The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [56]
He thought about his fear of change. He thought about how scared he was of his mother’s threat to ship him to the military. It wasn’t the military itself, or combat, that frightened him. He was terrified that he wouldn’t come out the same person. He knew some people needed the kind of change that the military offered, but Blue liked himself the way he was.
He believed he was struggling to simply survive. I want what other kids have. I’m tired of being different, he thought. Still, the only person I want to be is me. I can’t let her win. He realized why his immediate response to his mother was one of increasing rebelliousness. He didn’t want to live his life doing things to please other people. I’m gonna push her out, he resolved, so I can feel more of my own self-satisfaction.
Not long afterward, Blue’s mother informed him that she had signed him up for ROTC, informed ROTC of the colleges to which he would apply, selected his intended majors of Japanese and engineering, and lined up Air Force and National Guard recruiters. Blue, she said, was going into the military.
NOAH, PENNSYLVANIA | THE BAND GEEK
On Leigh’s birthday, Noah could hear her friends singing to her four tables away from the “Asian table” where he miserably stared at a textbook. Noah was trying to move on, but lunch was the hardest period of the day. The cafeteria made him feel like an observer of rather than a participant in the high school experience. “I’m just not using the cafeteria to have fun,” he explained later. “All around me, kids are laughing, joking. I feel like I’m not a part of it. I don’t feel like a high school kid; I feel closer to the teachers monitoring it, working on their grades, glancing to make sure there isn’t any trouble.”
Even with elections looming, Noah didn’t campaign in the cafeteria. He assumed that even other outcasts didn’t want to be approached during lunch. Outside of the cafeteria, however, he boldly delivered his spiel to classmates: “Hey, what’s up? . . . So, I’m running for class president, and”—here he’d give a quick rundown of his agenda. “Would you be willing to vote for me?” Sometimes people said no, but many students at least listened to what he had to say. Mostly, Noah stuck to campaigning among mainstream students. Some kids he was too afraid to approach, like the drinkers, stoners, Goths, and “prostitots,” Redsen’s term for underclassman girls who appeared to be promiscuous.
After gym, Noah noticed semi-popular students looking at campaign fliers on the wall. “Hey, guys,” he said. “You know, I’m running for president this year.”
They turned to him. “Again?” asked one. “Didn’t you run last year? Kent beat you, right?”
Noah nodded. “Yeah, well, I’ve looked at a lot of cool stuff we can do, and I think I can help make this an awesome year.”
“Yeah, right,” snorted another student. “Haha, I’m just gonna vote for Kent. You’re way too serious.”
In study hall, he approached a group of classmates and told them how he could improve class trips and other student privileges. The students nodded. “I hate how the popular kids win,” one said. “They don’t care about anyone else. They just sit there and do nothing.”
Noah’s opponent was not campaigning, content to sit back and “ride the popularity train,” as Noah put it. Noah had about fifty posters. Kent had zero. Noah set up a Facebook group and spent hours sending messages to classmates. Kent had done none of that. Noah believed he had a decent chance to win the election, much better odds than he had the last two years. Maybe this was the year he could “finally overthrow the popular regime.”
It didn’t matter to Noah that students didn’t understand some of his posters, such as the one that displayed Noah and two friends dressed as ninjas. SUPPORTED BY THE NINJA APPRECIATION CLUB, the poster read in large letters. Small print at the bottom of the poster read, “If you don’t know about