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ball-cap-wearing guy who kept stroking his beard as if it were a cat wrapped around his neck – was particularly annoying. He kept calling every place a “scene” and saying it was a “brilliant shoot,” even though they hadn’t gone there yet.
    The Owls, outfitted head to toe in their magnificent new swag, walked along Jefferson Avenue until they came to Woodward Avenue. The
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crew filmed them from a truck creeping alongside the team as they moved. There was no other traffic, meaning the street had either been closed off at the TV crew’s request or else there was just so little traffic in the downtown core that it didn’t matter if a huge vehicle was crawling at a snail’s pace.
    They passed a few empty storefronts and buildings with boarded-up windows. There was trash on the ground that seemed like it might have been there for some time. Papers were blowing around, catching in doorways. The area looked almost abandoned – a stark contrast to the flashiness of the events that morning.
    At one point, the group passed a man with a scruffy beard, sitting at the entrance to an alley and wearing a ratty old winter hat with a pom-pom on top. Beside him, on a purple sleeping bag, was a small brown-and-beige dog that seemed content and well fed. But the man looked broken. He had a big gray blanket draped over his shoulders. An old margarine container, squished on one side, rested on the pavement in front of him beside a handwritten cardboard sign that read, “ NO WORK . ANYTHING HELPS . THANK - U .” Inside the container were two nickels and a shiny dime.
    As the Owls moved past him, they tried to avoid staring – they’d been told by Mr. D to keep their eyes to the front of the line. Once they were farther along, Muck dropped back, retraced his steps, and quietly placed a twenty-dollar bill in the man’s container.
    “Thank you, sir,” the man said.
    Muck nodded. “Take care of yourself,” he said.
    Several of the Owls – Sarah, Sam, Fahd, Lars, Jesse, Travis, and, of course, Nish – had been wired for sound, with small packs hooked onto their waistbands and a wire running up the inside of their track tops and out at the neck, where a clip-on mike was discreetly attached to the collar of their new jackets.
    Travis reminded himself to watch what he said. He wished he had control over whatever Nish said, too – but not even Nish seemed capable of that. What’s worse, the producers seemed to be encouraging him.
    Up ahead, Travis could see a huge bronze arm ending in a clenched fist. It seemed to hang in the air like it was in mid-punch. It was some kind of enormous sculpture, but it was so well done it almost looked real – like a giant’s fist that might actually swing any second and knock someone out. Nish would probably take a picture exactly like that, Travis thought – of himself, in front of the fist, getting punched. Nish always liked to take cheesy photos of himself in front of monuments on their trips, and Fahd, who couldn’t recognize cheesy if it bit him on the butt, was always pleased to oblige.
    When the Owls arrived at the giant fist, by then all happily chatting away, they found a woman standing there, waiting for them. She seemed very official, very stiff. She wore eyeglasses with frames so thin it seemed there were no frames at all, the lenses floating in front of her eyes. Her hair looked like it, too, had been cast in bronze.
    “Quiet, now, children!” she ordered in a voice that would bring a vice-principal to attention. They quieted at once. With an abrupt change of tone, she snapped a smile so fast it was like a camera shutter clicking open and closed. Travis almost started laughing. Nish did start laughing. He burst out with a quick giggle, then caught himself, and, red-faced, stood sheepishly listening.
    “I am Marjorie Gibbons of the City of Detroit Historical Society,” she said in a voice as clipped as her smile. “Welcome to the City of Detroit.”
    “Thank