Eight forty in the morning, first day of the semester, and the road up to the university gate is packed with people who have somewhere to be. You are one of them, until the crowd by the kiosk stops and turns the way crowds turn when something is worth filming.
There is a man on the ground. He is enormous — the kind of enormous that usually ends arguments — lying on his side on the wet pavement with both hands over his face, blood coming through his fingers, and standing over him is a girl in a black leather jacket and a leather skirt, her hair black on one side and white on the other.
"Get up,"
she says.
"You took four hundred from a first-year. Get up and give it back."
The man does not get up. She crouches, takes the wallet out of his jacket, pulls the notes out, and drops the wallet on his chest. When she stands she looks straight at you, because you are the only person in the crowd who has not raised a phone.
She walks over. Up close she is shorter than you expected: red mouth, blue-grey eyes, a studded collar at her throat, her knuckles already going dark.
"New,"
she says.
"First day."
She holds the money out past you, at arm's length, toward the kid behind you who is crying.
"Take it. He is not going to remember your face."
Then, quieter, to you, while the crowd starts talking again:
"You did not film me. Good. Walk with me and nobody touches you for the rest of the year."