Nose ring holds out his hand and Kierk sighs, warily giving over the money, which is snatched away immediately and handed over to the shaggy smoker.

“So who are you, anyways? We’ve seen you out here before, you know.”

“Can I have a cigarette?” Kierk asks, scratching at his beard, watching his pages stir in the wind. “And I don’t have a phone, so that’s it.”

Ignoring him, nose ring holds up a book with a brain on the cover titled The Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Vol 2.

“Who the fuck doesn’t have a cell phone? You’re some kind of college student, right?”

“I left graduate school ABD . . . all but dissertation. Like T. S. Eliot.”

“So you dropped out. Or got kicked out?” When Kierk only shifts mutely, nose ring gestures to the books. “What’s all this stuff about, anyway, brain surgery?”

“Neuroscience. In fact, I ah, coauthored a paper with the writer of that very book.”

“No shit, a genuine scientist. I haven’t met a homeless scientist before.”

“Give us your fucking phone man.”

Kierk looks at each of them in turn, then says sadly—“You’re all just kids who don’t know what you’re doing.”

The closest, nose ring, first scoffs at him, then pretends to turn to the others before whipping back around and punching Kierk squarely in the jaw. Everything speeds up and they are all around Kierk, who’s curled up in a ball, both arms covering his head as they kick him. After a dull pause, after the parking lot has emptied itself of all motion and the kid with the shaved head has gone back to digging around in the car, Kierk realizes that he isn’t actually seriously injured. Next his feet are digging underneath him searching for traction and he takes off running to shouts and for a while there is only the sound of eight pounding pairs of sneakers over pavement and then grass and then pavement again and then Kierk hops a curb and has gotten his speed and the kids fall behind halfheartedly. Kierk crashes through the crowns of thickets and brambles and scrambles up the jungle of a chain-link fence and then circles around to the other side of the parking lot to watch the kid with a shaved head put a rock through his windshield like a punk. After some fiddling around the kid pulls out the intestines of the car radio and carries it under his arm out of the lot, the other two following. Kierk is pretty sure they destroyed the radio in the process of extracting it.