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hello fellow Nerdfighter, I have a short story about school and social cliches for your project, I hope you enjoy

The Other Side of The Social Line

The spirit of intellectual study somehow seems dead in this coliseum of jockdom, or athleticism, or whatever jocks call the gym now a days; and yet I am here to learn something.
Zach Kauhn was a Genius, no, a God of knowledge in the temple of heretics that is Lancingburg high school. And he was here behind the bleachers of the gym awaiting the basketball team’s arrival to give everyone a lecture on sociology. Of course sociology isn’t my forte, but a lecture by Zach Kauhn was to me what listening to Michael Phelps is for most Olympians; doesn’t matter what he’s saying, they’re still the words of a living God.
It’s only the writers, artist, science team, quiz bowl team, math team, RPG club, and me waiting here; in short, 0nly the nerds. Then, as they say in theatre: enter the protagonist, Zachary Kauhn. He’s very tall, a good 6 “4” with a frail build, pale white skin, and hair that’s as dark as an emo kid’s soul. He looks at us, our glee filled faces, our excited smiles, even into the very soul of our sad sad beings; calculating us all like overly complicated math equations. After a long minute he finally speaks. “In two minutes and 31 seconds the basketball team will enter the room, and I will begin the lesson.”
I can see the math team calculating the time to see if he’s right, and by the look on their faces when the sound of rubber impacting the floor spreads across the room, I’d say he’s right. “Now I want you to tell me what you think about the basketball team. They can’t hear us, so speak freely.” Everyone raises their hands to say their negative opinions. Lancingburg’s basketball team is one of the best in the state, and had managed to step on the toes of nearly every nerd in the school, Whether it be in cutting into the math department’s funding, having the art rooms taken down for more space in the gym, or in my case, getting picked on by the point guard. Basically, if the basketball team was a product, its material section would say: made of suck.
After everyone’s given their thumbs down to the team, Zach simply says, “interesting”. He then looks across this nerd herd of ours and points to one of the artist and asks, “Why do you hate the basketball team?” The artist instantly said “they took away the art classrooms, why do you think.”Zach gives a very meaningful hmmm.
“You’ve never considered that they might be just as useful as you?” Zach asks him in a casual voice. “Useful?” The artist says as if the concept of an athlete having any use is world shattering; and I can’t really blame him. “How could any one of those morons be useful? What do they do for society?” the artist says. Zach causally responds with “What do artist do for society?” The artist face goes bright red and he raises his voice. “We inspire people, we create works of beauty, and we’ve been doing it since the dawn of time.” Zach motions us to him and all of us, even the red faced artist come to him. “Look at the basketball players” he says. I look out of the small spaces in between the bleacher’s seats, anyone on the team could have seen us if they had bothered to look our way, but they all seemed so into a scrimmage with some no name high school that we could have been part of the seats for all they cared. Zach had probably calculated this somehow, the basketball team not noticing us all, our compliance to his command to come here, even the artist responses were probably thought out by Zach.
“Look at them,” Zach begins as our eyes become glued to the ongoing scrimmage, racking our brains to see what Zach sees. “You’re not that different from them you know. You create beautiful works of art with simple brush strokes, movements of pencils, and the like. Look at their simple commands of run, jump, and throw; get turned into complex plays and strategies. The precision of it all is rather mind blowing, a little too much force into the throw can be like being too heavy handed while drawing a line; it makes it distorted, illegible, and all together worthless. ” I found myself not working my mind more to understand Zach, but relaxing it to see what he was talking about. My mind’s eye see’s the basketball players in bullet time running, passing, and throwing a single ball of rubber through a small ring of steel. The strange thing is I get Zach’s point. When you break it down, it all has certain elegance to it, like a beautiful painting or a well made statue.
“I know it’s so little made out of so much. I know that the countless brush strokes to a simple piece of canvas or the thousand delicate chizzles to a block of marble to create things that can inspire those of all fields, those of all cultures, and all those who follow you, cannot compare to this simple art. But do they inspire people any less? Do thousands of people not cheer for them for every new piece they make? Are there not men of knowledge among those fans as there are of yours? Do they not push the limits of what’s possible with new shots, forms of dunking, and underdog teams that become champions? Does this not all have a use to it as art does?”Zach’s lecture stuns the artist into complete brain racking silence.
“Does anyone else have any complaints about the team?” Zach asks us. A math geek pipes up after a quick calculation about the ramifications of his words. “They took away the math teams funding when we were about to go to regional’s.” he says with the confidence that only probability equations and TAG can give a man.
Zach walks back to where we were originally and crush’s the math geek’s probability calculations of his responses leaving Zach speechless with another set of swift lectures that packed all the power of a round house kick from Chuck Norris. “It’s something of a math, if you think about it. They’re all making carelessly calculated equations functional with every shot they take.” The math geek’s face turns bright red as the face of the artist before him did. “We calculate equations that affect the lives of thousands. WE made the theory of relativity. WE made the freaking laws of physics. You know, the laws that society’s used to create all of the marvels that people take for granted.” Zach simply stares at him and calmly waits for him to cool down.
