Before the Notice, only two things mattered in a teenager’s social life: looking good and being popular. Sounds simple, right? Not so fast there, Mr. or Ms. Clearly-I’m-Popular. To look good, you had to have two things: good looks (duh) and good clothes. You could be born with good looks (lucky you), apply enough makeup to fake good looks (talking to the ladies), be so good at sports that people mistook you for having good looks (talking to the males now), or be so grossly rich and funny that your peers overlooked your Elephant Man-like deformities. But since we’re talking about teenagers here (aka social velociraptors) that last one is really, really unlikely.

Now, to have good clothes you had to have money and a sense of style. Teens (especially males) rarely have either. They are therefore forced to rely on their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, paper routes, pet trafficking, Internet scams, or black market organ sales for money. To acquire a sense of style, the would-be Prom King/Queen must turn to teenage Pop Culture Oracles (Internet, movies, television, etc.), older and more style-conscious siblings, or whatever fashion sense he/she can absorb through social osmosis.

Not as easy as you thought, right? Still interested in being popular? Then let’s recap: Having good looks is the prerequisite for being popular. Having good clothes is also required, but might not get you to Popularity Nirvana by itself. Having a lot of money helps get both, but it is not an absolute guarantee of popularity. Having all three—good looks, good clothes, and lots of money—is the Trifecta of Good Fortune. God clearly has smiled upon you and guaranteed you popularity.

I was not good-looking. I did not have good clothes. My parents were not rich. So, in short, I was not popular.

 But after the Notice, those of us still slogging our way through the Teenage Proving Grounds of junior high and high school found out that being popular might not be the Sole Defining Purpose of our young lives that we were taught to believe. In fact, the Notice showed us that the really important things in life happened out in the adult world while we were playing in a safe sandbox as we prepared for adulthood. What would happen over the next few weeks would force us to grow up far faster than we ever had imagined.
Let’s start at the beginning.

* * *

As my friends and I slowly approached puberty and middle school, some of my peers—the Darwin Social Winners, you might say—learned about dressing right, saying the right things to the opposite sex, listening to the right kinds of music, dancing, and other socially required skills for being popular.

The rest of us, Darwin Losers like me, went the other direction. We learned about comic books, science fiction movies, and action figures, and were swallowed whole by the fatally unpopular geek universe of computers and technology. We dived headlong into the fanboy world of fiction and failed to learn social graces and basic hygiene. Many of us were never heard from again.

I fell somewhere in the middle, in that I learned to brush my teeth every day, shower almost every day, and wear clean clothes to school. I never became the kind of outcast that the school elite classified as an Untouchable like Jason Dearly, the kid who hung out in the back of the school’s baseball fields mumbling to himself and picking at his filthy clothes.
So, no. I was not that bad. My clothes were clean and neat, but my fashion sense rated somewhere between “what the hell were you thinking there?” and “I don’t even know who you are.” Yeah, it was that bad.

Star Wars shirts that glowed in the dark? Check. Star Trek backpack with original TV series sound effects? Check. Corduroy pants? Check. Wallabee shoes? (Do you even know what Wallabee shoes are? Look them up. They’re as awful as they sound.) Check. Flood-walkers? Check. Suspenders? Check. Unholy combinations of colors coupled with plaid, polyester, and/or button-up shirts? Check and double-check. I was a mess.

I knew this. My friends knew this. The popular kids knew this. Even the teachers knew this.
But like all teenagers in their school years, I aspired to hang out with the jocks, the beauty queens, and the popular ones. So I decided to try and do something about my lowly social status and failed spectacularly.

Come close, my friend, and let me tell you the story in painful detail. Ready? Here we go.

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