"Such a beautiful smile," he said. "Want a cup of coffee?"
"No," I said, choking it out past my raw-from-screaming throat.
"All right," he said. "Which video do you want to watch?"
"*Princess Bride*," I said. I hadn't heard of any of them, but I didn't
want to admit it.
"You don't want to start with Edward Penishands?"
#
Alan stood out front of the video shop for a while, watching Natalie
wait on her customers. She was friendly without being perky, and it was
clear that the mostly male clientele had a bit of a crush on her, as did
her mooning, cow-eyed co-worker who was too distracted to efficiently
shelve the videos he pulled from the box before him. Alan smiled. Hiring
cute girls for your shop was tricky business. If they had brains, they'd
sell the hell out of your stock and be entertaining as hell; but a lot
of pretty girls (and boys!) had gotten a free ride in life and got
affronted when you asked them to do any real work.
Natalie was clearly efficient, and Alan knew that she wasn't afraid of
hard work, but it was good to see her doing her thing, quickly and
efficiently taking people's money, answering their questions, handing
them receipts, counting out change... He would have loved to have had
someone like her working for him in one of his shops.
Once the little rush at the counter was cleared, he eased himself into
the shop. Natalie *was* working for him, of course, in the impromptu
assembly line in Kurt's storefront. She'd proven herself to be as
efficient at assembling and testing the access points as she was at
running the till.
"Alan!" she said, smiling broadly. Her co-worker turned and scowled
jealously at him. "I'm going on break, okay?" she said to him, ignoring
his sour puss.
"What, now?" he said petulantly.
"No, I thought I'd wait until we got busy again," she said, not
unkindly, and smiled at him. "I'll be back in ten," she said.
She came around the counter with her cigs in one hand and her lighter in
the other. "Coffee?" she said.
"Absolutely," he said, and led her up the street.
"You liking the job?" he said.
"It's better now," she said. "I've been bringing home two or three
movies every night and watching them, just to get to know the stock, and
I put on different things in the store, the kind of thing I'd never have
watched before. Old horror movies, tentacle porn, crappy kung-fu
epics. So now they all bow to me."
"That's great," Alan said. "And Kurt tells me you've been doing amazing
work with him, too."
"Oh, that's just fun," she said. "I went along on a couple of dumpster
runs with the gang. I found the most amazing cosmetics baskets at the
Shiseido dumpster. Never would have thought that I'd go in for that
girly stuff, but when you get it for free out of the trash, it feels
pretty macha. Smell," she said, tilting her head and stretching her
neck.
He sniffed cautiously. "Very macha," he said. He realized that the other
patrons in the shop were eyeballing him, a middle-aged man, with his
face buried in this alterna-girl's throat.
He remembered suddenly that he still hadn't put in a call to get her a
job somewhere else, and was smitten with guilt. "Hey," he said. "Damn. I
was supposed to call Tropicál and see about getting you a job. I'll do
it right away." He pulled a little steno pad out of his pocket and
started jotting down a note to himself.
She put her hand out. "Oh, that's okay," she said. "I really like this
job. I've been looking up all my old high school friends: You were
right, everyone I ever knew has an account with Martian Signal. God, you
should *see* the movies they rent."
"You keep that on file, huh?"
"Sure, everything. It's creepy."
"Do you need that much info?"
"Well, we need to know who took a tape out last if someone returns it
and says that it's broken or recorded over or whatever --"
"So you need, what, the last couple months' worth of rentals?"
"Something like that. Maybe longer for the weirder tapes, they only get
checked out once a year or so --"
"So maybe you keep the last two names associated with each tape?"
"That'd work."
"You should do that."