#age of the geek
✪ – leverageland heist M, con#6
(psst! btw, Leverageland is starting up again! Heist 15 coming soon!)
I could see Hardison making a comic like this if they had too long between jobs and he started to get bored. Or if there was a lull in Lucille during a job.
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Hardison didn’t come up with his catchphrase. He heard it, liked it, and claimed it.
He was not the most popular kid in school. He was a very much a geek, arguably over the line into being a nerd, well-liked by his teachers and not many others. He made up for that somewhat with his naturally friendly temperament, but even so he wasn’t most of the students’ favorite.
The other geeks were nice enough most of the time but he didn’t fit the image of what a geeky high school kid should look like. He was black and in the minds of most of his very white fellow geeks that automatically made him a jock at best and a gangbanger at worst. He wore backwards baseball caps with Star Wars t-shirts. It didn’t match their image. And on top of that he was smarter than most of them, so they were a bit jealous too. The jocks didn’t want him because they could tell right away that he was a geek to his very core. Even so, he almost never got straight up picked on because he was tall and strong and nobody wanted to test whether he was a total nerd or not.
He didn’t go to his first prom. He didn’t have anyone to go with anyway, and told himself it was really because Nana couldn’t really afford a tux rental. He could always hack in somewhere, get himself on a prepaid list, but there the whole idea circled back around to not having a date.
“What you doin’ hidin’ out up here instead of goin’ to your prom?” Nana asked.
He shrugged, glancing up briefly, then back down at his computer screen.
“I know that shrug young man. Don’t you gi’me that shrug. If you don’t want to talk about it tha’s ok, but you can use your words to say so.”
“Stacy’s goin’ with the quarterback,” he said, just catching himself in time to keep from giving another shrug. Nana notices and smiled.
“You’ll get the last laugh and no mistake.”
“How?” Hardison asked a little petulantly. “He’s team captain. He’s got the girl.”
“And he’s got maybe a one in a million shot at any of that mattering for the rest of his life. What you’re good at don’t go ‘way after school. Don’t you know it’s the age of the geek?” Nana asked. “Well it is and don’t you forget it.
The next year he also didn’t go to prom but that time it didn’t bother him at all. He was busy hacking the Bank of Iceland. Age of the geek indeed.
