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Or even the celebrisphere. Author J. K. Rowling, who has described herself as “a squat, bespectacled child who lived mostly in books and daydreams,” was bullied in school because she was different. Her heroic wizards and witches, who have entranced millions of readers worldwide, “are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so,” she has said. “Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!”

Musician Bruce Springsteen was so unpopular in high school that, “other people didn’t even know I was there,” he has said. He started a band because “I was on the outside looking in.”

Television host Tim Gunn, who identified himself as “a classic nerd” in school, was “crazy about making things: I was addicted to my Lincoln Logs, Erector Set, and especially my Legos,” he has said. “Between my stutter and my fetishizing of Lego textures, I was taunted and teased.” Now Gunn is a fashion world icon precisely because of his eye toward “making things”—and his catchphrase, “Make it work,” has become famous.

All of these people exemplify what I call quirk theory.

QUIRK THEORY: Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting.

Quirk theory suggests that popularity in school is not a key to success and satisfaction in adulthood. Conventional notions of popularity are wrong. What if popularity is not the same thing as social success? What if students who are considered outsiders aren’t really socially inadequate at all? Being an outsider doesn’t necessarily indicate any sort of social failing. We do not view a tuba player as musically challenged if he cannot play the violin. He’s just a different kind of musician. A sprinter is still considered an athlete even if she can’t play basketball. She’s a different kind of athlete. Rather than view the cafeteria fringe as less socially successful than the popular crowd, we could simply accept that they are a different kind of social.

TO INVESTIGATE THE CAUSE and consequence of the gut-wrenching social landscape that characterizes too many schools, I followed seven “main characters”—real people—for a year and interviewed hundreds of other students, teachers, and counselors individually and in groups. I talked with students from public schools, private schools, technical schools, schools for the arts, boarding schools, college prep academies, inner city schools, small rural schools, and suburban schools. They have more in common than they know.

While for previous books, I acted merely as an observer, narrating stories as they happened, with this book I crossed a line. In the middle of the school year, I surprised my main characters by issuing them a challenge that dared them to step outside of their comfort zone. If successful, I hoped these experiments could bring them closer to the school experience they genuinely wanted.

To understand why the cafeteria fringe will be much better off after leaving the school setting, it helps to know how they become outcasts in the first place. Throughout the following chapters, I explain in what I hope is entertaining prose the psychology and science behind questions such as: “Why are popular people mean?”, “Why is seventh grade the worst?”, “Why are outsiders better off after school?”, “Why do social labels stick?”, “Why can’t groups get along?”, “Is popularity worth it?”, and “How can we improve the school experience?” To explain these student group dynamics, I spoke to experts and reviewed hundreds of articles and books on psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other sciences. Much of what I learned was unexpected.

Slip with me a few tiers down below the in crowd—below the cliques that include people who say, as one popular girl told me, “I’m not friends with losers”—into a world of students who are overlooked, disparaged, or completely dismissed. Descend to the plane where