Over the years I have been a pretty shamefully bad friend. I have
many times used someone for their toys or social status or out of
convenience only to discard them when I saw a better deal. Travis was
once such case. Now it is important to understand in the realm of
nerds there is not one universally compatible type that can always be
friends with each other. There is in fact a rich tapestry of nerds
who almost all believe while they might not be in the jet set they
are cooler then some other type of nerd whom is helplessly pathetic.
To a popular kid it may look like a band geek was at the same level
as computer nerd, and sometimes they shared some of the same members
in each classification but they were not the same tribe not at all.
In elementary school the unpopular kids fell into just a few major
camps. There were the poor kids, who could be cool but popular kids
would never want them on their team during recess if possible. They
would rather all be on the same team and cheat to win then to have a
superior athlete who was also poor. The second type were those
nonathletic kids who even if they were wealthy didn't gain acceptance
if they couldn't play baseball or basketball or confusingly in the
hierarchy – four-square. There were academically minded nerds who
preferred to play checkers or read during recess and they were almost
at the bottom of the barrel but they were saved by the stinky nerds.
The stinky nerd classification was a catch all that included the
weirdo paste-eater kids, the unbathed, the crazy and the deranged. I
should mention that these were how the boys were sorted out I don't
know anything about girls at this age because they were infested with
cooties.
I was one of the poor and nonathletic kind of nerds that was in
denial about my athleticism and was always trying to join up on a
team and somehow pull out a Disney-esque win over the rich kids. It
didn't work so I decided to strike up a friendship with a really nice
poor academic nerd and test those waters. Alright now we are finally
back to Travis and he was into all kinds of really nerdy things like
models and computers and I thought that was something I could get on
board with. I went over to his house a couple of times and we played
video games and his older brother showed us some cool magic tricks.
We watched Indiana Jones and the last crusade a couple of times
because they owned the film. I genuinely had a lot of fun playing
with him but he was from a family that everyone decided to pick on
for some reason. Everyone made fun of them and pranked them for no
real reason except for it caught on and stayed on through
high-school. One day I was getting off the bus with Travis when one
of his neighbors who I thought was about the coolest kid in the world
made some comment about me being friends with Travis. I wish,
sincerely, this was the part of the story where I tell you how I
stood my ground and defended my friend but I didn't and I got off the
bus and went to his house with him to play for the last time. The
whole time I was over there I just kept thinking what people thought
about me being friends with Travis and when I went home I never went
back. At least we had not really become good friends before I curbed
him and he wouldn't want to be a friend with a shallow kid like me
anyway.
