Hi, I’m Mur. I’m a geek. While I have embraced this geekdom for the past fifteen or so years, it was terrible to go through high school when my girlfriends didn’t share my passion for They Might Be Giants or Star Wars, and none of the boys wanted anything to do with me.

Well, romantically, that is. I had several friends who thought I was -– say it with me -– one of the guys. I ran for student government; I lost to a girl named Valerie. My Bloom County–inspired campaign signs were defaced and torn down. Forget running for homecoming queen; that’s just ridiculous. No one would even consider geeky little me for such a lofty position.

I was ignored; the smart one who kept her head down and worked backstage in the theater department. The one who wanted to be a writer.

Of course, in college I made friends who understood me, cared about me, and didn’t seem to think that I needed heels and pretty hair to fit in. And now that I’m an adult, more or less, I’m geeky, confident, and don’t give a damn about those who made high school a depressing place.

So. How many of you have the same story? Many, I bet. There were several of us geeks in high school, several who saw those four years as long, arduous tests intended to cause so much trauma to us in order to prepare us for the rest of our lives. But as I make friends, many of whom tell me of their geeky status in high school, one question stands out to me.

What happened to all the popular kids?

Seriously. Where did they all go? There are several explanations, I suppose. They could all be right in front of me, just not wanting to say so, uncomfortably hiding under the radar in the same way that kids whose parents paid for their college educations did when friends swapped student loan or work study stories. If you have no “high school was hell” stories, then you’re not terribly interesting in many social circles. Especially if your stories revolve around, “I made high school hell for others.”

Another option would be that they went into careers that exist outside of my world. I hang out with a lot of artists, writers, and computer engineers. I suppose most of those jobs are done by classically geeky people. I always assumed that the popular kids went off to get jobs as investment bankers or spouses of investment bankers. I don’t know any investment bankers. This does not bother me.

But my favorite option is the Lost Island of the Prom Queens. I was chatting with my arch-nemesis Matt Wallace the other day, and I said that I wondered if the popular people just stopped once they left high school; that they had reached the pinnacle of their lives. He said they were all shipped, in their prom dresses and rented tuxes, to the Lost Island of the Prom Queens. This of course upsets the boys, as the island is named for their dates, not them. And broken tiaras lie in dusty corners like discarded bones.

(Incidentally, Matt was also a geek in high school, a journalism geek who had a menacing frame and left at age sixteen to become a pro wrestler. Now he writes horror. Think I’m kidding?)

I do remember a book from the 90’s where the main protagonist was a woman who had been the prom queen in high school, the most popular girl ever, whose life did stop at eighteen. She led a life of aimless depression because her court had been disbanded and she didn’t know what to do with herself. That made the most sense to me; for most of us, life began when we escaped high school. For the popular kids, everything changed. They likely went somewhere that forced them to start from scratch. Maybe they pledged the Greek lifestyle (I know very little about that, as I didn’t pledge) –– you do meet people who were in frats and sororities –– but no one ever talks about their prom queen heyday.

I’d love to end this column with a report on my ten year high school reunion, on how I went back, confident and happy, and saw for my own eyes what happened to Jessica, Beth, Joleta, Teddy, Craig, and David. The beautiful ones, the popular ones. Those for whom high school served as their own personal golden eating trough, what are they doing? I’d love to tell that story, but, well… I wasn’t invited to the ten year reunion.

Remember what I said about being ignored?

I still haven’t gotten past high school angst. I’m thirty-five, confident, happily married, and actually doing what I wanted to do since I was twelve. And yet I still get shaken and return to the same horrific awkwardness and shyness that I felt back in the day (like the time I desperately tried to get David to notice me). I sometimes wonder if I would be better off if I found out where they were now, what they were doing. Then I realize I’m a lot happier thinking of them on the Lost Island of the Prom Queens.

Yup. Thirty-five, confident, and petty. That’s me.


Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.