Labels can keep you down

“Mom, Arnie Welsh keeps calling me a geek. He says it like it’s a bad thing. Is being a geek a bad thing?”

“Of course, not Soda Pop. And don’t listen to labels. They don’t matter.”

“What are labels?”

“It’s an imaginary sticker people slap on you with the word they think you are written on it. It doesn’t matter who they think you are. It matters who you think you are.”

“I think I might be a geek.”

She laughed. “Then you be a geek. Just be whatever makes you happy, Soda Pop, and I’ll be…