Free How Genius Girl Saved My @$$ by Garry McNulty Page A

guys in closer. “So tell America, Ryan, how do you feel about the breakup?”
     
    I sit there speechless, looking confused and depressed. And really stupid.
     
    *
     
    The very next night, I’m on national television, and the students in every dorm lounge on campus are laughing their asses off. At me. Why did I have to end it so pathetically, shouting, “Lana, I love you! You hear me? I love you!”? And of course, they all recorded it so they could play it over and over again.
     
    I might have scored some pity sex from a few of the other women on campus if Lana hadn’t spouted off about the sex not being that good—a total lie, by the way. I’m pretty sure I’m very good at sex. I’m at least average, I know that.
     
    Anyway, that night I’m sitting on the very same bench where Lana blindsided me the day before. It’s dark, except for a thin slice of moonlight. I’m slugging down a bottle of cheap wine poorly concealed in a brown paper bag, and I’m contemplating suicide by alcohol poisoning. Along comes Tracy Chyvers, better known on campus as Genius Girl.
     
    She sits down beside me. “Ryan, I can help you.”
     
    “That’s very kind, Tracy,” I say, “but I don’t fool around with unattractive women. A guy has to have standards.”
     
    It’s not like I was insulting her. She’s a genius, for crying out loud. She has to know she’s one hideous 22-year-old. Yet, for some reason, she acts all offended.
     
    “Don’t flatter yourself, asshole! List="assholeten to me. How would you like to travel two days back in time?”
     
    “And get humiliated on national TV all over again? No thank you.”
     
    “Could you be any more freaking stupid?” she shouts in my ear.
     
    I wasn’t sure how to respond. I didn’t want to say, Yes, I could be more stupid. But saying, No, I couldn’t be more stupid , didn’t sound right either. I set down my wine bottle and gave her a blank stare.
     
    “You’d have a chance for a do-over, dickwad! You could just not show up to meet her, or show up and dump her ass on national television.”
     
    Okay, I may have been a little slow catching on. In my defense, that was some real rot-gut wine I was drinking, and I may have incurred some temporary brain cell damage.
     
    *
     
    So Tracy drives me out to this pitch-dark, unpaved road. I hear brush and tree branches rubbing up against the sides of her minivan. It’s all pretty creepy. I know she’s some kind of astrophysics genius, but all that knowledge in your head at one time can’t be good. And it’s a known fact ugly women resent guys like me who date hot-looking women.
     
    I’m thinking, Is she going to murder me with a hatchet and cut me up in small pieces and marinate me? Then I’m thinking: Maybe she’s going to chain me to a wall and make me her love slave. And later, I could break free and escape and write a book called, I Was an Ugly Girl’s Sex Slave and make a million dollars. And I’m thinking that wouldn’t be so bad.
     
    At that point in my thoughts, we’re a mile or so in from the main road and her headlights are shining on the door to an abandoned mine. A big sign reads: Keep Out! No Trespassing! Tracy says she bought the mine by selling some of her invention patents. Genius Girl.
     
    She unlocks the door and turns on all this multicolored, futuristic, laser-type lighting. There’s a sleek, one-seat, race car with no tires sitting on a pair of rails that runs through a tunnel circling around the place. Genius Girl had obviously done some serious renovating. She tells me to sit in the vehicle.
     
    I climb into the sleek, little race car, Tracy has me buckle the seat belt, and she places a motorcycle helmet on my head. I should point out that none of this is making me feel particularly safe.
     
    Before I can reach a conclusion on that, I’m flying around the track at a jillion miles an hour.
     
    Tracy had babbled on about the colored lights having something to do with a