Several long uncomfortable minutes of silence pass. I can feel all the vices of the basketball team as though they were tangible; it sticks to my skin like leeches with microscopic teeth bearing into the blood of my being. It’s not the game of basketball itself that makes this horrible aura; it’s the people that play it and their vices, their horrible attitudes, their arrogance, and their irrational hatred of the kids attending this sermon of Nerdom, their irrational hatred of me. There’s no comparison to any great field of the world that could make me change my mind about that, nay, no comparison to any field in the universe that could make me change my mind.
Yet, I still relish listening to Zach’s lecture on it all. His bewildering reasoning of it all seemed to motivate me enough to stand the feel of this stained aura. “Of course you made the rules of physics. Of course the discoveries of mathematicians create the wonders of this world, but it also turns those same discoveries into mundane things. Into simple equations that people forget to appreciate. Look out at the players again.” Zach finally says in his now seemingly monotone like calm voice. We do as he says looking at all the player’s running back and forth through the court that I now look at as some sort of live action painting with a thousand words told in the looks of triumph and defeat in the player’s faces, in the pass’s given and the shots taken, and in the scoreboard in the background reading home: 42 away: 12. “Look at all of those equations playing out. Look at the laws you’ve found in use. They don’t need calculators to create the vast amount of equations you see before you, to get them right every time. Do these equations have to always follow your laws to be amazing? Aren’t miracles simply answers that defy their equation?” The math geek’s mouth doesn’t drop; his silence is not of amazement, his reaction of no strong emotion what so ever. He simply stands there looking at the basketball court with the intensity I imagine he’d look at a math equation with.
Zach turns back to the rest of us and I’m half expecting him to say “and for my next trick...” as though he were some sort of magician, because I don’t think Harry Potter could have pulled off making anyone with a shred of nerd pride think that an athlete could be of any use to anyone. I find myself trying to guess who he’s going to lecture next as though I’m somewhere between a detective from a good mystery novel and a mathematician trying to pick a winning team to bet on with probability. Of course all the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes and the math skills of John Nash couldn’t help me in guessing his next move. He turns to me, yes me; the outcast who can’t even be classed in with any of the nerd groups standing in this very room. He looks at me and says “and why do you hate the basketball team?” Scratch my earlier remark about a great combination of detective and probability skills not being able to predict what he does next; I don’t think full fledged telepathy could have prepared me for this.
Of course I’ve found myself at a loss for words. Despite Zach’s undertaking of the stupid task of trying to make the basketball team appear as though they have any actual use, he’s still doing a pretty good job of it. If I didn’t have such a good head on my shoulders, I might be agreeing with him. “Because they suck,” I say meekly after what feels like a long silence. “Why do they suck?” Zach asks me with the same calm voice that just cut through the reasoning of two people with in a space of ten minutes. “Why do they suck?” He asks again after a short pause. I remind myself that it wasn’t Zach’s voice that destroyed the reasoning of the last two nerds who tried to argue with him, it his mind that did that and I know that I’m right, which means that I can’t fail, no matter what Zach’s mind can throw at my logic.“You’ve practically said why. People like us have built the society that makes the game that those morons out there enjoy so much possible; and yet they all act like they’re better than us. They torture and humiliate us on the daily basis and we’ve never done anything to them.”Part of me is expecting Zach to be awed into silence, to admit that I am right and crown me the new kind of nerds. Of course I know otherwise.
“True they’ve abused having the upper end of the social ladder, but have you ever thought of why they do this? I think it’s because they see our intellectual talent the same way we see their athletic talent, useless. The only real difference between us and them is the physical prowess that allows them to assume a dominate position of us. Do you really think that you wouldn’t torture them if had the opportunity to do so?” I have to think about this for a few seconds, the teams point guard had tortured me ever since he saw me attempt and fail playing basketball, but I had silently laughed at him when he failed a history test that I had gotten a hundred on. Perhaps if I was bigger, I would have tortured him for his lack of intellectual prowess as he tortured me for my lack of athletic prowess; but even if I would, neither of us have a right to torture the other like he had me, and Zach doesn’t have a right to try and justify it.
“Of course I’m not saying that the pursuit of knowledge has less worth then the game of basketball, or any game for that matter; but you’ve all limited yourselves in that pursuit by labeling things like sports as useless. You may not have chosen your side of the social line, but you have chosen to limit yourselves to your side of the line. You’re not allowing yourselves to look onto the other side of the line to see what it has to offer. How can you not expect for your pursuit to not end at a brick wall when you’re not looking at all of the paths that can be taken?” Zach says not waiting to see if I’m awe struck by his arguments or not. ... He’s right, I have limited myself by not bothering to look at the basketball team as anything but useless and I have nothing to respond to Zach with; so all I can do is listen to Zach say, “Well that’s everything, so with that the lecture is over. Thank you all for coming, hope you all learned something.” and with that he went abruptly to the door, the sound of his steps drown out by the sound of a game being played by people who didn’t have the slightest understanding of their affects on us, or of our affects on them. Leaving without being noticed by the very people he used to expand our minds.

By-Kevin M. Berry
- Intelligence is like water, it’s everywhere you look. Whether you see it or not.