The edges fried.
Angel cradled the carton in his free arm, jumping up and down.
“See, I told you! Pay up motherfucker!”
Lauro slapped twenty dollars in Angel’s palm.
Jesus, it was fucking hot! Lauro thought, squinting at the sun. The fact he was short, stocky, and chubby didn’t help him, not in the slightest.
But hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk?
Lauro would never have guessed it. Now his ignorance cost him twenty dollars.
“What the fuck? That’s some bullshit, man,” Lauro was laughing.
Angel shrugged, “Seeing is believing.”
*****
It was hotter mid-July heat than Lauro had experienced last year, after moving to the desert with his mother. As he squinted at the sun, he considered Angel probably knew exactly how hot it needed to get for the egg to fry. Angel had the advantage of being born and raised in Phoenix, living there longer.
They hopped the fence to Garfield Elementary; cut across the sallow playfield. They put as much distance as they could between them and their crime, where the metal Phoenix sat on the other side of the black vertical bar fence.
Like a game of follow the leader, Angel led Lauro through the neighborhood. They kept an eye out for cops; larger groups of teens. They took a shortcut through a ramshackle stucco duplex with a giant banner hung from the side, advertising: Low rent, low move-in fees.
On Fillmore, the next street over, they passed a beautifully renovated pyramidal cottage that had been boarded up and a For Sale sign stuck in the yard. The cottage was wedged into a row of broken-down ranch style homes and empty dirt lots. Another home was boarded up, missing a door, the insides gutted, the copper pipes and wires picked clean. Slivers of shade bordered the sides of the buildings, or under the moribund fronds of wayward palm trees leaning hunched along the broken street like the bowed backs of old, tired men.
Angel was tossing an egg in the air, catching it. Across the street, a skinny girl with ratty matted hair squatted in the feeble shade of the boarded up home with the missing door.
When he noticed her, his first impression was: crack whore squatting to piss. She had a greasy dirt-streaked face, dirty clothes, like she belonged in a third world country-not America.
What was she doing there? He wondered if she was really taking a piss.
Maybe he would get a free show.
“You know her?”
“Nope, never seen her before,” Lauro said.
Angel lobbed the egg near her.
