"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."
"So? I kind of like older guys. At least they know what they're doing in bed most of the time."
"I wouldn't know." Juliet hadn't dated since high school. She had been too shy and withdrawn to make many friends, and the dating landscape outside of school intimidated her. More than anything, it seemed more effort than it was worth.
Kendall, on the other hand, filled her life with one-off sexual encounters and brief relationships that burned hot and then were snuffed out without remark. It seemed to work for Kendall - but Juliet couldn't imagine it. She longed for something more intimate and understanding.
The blonde girl grabbed a stack of DVDs and began breezily replacing them in the racks. "You should give it a try, girl. Date a customer. Suck his dick in the back room. Make a terrible decision. It's a rite of youthful passage."
"Hard pass, Kendall." Counting the money, Juliet plucked a piece of stiff paper from the bills. "Holy shit."
"What?"
"The long-haired guy who was in here? The one wearing the Killhammer tee shirt?"
"I don't know what that is," Kendall declared.
"It's a horror franchise. He left me a card. Like, a business card. But it just has his email and his Dategrind address on it." She laughed. "This is utterly ridiculous."
Kendall slotted the last disc in place and sauntered back to the front counter. "That guy's in love with you, Juliet. He's in here every day you're in here. I see him checking out your ass in the security mirror."
"You do not.
"Swear. And he's into horror movies, like you are. Don't you watch horror movies with your dad every Thursday night?"
Juliet smiled at the thought of it. She reminded herself to take the copy of obscure 70s horror masterpiece The Seventh Sacrifice out from under the safe where she'd stashed it so no one would rent it. She'd been looking forward to seeing it with her dad for months.
"Yeah. But that's different. I'm not into that torture-and-gore Killhammer shit."
"Oh, fuck," Kendall groaned, rolling her eyes. "Who gives a shit. Juliet, lower your standards a little. Get on Dategrind, DM this guy, and go out with him. You could really hit it off."
Juliet twisted the little card between her fingers, watching it bend. A smile crept across her face.
"I'll think about it," she said.
***
Juliet lived by herself in an apartment in Sunshine Row, a dreary and optimistically named complex on the west side of Donner Bay. It was a forty-minute drive beyond the smog-choked expanse of industrial parks, and put a lot of miles on her beleaguered Dodge Neon, but Sunshine Row was the only place she could afford to live without a roommate.
On the up side, her late-night drive meant phone calls with her dad.
Juliet's parents had divorced when she was only fifteen - a consequence, her mother said, of irreconcilable differences. That was how her Maria Goodwin talked. Mom was a lawyer, one of the most in-demand in Donner Bay. Her ex-husband, Juliet's father, was a contractor, but had been out of work for months.
Their familial relationship had always been strained. By the time Juliet entered her teen years, her mom and dad were already mostly estranged, and the close relationship they'd once shared had disintegrated with a kind of glacial slowness. Mom moved on quickly, remarrying a fellow partner at her law firm soon after.
Dad, on the other hand, had never quite recovered. He'd struggled with depression and sometimes with drinking a little too much.
Juliet worried about him. So she called him every night on the way home from work. He claimed it gave him peace of mind to know she got home safe, but she suspected it helped soothe his loneliness a little.
So, as she waited at the stoplight, she fished the tattered earbuds from the drink holder, plugged them into her smartphone, and called her dad.
***
"Hey, pumpkin."
His voice always soothed her, even through the fuzzy reception. She used to joke with him that he had an announcer's voice: smooth, calm, deep, but not intimidating.
"You should go into radio," she would joke with him, "whatever that is." And he'd laugh, the joke recycled five hundred times, still somehow funny to both of them.
After the long week she'd had, she was glad to hear his voice.
"Hi, Dad."
"How was your night? Glad to be done with work for the week?"
"I'm not done. I picked up one of Kendall's shifts. She's got a date, which she arranged like ten minutes ago."
"Oh yeah?" He chuckled. "Is this the one you said likes older guys?"
"Why, Dad? You want me to set you up?"
The sound on the other end fuzzed out for a moment. The reception on this end of town was always garbage. "That sounds like a bad idea."
"Trust me, it is. The guy she's dating is your age, funny enough. But it won't last."
"It never does," he said. That quiet sadness crept into his voice, and Juliet felt her heart dip to hear it. He was thinking about Mom again. She decided to change the subject.
"Hey, speaking of bad decisions, I got asked out on a date. Sort of. This customer gave me a card. A physical card."
"Very retro in this new digital age," he said, and she could see the wry grin on his face. "Are you going to go?"
"I don't know. I might. Kendall says I should because he's a horror fan too."
"Oh, I see how it is," he teased. "I'm getting replaced."
She grinned. "No one could ever replace you, Dad," she said tenderly.
She met only silence as her Neon chugged into Culver Park, home to Donner Bay's factories and warehouses. A moment later, she heard the beeps that indicated the call had dropped.
"Fuck," she muttered.
***
Juliet drove the last five minutes to Sunshine Row without calling him back. This had happened dozens of times, and they both knew the routine.
She parked her Neon in front of her apartment - the whole complex was a converted motel, and between the battered yellow sign that bore the building's name and the ratty vehicles parked out front, she often felt like she was living in the beginning of a horror movie herself. If one of the neighbors turned out to be a serial killer, she wouldn't even have drawn a breath in surprise.
Locking and bolting the door, she was immediately disappointed in the muggy heat of the apartment. The air conditioning in Sunshine Row was even more theoretical than at her workplace. She flicked on the fan and stripped out of her clothes, peeling off her tank top and then squirming out of her shorts. The air from the fan felt good on her skin.
