The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [170]
On the last night of the trip, Blue quietly panicked. His disappointment that the team wasn’t coming home with an award was far overshadowed by the feeling that he was coming home to nothing. He was scared that the end of SCH meant the end of everything good that had happened to him over the last couple of months. All of the awesome progress I’ve made socially and intellectually ends here, Blue thought sadly. Now we all go on with our own lives. Every other member of the team had a plan; Michael was going to a mainland college and the others all had scholarships to the University of Hawaii. Blue had no inkling of what was going to happen to him.
Back at home, it became apparent that Blue would have to follow the most obvious avenue remaining to him. He could go to the local community college and work his tail off so that he could attempt to transfer to the University of Hawaii. First, however, he would have to graduate.
Because Blue again was behind on homework, he was still failing English and French. With three weeks left in the school year, he appealed to those two teachers for help. He had paid attention, he told them. He moved his seat to the front of the room. “If I get an A on the final,” he asked them, “will you pass me?” They agreed. “I know you’re smarter than this,” his French teacher said.
When Blue hunkered down to study this time, he did not hear voices screaming at him that he was an underachiever who would amount to nothing. His mother, having realized that she couldn’t force him into the military, largely left him alone. Instead, Blue heard a new chorus. “You’re an intellectual,” he remembered Michael saying. “You have a one-in-a-million kind of mind,” Leilani once told him. He got to work.
DANIELLE, ILLINOIS | THE LONER
By May, pieces of Danielle’s new social life slowly clicked into place. In the school library, she studied for government with Logan. In classes, she chatted with Kristy, Bree, and Max. She went to lunch with Trish a few more times. She had become friendly with another of Camille’s friends, a boy who liked National Geographic as much as Danielle did and had the same taste in movies. One afternoon, when she happened to spot Autumn, the Dairy Queen trainee, leaving softball practice, Danielle offered to drive her home, even though she lived out of the way. On the ride, they chatted easily about work and softball. Danielle decided she didn’t care that other people called Autumn “creepy.” Autumn was nice to her, and that was enough for Danielle. To Danielle’s amazement, a supernerd even included her among the eight classmates he invited through Facebook to a study session. She was both disappointed and relieved that she couldn’t go because of a Dairy Queen shift.
A few days later, Danielle summoned the nerve to ask the guy with whom she had discussed pop if he could burn for her the new TV on the Radio CD, which he had reviewed for the school newspaper. She expected him to think it was strange for her to ask a favor, but she wanted the CD. He agreed. The next day, Danielle passed him in the hallway and actually smiled at him. It was the first time at school that Danielle had smiled unprompted at someone whom she didn’t know well. He smiled back.
To celebrate the end of classes, Danielle’s creative writing teacher hosted a picnic on the soccer field for his students. Danielle rolled up her jeans, kicked off her flipflops, and played soccer barefoot in the mud. She scored a goal and even called out for the ball a few times when she wasn’t teasing Kristy and Olivia, a girl she knew from eighth-grade summer camp.
After the game, Danielle, Max, and Olivia went inside to talk to their AP U.S. History teacher, who was one of Danielle’s favorites. She chattered away, realizing that this was probably the most that Max and Olivia had ever heard her speak. Max and the teacher agreed that it had taken ages to convince Danielle to talk to them.
“She used to just sit in the back of the room and look like this,