Petals on a wet, black bough

On the commute home today, I saw:

• A kid, not a day older than sixteen, in a secondhand jacket, sporting a red fitted cap covered in thin black squiggles with a stylized letter F above the bill. His chin crept back to halfway between his underbite and his adam's apple. He fiddled with his iPod as he sat down, then stowed it in his backpack. He pulled a dog-eared Penguin Classic out of his artfully distressed backpack - I couldn't resolve the title - and settled in. Five stops whipped by. It wasn't until he dotted the page that he noticed he was crying.
• Two large guys with identical haircuts and choice of clothing style. They breezed into the subway just behind a very blonde, very leggy lady wearing a very brief skirt indeed, and they all sat down together. The guys both wore very fashionable glasses and expensive clothing that didn't hide that they were both a good bit overweight. They grinned at each other and the rest of the subway and barely paid any attention to her attempts at making conversation. One nudged the other with his elbow and leaned in to crack a joke. They both laughed so hard for so long that they didn't see the lady get up to offer her seat to a swaying, grateful octogenerian.
• A lady in her late fifties dourly poking at the keypad of a Nokia N70 and convincing it to map her keypresses into ideographs. She filled two entire screens, then patiently waited until the subway reached a point on the track where it hit open air and GSM reception. She carefully examined the small cornerful of pixels that graphed her signal strength, waited for it to max out, then hit Send. Once the screen emptied, she stashed the handset in her coat pocket, chuckled, then broke out into a grin so wide that I couldn't help but return it.