Midnight crash by Tara zlick (i can read book club .txt) đ
- Author: Tara zlick
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âRighhht...â
I gave up trying to justify myself.
Then the last person I wanted to see walked, or rather, stalked into the store.
Robert Keppler.
4
..................................
he Video Saloon store wasnât very popular. Itâs big, old and crusty. Movie posters
peeled off the wall and paint flaked off the white ceiling. Everyone in town called it
the âVideo Loonâ because the âSâ and âAâ were missing from âSaloonâ on the sign
outside. I thought Vince should change the name completely. I mean, we donât even rent
videos anymore. Should it be called the âDVD Saloonâ or âThe Movie Saloonâ or
something?
It was too big as well, almost four times the size of the other shops on Main Street.
It looked bare and cold when there were no customers, and dark and dreary in winter. The
counter was right at the back of the store and customers were always complaining
because they had to walk all the way down the store to make a return, unlike other rental
stores, where the counter is always at the front door.
Still, at least I had a job. There werenât many jobs in Rosedale. Not for year ten
secondary school girls, unless you put your name down on the Coles waiting list or didnât
mind putting up with greasy hands and the smell of fried fat at the Chicken Shack.
I worked with Crass on weekends and an evening or two during the week. Crass
worked at the Video Saloon full-time where he spent most of his day watching the store
TV. My dad would have called him a no-good slacker before my dad actually became a
no-good slacker himself. Thatâs why I got this job. Anyway, one thing for sure, when Iâm
19 I wonât be working in a video store like him. Iâll be out of this town. Live in Rosedale
all my life? Thatâs not for me. Whoâd want to live in a town in the far reaches of the
galaxy? Itâs so far away from anything.
Not everyone thinks like I do though. My friend Skye lives in the Bracken Lake
estate just outside of Rosedale and she loves the place. âStacey Fallon, youâre wrong,
Rosedale is so cool,â she said to me during my last rant about the town as we walked
around the lake that her estate is named after. âIt has tennis courts, bike paths and it even
has a skating rink.â
....
A skating rink? Whoopee! Awesome! Letâs stay here forever! Anyway, compared
to a hole like Bracken Lake, Rosedale would seem like some bustling metropolis.
The best thing about getting out of Rosedale? I wouldnât have to put up with
Robertâs total weirdness.
Robert looked tired, like he had just got out of bed. To my relief he ignored me and
went straight to Crass. He gave Crass a DVD disc. Crass walked to the counter and
casually dropped it in front of me. It was the Night Falls disc. Crass had obviously rung
Robert and asked him to return it.
Robert followed Crass to the counter. He looked embarrassed and kept his eyes on
the ground.
âItâs illegal to burn DVDs mate,â Crass said to him with the same soft-as-barbedwire
tone as my principal, Huffy Kilpatrick (named because of her habit of huffing at you
before the start of any conversation) used during school assemblies. He handed back the
blank silver disc Robert had accidentally returned to us, which I thought was overly
generous. It was a copy after all. I thought he should have thrown it away. Crass held it
away from Robertâs grasp for a few seconds, as if leaving the disc where we could all see
it magnified the crime.
âYeah, I know,â said Robert, his shoulders hunched and hands in his coat pockets.
âIt was just for my own collection, you know, just so I could watch it again.â
âPretty stupid to give back the copy then. Or were you trying to rip us off by
keeping the original?â
âNo! It was a mix up. Iâm sorry man, yeah, it was stupid.â
Crass turned to me with a smile. âSo Stacey, think we should slap a ban on him for
this or what?â
For copying one DVD? When there were hundreds right under our feet in the
basement? I told Crass that it wasnât a big deal. Robert paid to rent the DVD, that was the
most important thing.
