Dad and daughter bond unexpectedly over a movie.. “Thanks for renting from Midnight Dreams,” Juliet said. With a shy grin, she handed over the pile of DVDs. The customer, a young man wearing longish hair and a black tee shirt with a skull logo emblazoned on the front, stammered a thank-you and left.
Juliet breathed a sigh of relief as the last customer left the video store. As she picked up a pile of DVD cases from the counter and pitched them onto the return cart, she caught sight of the sticker on the topmost case. SOMETIMES MIDNIGHT DREAMS COME TRUE, the slogan read.
She grinned wryly. Her dream had come true, all right: a dream of closing time. Juliet flicked the switch on the OPEN sign, extinguishing the store-spanning array of bright red neon that decorated the last video store in Donner Bay. The garish glow that soaked the store in crimson during operating hours faded to the cold blue of a cloudy, starry evening.
“Thank god that’s over,” Kendall groaned as she hastened to the front door. With quick, practiced motions, she shot the bolt and lowered the shades. As a novel holdout of a dead industry, Midnight Dreams tended to attract night owls, misfits, and people who liked to show up one minute before – or after – closing time.
“Hey, at least those dudes didn’t show up to ogle us like they usually do.” Juliet punched the key combination to open the register and began counting the evening’s cash.
Neither of them were very surprised by unwelcome male attention – Juliet was twenty and Kendall twenty-one, both of them blessed with the attractiveness of youth. Juliet, shorter than Kendall by a head, with her unruly mouse-brown hair and curvy figure, got hit on less often than willowy, blonde Kendall, who looked and acted like a manic pixie dream girl out of some adolescent’s overactive sexual imagination.
It didn’t help that the manager’s informal uniform of choice consisted of black tank tops and jeans – or shorts. On July nights when the air conditioning at Midnight Dreams couldn’t hold back the blistering heat, both of them ended up showing a lot of skin and sweating in their outfits. Judd, the manager, said it helped bring in customers, but Juliet thought Judd was probably just an old perv.
He wasn’t wrong, though – every Wednesday, a group of older guys, self-proclaimed movie buffs in their late thirties and early forties, would trek in en masse to loudly discuss whatever obscure art-house film they were into that week. Though they always stopped at friendly comments and the occasional light flirtation, Juliet could count on at least one of them staring unabashedly at her breasts during checkout.
Worse, she found she didn’t always mind. Juliet lived most of her life alone, and sometimes the attention felt good, even though she felt like it shouldn’t.
“At least they keep it interesting,” Kendall said as she started going through the returns one last time. “The one guy is cute. The one with the beard? He asked me out last weekend.”
“Are you serious? He’s like forty.”