About 9am this morning: four boys, early teeners, Hispanic-looking, wait outside CVS Dupont Circle, sitting on the rails near the entrance. When you exit the store, one of them will come up to you with a $5 bill and ask you, “Excuse me, sir, can you go back and buy me a patch, I can’t go in there, and I really need it,” then, as you splutter for some kind of meaningful response, his three cohort brats from the sidelines will start laughing — pretty forced, throaty, kiddy cartoony laughs, actually — at your discomfiture. They will keep laughing at you from there even as you walk away in annoyance, and they will try to make sure that their high-pitched, broken-voiced kid laughs carry as far as possible down P St.

Well, I guess it’s a bit more savvy than rocks.