Free Crushed by A.M. Khalifa Page A

but she went to the prom with Jake Balantine, a perfect human specimen who become her boyfriend for the remainder of our high school years. Jake was everything I wasn’t—a beautiful, physically superior jock with formidable social power. Later, I heard, he got her knocked up and they married when they were college juniors.
    They say our tragedies and heartbreaks define us and transform us into stronger, future-versions of ourselves. That’s probably true in my case as you will soon find out, but rather melodramatic for my taste. Heartbreak stinks and if you could live without being rejected and humiliated, you wouldn’t be worse off for it. The only thing better than not having your heart broken is to have it mended.
    Like a man, I stomached Ashley-gate and moved forward. I heeded the lessons from the scam and vowed I would never be taken advantage of again.
    After high school, life started to incrementally improve for me.
    Studying artificial intelligence at MIT, I finally found myself in a setting where being brilliant mattered more than being beautiful. In time I began to grow up and blossom. I don’t know about you, but I always had this image of places like MIT being a colony of brainy rejects. That I would fit right in. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead I found a colony of smart, socially adjusted kids who wanted to hang out. The world outside high school was not a black and white division of geeks versus jocks, or nerd girls against babes. There was every shade of normal and a world of amazing people who began rubbing off on me.
    I started taking better care of my body and paying more attention to how I presented myself to the world. It’s mind-boggling what contact lenses, the rays of the sun on your skin, a year at the gym, an expensive haircut and some attention to your wardrobe can do to transform an awkward boy into a confident man.
    Underneath my nerd disguise lived a pretty good looking young fellow who I had kept imprisoned all my life. Perhaps because I hailed from a family of scientists who cared more about ideas than appearances, I had never learned the fundamentals of looking the part. But college changed all that.
    By my junior year I had shaved off my maladjusted exoskeleton and morphed into a social super hero. I had taught myself about everything you need to thrive in high society. I read voraciously and learned from history. I allowed music and art to refine my sensibilities and soften my heart. I paid attention to emotions rather than just quantifiable ideas.  And I surrounded myself with a network of high-stake players and supportive friends who always challenged me to reach my best. In high school the operating standard was to trample on the weak and worship the strong. At MIT and beyond I found people who inspired me because they believed in me. My confidence began to sky-rocket and my checkered past mattered less and less in my mind as I set out to conquer the future and change the world.
    I dated like a junkie, dipping my cup in every well I came across until the void of deprivation I had grown up with was filled and patched forever.
    In my senior year at MIT I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife and my partner. Melinda Brand.
    I had gone back home to Oakland to spend Thanksgiving with my family. Both Melinda’s parents and mine were friends from their high school days, all brilliant minds in one capacity or the other. They were intrigued why Melinda and I had never hung out in high school, even though we were in the same grade and apparently mirror images of each other. The answer to that seemed obvious in my mind. I barely took notice of Melinda, or any other girl nerd, precisely because they were the female versions of me. Two invisible souls can hardly perceive one another.
    During college I had become shrewd about wiggling out of my parent's never ending campaigns to set me up with good girls they thought were perfect for me. My standards had