spanish flashcards that she would have to describe so that her team could guess the accompanying vocabulary words. As they waited their turn, Danielle