The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [16]
Most people didn’t understand Eli’s sense of humor. He was low-key and cheerful, but it was tough to stay positive at Strattville High, a large public school in Virginia. On the first day of the spring semester of his junior year, Eli approached a cafeteria table and asked the students—known as “black gangstas”—if he could sit with them. Without so much as a second’s hesitation, they said no. He spent the rest of that semester eating lunch in the library.
Eli still remembered the day in seventh grade when a popular boy knocked a pile of books out of his arms and laughed. As other students joined in, no one helped Eli pick up the books, including a teacher standing four feet away. Eli hated middle school, but the teasing didn’t stop then. Even in high school, sometimes when he walked by a group of jocks, one would follow him, “acting nerdy,” as Eli phrased it, pushing up invisible glasses, mockingly walking in step with Eli, and muttering in a stereotypically nasal nerd voice, “According to my calculations . . .”
Eli had always felt different from his classmates. They didn’t seem to know what they wanted for lunch, let alone what they wanted to do with their lives, whereas Eli knew he wanted to major in finance at Westcoast University and live in the Pacific Northwest after college. (As for lunch, Eli usually opted for pizza.) “I feel like a forty-year-old living the life of a teenager. I just don’t have any connections with anyone at school,” Eli explained. As cliques began to form in elementary school and middle school, his disconnectedness “evolved into nerdiness, just because that was the ‘group’ I best fit into.”
Eli liked to think of high school groups as hierarchies of subspecies. The jocks, for example, could be tiered into football players, cheerleaders, gymnasts, soccer players, “random gym abusers,” and baseball players. The nerds had their own hierarchy as well. This was how Eli described them in descending order of status: “The ADD nerds (who obnoxiously freak over everything, like they’ll walk into class on the day of the test and go, ‘Oh. My. God. Kill me! I didn’t study at all! Aaah!’ when it’s so obvious they spent their whole lives preparing for this test and then they get an A+ on it . . . ); the I-don’t-really-care nerds (this is the rarest group. They do well, but they don’t go out of their way to flaunt it.); the try-to-be-cool nerds (who are too oblivious to realize they don’t belong with the popular kids and that the popular peeps make fun of them); the quiet nerds (who stay in the library during lunch and don’t talk to anyone); and the geeky nerds (like, ‘Oh jiminy crickets! Did you see that episode of Battlestar Gallactica last night?!’ with the squeaky voices).” Eli classified himself as “ten percent quiet nerd, ten percent ADD nerd, and eighty percent I-don’t-really-care nerd.”
Eli had never fallen into the try-to-be-cool nerd category. Why bother attempting that masquerade? As he put it, “I’m not a cool cat.” His school activities consisted of captaining his school’s Academic Bowl team, which competed once a quarter, and participating in the Model UN Club, Spanish Club, and Future Business Leaders of America.
Eli loved Academic Bowl. He was good at Model UN. Other than in those two arenas, Eli felt “kinda out of place. I usually feel like an outsider and looked down upon.” He didn’t know anyone at school whose interests dovetailed with his own. He was a self-proclaimed “geography freak,” often studying a map of the world that hung in his room. He practiced geography trivia, had a goal to visit all fifty states by the age of eighteen (he was missing only three), and in accounting class, while other students played games like Tetris, he was engrossed in the Traveler’s IQ Challenge. His “life to-do list,” which he had written this month, included 124 cities to visit (and 66 things to do). Eli loved the Spanish language and could often be found singing Spanish songs to himself. When he was bored in class, he hunted through his textbooks to find typos or grammatical