Caro steps inside the glass revolving doors just as Miguel steps in from the other end. She waves trying to draw his attention, but the boy seems to ignore her. He exits the glass cylinder and heads straight back to his bike chained to a rack nearby. Caro can only wait for the revolving doors to complete a full turn until they deposit her back on the scorching heat outside.
"Hey! What happened!? Are you ok?" she yells as she catches up with Miguel who struggles to dislodge his rusty bike from the rack.
"I'm fine." the boy blurts shoving his rusty bike from side to side. He finally manages to free the wheels and walks away pushing the bike by his side.
Carolina hesitates, unlocks her bike, and follows him.
The two tweens walk pushing their bikes for several blocks without sharing a word, heading nowhere in particular. Miguel walks with his eyes on the floor while Caro walks behind him in silence, unable to decide whether to ask him what happened.
The sun is high in the sky leaving few shadows along the bare sidewalk. Miguel peeks over his shoulder and sees Caro fanning her green hoodie to give herself some air, her face blushing red. He sighs, reads the nearest street name, and turns on the next corner. Not long after they enter a small park dotted with puffy trees and cast-iron benches.
The moody boy drops his bike in front of a bench shielded from the sun and sits on the headboard with his feet on the seat. Caro huffs and lowers her bike on the ground, then sits next to him.
The two sit in silence for a long while with their elbows on their knees. The girl sporadically throws glances at the boy who keeps staring at the dead leaves on the floor with a thousand-yard stare.
She huffs, holds her chin in her palms and lets her eyes roam around their surroundings. She studies the trees, the hotels, the pedestrians, and then back at Miguel. She cycles through these objects of interest until she realizes she has just spent nearly ten minutes straight biting her lip and staring at the boy, analyzing his skinny body barely covered by the oversized NASA shirt, guessing the shapes and contours underneath.
Miguel turns and looks at Caro with a questioning look, shaking the girl out of her stupor. She coughs and looks elsewhere.
"Money problems?" she ventures.
Miguel smirks and nods "Money problems..."
Caro nods too, used to it. She wets her lips before asking "Um... Am I still getting paid for today…? Or...?"
Miguel jolts. He smiles and shakes his hands "No, no! You're still getting your share. The money for my third house visit is all yours, just as we agreed."
"Ah! Ok...! G-good to know!" Caro says with an awkward smile.
Miguel nods, his smile alternating between genuine and forced. He scratches the back of his neck.
"B-but she's available until 7:30. And… we don't have enough money to eat until then. I mean… 22 bucks isn't a lot for two people..."
"Ah! Um... It's $12.5 in fact…" says Caro with a whisper. She pulls out her phone and shows the big —yet small— green number crowning her online wallet "I may have agreed to that extra popcorn the bot suggested..."
Miguel's eyebrows raise, Caro's guilty smile widens. Suddenly she remembers something and buries her hands inside her hoodie's kangaroo pocket, extracting the wrinkled bills and rusty coins the old woman gave her.
"Hey! What about these?"
"Wow! Are those real?" the boy says amazed moving closer. He touches the old bills with the tip of a finger as if they were delicate butterflies. Caro giggles.
Miguel murmurs to himself as he counts the money, leaning unconsciously even closer. Caro swallows and tilts her body away until he finally realizes how close they've inched together and slids back.
"Oh! Mmh… It's just 29 bucks, still not a lot." he coughs on his fist and looks away "And we would have to exchange them for real money first, but most pawn shops are on the other side of town."
"Ah..." Carolina says, deflating "I thought the bill with the bearded guy was valuable."
Miguel chuckles "No, you're thinking about the ones from before the war. It's a common misconception from all the bots mixing in new bills into old movies." he moves his hands as he explains further "That's actually a way to tell if a movie is unmixed: check if it has the correct bills and coins."
"Ah, wow!" Caro says with a smile "And… How else can you tell if a movie is unmixed?"
"Oh, tons!" he says with raising enthusiasm "Like with blood special effects! There's this 'x' shape that was very popular in old libraries that bots today also erase. So when you see the 'x' on the screen, it means the movie is unmixed!" he stutters as his excitement bubbles up "O-or this other glitch in bird flocks...!"
Caro nods and smiles as Miguel continues to dig further into movie trivia, rapidly forgetting his past hurdles. Their conversation gradually evolves as they start to one-up each other with more and more obscure facts and hard-to-check factoids.
But after about an hour of back-and-forth conversation, the first strings of hunger appear during a silence between laughs. And with it, the kids are reminded about their economic struggles once again and get serious.
"Uhm, I was thinking..." Miguel says taking off his red cap to scratch the top of his head "What if we message your parents and ask for some lunch money? I can pay you back next week when abuelita... Hey, why are you laughing?"
Caro has a hand on her mouth suppressing her giggles. She shakes her head.
"Sorry, I'm not laughing at you. I was just imagining my mom's face, in the middle of her second shift, reading a message asking for money." she straightens her back, smiles a cryptic smile "I would rather starve the rest of the weekend than give her an excuse to shoot more of her venom."
Miguel nods and raises his palms, apologizing for his suggestion. Caro shrugs and pats his bony knee, forgiving him.
"You're lucky for not having parents. They suck."
The boy seems taken aback. He speaks with measured words "I'm... not sure I agree. I think you're... um... lucky to have parents."
Caro laughs "You can have them if you want! I'm not using them right now…"
They both chuckle without much enthusiasm, then sigh at the same time and rest their chins on their fists when their stomachs gurgle again. The pedestrians passing by throw furtive looks at the miserable-looking pair of tweens. One even considers for a moment giving them a couple of dollars, but when they see they have no QR code on display they walk away.
"How about other clients? Don't you have more houses to vis…?" Caro begins to ask, but Miguel is already shaking his head.
"No, none of my clients is ovulating this weekend, and unless they tell me, most don't appreciate me showing up unannounced. I learned that the hard way..."
"Ah... Mmmh..." she snaps her fingers "Can we go back to the market and take the twin's offer?"
Miguel groans and pulls his red cap to cover his eyes "I don't want to have sex inside a hot van that smells like cheese! I have standards!" they both laugh, he pushes his cap up "It's also probably giga crowded right now. And on top of that, they can only pay me with more__cheese! You really want that for lunch?"
Caro gags and shakes her head. She groans and looks up at the sky while brushing her black hair with her fingers.
***