The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [90]
Noah tried to ignore Frederick and put on his suit. Underclassmen were hanging onto Frederick’s words.
“C’mon, let’s hear it,” Frederick sneered. “How far have you gotten with her? I bet you have a huge dick—you know, being that you’re Chinese and all.”
The swimmers laughed, except for Jiang. Noah’s face burned. He wanted to tell Frederick to shut up, but he assumed any response would only provoke him. One of the first techniques in dealing with bullies is to ignore them, he reminded himself. If they lose interest, they’ll leave. He silently thanked his parents for planning a trip to California that overlapped with the next team party.
Noah knew he and Leigh were both seen as good kids, even though they didn’t view themselves that way. He never shared intimate details about their relationship. He didn’t understand why sex was such a popular conversation topic; sex was something for two people to share with each other, not with a bunch of obnoxious, meddling teammates. Noah walked silently to the pool deck.
At the starting block, Noah inhaled deeply. As he did before every race, he cupped his hands around his nose and mouth, cleared his mind, and flexed his scapulae. He scanned the crowd for Leigh, who was cheering with his parents. He exchanged grins with Jiang in lane three.
When the blue strobe light flashed, Noah dove into the pool with as much force as he could muster. He raced down the lane. At the wall, he flipped hard, shoving through the water, kicking as forcefully as he knew how. A quick peripheral glance revealed that he was ahead of Jiang by about a body length. Noah’s angle was too sharp for him to see the other swimmers. He remembered a lesson he had learned as a sophomore: “Breathe less, don’t think.” He decided to take two breaths instead of three. Don’t let up, he told himself. Pretend this is the last swim of your life. Coaches had told Noah’s team repeatedly, “If you leave everything in the pool, you can have no regrets.” Now he clung to that.
Noah took his second breath and shot forward through the last fifteen yards. He slammed into the wall and looked up at the scoreboard. Lane 5: 23.51. First place. Noah leapt with joy and fist-pumped. He shook hands with Jiang, who placed second but hadn’t qualified. Noah had done it. He was a district swimmer.
NOAH’S CHALLENGE
Noah’s challenge was not easy to devise. He wanted to get to know more people at school, to improve his self-worth, and to convince classmates to view him as a leader. I told him that, similar to his swimming pep talk, for people to see him as a leader he had to act like one. When I explained that I was issuing each person a challenge, Noah was willing but nervous. “Redsen is pretty cliquish, and some of those cliques just don’t cooperate,” he said. Even the elected student government officers hardly acted like leaders. The class officers hadn’t held a meeting in months. It was no wonder, he said, that Redsen seniors were no longer allowed to go off campus for lunch, go on a cool class trip, or leave school early when they were finished with classes. Nobody was lobbying for the privileges.
I thought about how Frederick picked on Noah, football players physically shoved him, and other classmates made fun of him. Noah wasn’t their only target. I asked Noah to think about a way to rally as many other disenfranchised students as possible toward one cause.
In our next conversation, Noah asked if he could use his recycling program to unite students across clique boundaries. I thought that was a great idea. If Noah could get enough marginalized students to work together, they might see him as a leader, and they could prove that non-popular kids could do as much as or more than the populars for the school; plus,