Spirit of the Escalier

Human brain is a wonderful thing. My brain made me think that. Sometimes you have to agree with you own brain, if that even makes sense. Today when I was running down the stairs, I came up with the most ingenious way to ask this girl out.

~~ Few Days Later ~~

I climbed down the stairs in twos. I was just coming out of an exam hall. The exam was a bit harsh but I wasn’t concerned about that. The plan was to catch her at the end of the stairs, that’s how I imagined it would go down.

~~~

So far so good. I was at the bottom of the stairs. She had to come down this way. Unless she decided to go some other way, naah.

Did she go to the washroom instead of taking the stairs? Now that sounds logical after a two hour test.

At first it was just a trickle of students coming down in ones or twos. Then it turned into a stream and then a river. There were few people I knew here and there, they just went on their way after a casual nod or a smile. I’m glad none of them stood to talk. I knew that the people from my clique is still outside the hall discussing the questions. Is she there too? stuck with some nerd who wants to know what answers she got.

Finally I saw her coming down, she had her pens bundled in her hand on the other she had a paper. It looked like one of those sheets they hand out to do rough work in exams. A green hair clip on one side was keeping her short hair from falling onto her face, I wonder if it was really needed, because she always had her nose slightly up in the air, giving off an arrogant and bitchy vibe. But she was in fact one of the kindest people I know.

“Hi !”, I said, “How’s the exam?”

“Better that we hoped, right?”, she said. I then noticed that one of her fingers has started scratch her nose. Her nails were painted green, almost the same shade of green as her hair clip.

I realized then that I have been staring too long, I shook my head mentally and said “Uh, yea?”

Did she really think that the paper was easy? I feared what I was going to get in the results.

This must have shown in my face because she soon started to cover up “In the second paper, I think I screwed up the image smoothin — ” she was telling when I interrupted with: “What did you get for the fourteenth one?”

“What?”, she said.

“Do you remember what you got for the fourteenth question?”, I repeated again.

Her eyebrows raised for a moment and then she looked confused. “Sri, I don’t think there was a fourteenth question”, she finished with a confused smile.

“Maybe you missed it”, I said returning the smile.

More confusion. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. She can sense I am playing with her.

“Fourteenth question was something like — ”,

I stopped, am I really going through with this? This is going to be such a disaster. I felt my body going into the awkward mode.

Her eyebrows are so up in her forehead that they are hiding under her fringe, her eyes were big and edging me to finish the sentence. For me everything was in slow motion. I watched as her eyebrows were pushed onto her forehead sending ripples of tiny wrinkles over the skin.

“ — if you are …er- free after the exams, do you want to maybe… spend some time together?”, I asked.

“hmm…”, she paused.

“coffee…?”