The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [34]
As soon as Danielle’s group walked into the decorated gym for Homecoming, Danielle already regretted going. Her friends mingled, darting about so quickly that Danielle lost track of them in the crowd. Danielle grew lightheaded, as she usually did in the middle of large social gatherings. Why was she here? She didn’t like dancing—at least, not the grinding that surrounded her. She preferred “old-people dancing,” the elegant waltzes she saw in the classic movies she loved, and wanted to learn the flamenco, the tango, the salsa. For now, she tried to ignore her discomfort.
When her friends dragged her onto the dance floor, Danielle swayed awkwardly and tried to think of an excuse to do something else. She surveyed the other students, who were laughing and frolicking in the crowd. It hit Danielle then just how different she was from her classmates.
It wasn’t her looks. She could blend in, and outside of school, people insisted she was pretty. No, she figured it was everything else about her that made her stand out. She didn’t listen to the same music her classmates did; she preferred to listen to her mother’s favorite bands: Deep Forest, Marillion, or James. For extracurriculars, she took tae kwon do classes with her younger brother and played varsity tennis only reluctantly. Even her conversation topics meandered from the mainstream; she liked to raise random questions, like “How are sweatshirt drawstrings made?!” She couldn’t relate to other students’ provincial, high school–oriented goals. They talked about partying at the local university and staying together in town for the rest of their lives, while Danielle dreamed of someday doing something “really great,” like joining Doctors Without Borders or discovering ancient ruins. She preferred not to act phony, so she refused to pretend that shallow topics were interesting or that unintelligent comments were witty. Better to say nothing than to be fake.
Danielle didn’t feel like she assumed other people her age did, either. Classmates never seemed to understand why she hated talking on the phone and texting. She didn’t date, shop, or watch much TV. Also, Danielle enjoyed her own company. Danielle’s mother, who was a childhood outcast too, had taught her not to care what other people thought. “If I believed in fate,” Danielle said, “then I would say that I was destined to be an outsider, based on my genetics. The entire maternal side of the family is extremely antisocial, and I definitely got those genes.”
Sometimes Danielle considered being an outcast pretty cool, actually. Because she didn’t feel the need to follow trends like other students did, they didn’t scrutinize her; or if they did, she wasn’t aware of it. She didn’t feel strange doing things that other students wouldn’t do, like reading in odd places. Danielle read incessantly; she thought perhaps it was because reading made her feel smart and she liked the quietness of it. She liked watching movies, too, but not as much, because with movies “you miss the really cool sentences.”
More than three hundred books were divided among three bookshelves in Danielle’s room. One was the Young Adult section, with Harry Potter, the series that first inspired her to read, and the Gossip Girl Series, which she read during the year of the hate club to try to learn how to be popular. She hadn’t read the YA books since middle school, but she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of them. The other large bookshelf was her literary shelf: Tolstoy, Orwell, Rand, Dickens, Hardy, Lessing, Faulkner, Proust, Shakespeare, Austen, Saramago, García Márquez, both Brontës. She kept her favorite books on a shelf attached to her headboard. There she could find Gone with the Wind, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Out of Africa, and Into the Wild.
Danielle treated her books like museum treasures, cringing if a book cover so much as creased. When a classmate borrowed her Les Misérables paperback and told her the cover fell off, she gave him the book permanently and bought herself a new, unblemished hardback. Books were so