The Wallflower

The rain had never felt so annoying. Stranded in the middle of the bus depot, huddled under the refuge of a rusty roof, he silently cursed everything from the Weatherman in the Heavens to his charge-starved mobile phone. With no means to challenge the slow, painful onset of boredom, he kept his calm and decided to while away time with an unintelligent and primal hobby he had developed some time ago. Across him on the bench was a girl roughly his age with an average face and a giggle that annoyed him as definitely as the rain did. He was quick to avert his eyes as he said ‘One’, distastefully to himself. The eyes went back to scanning the vicinity. 

The trick was to make an impulsive judgement in under five seconds using the subtlety of a cursory, fleeing glance; anything more or less would be biased or creepy, depending on how he felt about it. The presence and choice of indirect vision was justified if it helped the cause, though best avoided as far as possible. Yet another crossed him in an unattractive pink chudidhar, hair tied in long, unflattering braids. The copious oiling of it did not help either. ‘Two’ he said as the mental counter climbed up. A hawker by the roadside grinned at him to reveal several missing and broken teeth; all in an earnest bid to coax him to buy vegetables from her. He politely shook his head negatively, “three”…  

The count had reached 153 within a span of a half hour and was still going strong, even as he added another to the counter of unattractive ladies pervading his city habitat. 154. When the restless twiddling of his thumbs had started, he consciously broke the habit to scratch his scraggly beard and adjust his posture impatiently.. 154! ‘Where is everybody?’ he thought, only to cynically answer his own question ‘This is your town. Everybody is right here.’ The thought amused and irritated him equally.

Around the same time, he spotted a garrulous bunch making a beeline for the bus depot. It was a perfect stereotype of a gang of friends as popularly seen everywhere, he thought to himself - The fatso, the loud one, the wannabe-hunk, the flaky skin-and-bones (ugh, 155!), the nerd, the shorty and… the wallflower… The dark blue framed wayfarer glasses were perched gently on a button nose, shielding a pair of bright, brown, almond eyes against a warm complexioned face he would find hard to forget anytime soon. Nestled within a hoodie, her face seemed equally irritated at the downpour; furrowing her brows in a comic expression as she looked up at the bleak skies. The gum she had been chewing on, blew into a bubble and burst on her mouth. The tongue quickly stole it back to where it belonged and he had a good look at her bare yet full, shapely lips. Veiled in a rare charm of plainness, they seemed just about right. He could not help the wry smile playing around the corners of his mouth as mild trepidation of his lingering gaze took over. He looked away and beamed like a complete idiot as several sensations swept over him terminating in a familiar tingling along the nape of his neck.  
‘Counter reset to zero’ he announced to himself softly. 
155 on a rainy day in this wretched town. 
Not a bad day after all.