First Impressions

Chapter twenty

My phone's ringing. Raghav had dropped me home and I am having my dinner with Neha when I see my phone continuously vibrating . I had keep it on silent when it was ringing during the music fest during the announcement of the winner. I had missed the fact that it could be something important but everyone I knew was safe and sound right now.
It was the same number ringing again.
I excused myself to receive it.

"Hello" I sang into the phone.

No sound.

"hello?" I repeated again.

No sound again.

I took the phone away from my ear and tapped the END CALL option.
What was wrong.

I didnt get the call again that night. Before retiring to the bed, I took my old cell phone that had an app for searching unknown numbers.
I looked it up in it and I was shocked to see the name in it.
I immediately called back the number.

"The number you are calling is currently switched off" The lady's monotonous voice boomed on the other end.

I tried calling it again and again but in vain.

******

As morning rolled around, I tried calling it one more time.
The number was the only hope now. I had to reach it no matter what.

During the bus ride to Hill Valley with Neha, I began to root my brain for ideas that could come up as to what I had to do next.

Today, when we were sitting for lunch in the canteen, I spotted Raghav from across our table sipping on a mug of coffee along with his friends.

We hadn't talked since he had dropped me home the day of the music fest. He had been the Centre of attraction of the college these days and often I would find find girls hovering in and around him congratulating him for winning. According to me, it was basically a primary excuse to strike a conversation with the college rockstar. Because once they would starting talking, someone had to pull them away from him from an invisible magnetic field they had been attracted towards, else they would go on and on.

It wasn't like we hadn't talked at all, because we had texted more than a couple of times but I am not sure if that counts as talking.
On the other hand, apart from Kanak and Neha nobody exactly knew whom did he take along with him to the fest apart from Kanak.
His other friends were surprised and kept asking him, that's what he told me yesterday on the text.

It wasn't late until word got around in Hill Valley that the other person who went with him was a girl. However, since the only girl that people thought he could possibly take was Aarushi and since Aarushi was out of town, it became more interesting as to who the lucky girl was.

As we were sitting in the lunch table, Piya who had received all this piece of news shared it with us, (that's how we got to know) and everyone seemed wondering who could be the girl except of course me and Neha who pretended that it was rather amusing and that we were completely unaware of all these gossips.

Further, Aryan wasn't here at the moment.

Just as I was wondering where he was, he appeared out of nowhere and grabbed a seat next to me.

"Hey Aryan, you know what's going on with Raghav? Don't you?" Mohit asked.

Aryan stiffened in his seat upon the mention of Raghav.
I glanced over at him, worried.

"No. Neither do I want to know" he muttered.

And that way, the conversation was put to an end, to my relief.

On our way to applied linguistics lecture, Aryan stopped midway in his tracks.
When he didn't say anything,
"What's wrong?" I asked.

He shushed me into silence with his pointer finger on his lips.
We were standing outside the art room and Aryan leaned in to eavesdrop the conversation that was probably going on inside.