âPaid?â laughed Crass. He looked at Robert with a sneer. âIâve always wondered
Robbo, where do you get all the money for your DVDs? Youâre unemployed, right?â Robert nodded his head sullenly. âSo then, a DVD is six dollars a night and half-price
during the week. You watch a couple of hundred a year. Thatâs a lot of dosh. You must
be raking it in.â Robert didnât answer. âGo on, get out of here,â said Crass. âAnd if you
want to copy DVDs, burn them from Blockbuster. Not from us!â
Robert gave Crass a sharp look, then hurried out of the store with his bouncing,
gaping walk. âI donât know if Iâd have said that, Crass,â I said when heâd gone. âHeâll
never come back here again and heâs out best customer.â
âDoesnât mean anything to him. Heâs a geek,â said Crass, dismissing Robert with a
wave. âHeâs used to people talking crap to him. Anyway, heâll be back tomorrow. He
likes the staff.â Crass gave me one of his thin lipped smiles and walked back to the
console games shelf. He could be so obnoxious sometimes. It made me want to thump
him.
I snatched the Night Falls DVD and squeezed the scanner trigger. The movie was
added to the âReturned Rentalsâ list. If a customer returns a DVD late a warning flashes
onto the screen. You could also press the F7 key and take a look at the customerâs profile:
address, fines, rental history, how much money a customer had spent. Usually I took little
notice of customer profiles.
I saw that Robertâs fines were zero. He usually came in every Saturday afternoon I
worked and as far as I knew heâd never handed in his rentals late. I wondered just how
much money he had actually spent on rentals. It must have been hundreds and hundreds
of dollars. If Robert was unemployed thatâd mean he spent most of his money in the
store. Was it possible? I suppose if you donât have a job, watching movies is one way to
pass the time. Then why didnât he just download them from the Internet for free?
Feeling slightly self-conscious and sneaky, I pressed the F7 key and then selected
ârental historyâ. At the top of the screen was a text box which read: TOTAL RENTAL
SPEND FOR YEAR: $34.00.
Thirty-four dollars in ten months? That couldnât be right. Thatâd be only eight or
nine rentals, even if he did get them at half price. I downloaded his rental history.
Holding down the cursor I ran through the list of rentals. It was long. I knew it would be.
277 films in the past year, exactly the same number as Crass had told me. He has a good
memory. I scanned through the names: Wolf Creek; Saw IV; Land of the Lost; The
Notebook; Semi-Pro; American Gangster; Wrong Turn; Blade Runner; The Hills Have
Eyes. They werenât all horrors, thatâs for sure. And what was with The Notebook? That
was like a mega weepie film from years back. That was a really weird choice for Robert.
Next to each film on the rental history was the charge for each rental. Nearly every
one of them was listed with the same charge: CREDIT $0.00. A credit meant weâd rented
it out for free. Robert hadnât paid for hardly any of his movies. Fair enough, he may have
used the odd shop-a-docket voucher or his privilege card to get free rentals, but surely he
had spent more than thirty-four dollars?
Next to the charge was a code for the staff member who completed the transaction.
You had to logon each time you used the computer. That way if you didnât collect fines
or if you charged the wrong amount or the end-of-day balance didnât add up, Vince
would have known who stuffed up.
Next to nearly every one of Robertâs recent rentals was Crassâ login name: COL. I
kept scrolling until I saw STA. My login name was only next to a handful of titles. I
always made him pay. I looked at some of the titles under my login name. The last one
was a gory slasher flick. I remember renting it out to him a month ago, because Crass had
gone to lunch and Robert had gone on and on about the director of the film being the best
new director out there. The film had been paid for at half price, as Robert had a Saloon
privilege card â a scheme Vince had tried a couple of years before, but it had never
caught on with customers â that gave you half price on new releases during the week.
Soon enough you could get half-price overnighters any weekday regardless. But Robert
still liked to use his card.
It was weird that Robert rented so many videos but hardly any from me. Always
from Crass. Yet I remember him constantly returning DVDs to me, sometimes up to three
or four on a weekend. I saw him every weekend, yet Iâd only ever rented four or five
titles to him. I scrolled back to the top of the list to look at the transactions from earlier in the
year. Again, Crass completed nearly all the transactions until around March. Then I saw
another regular login name â KAT â beside a number of titles. The dates for KATâs
transaction ended in June. I started in mid-July when I answered an ad in the local paper,
along with nearly every other teenager in town. Again, nearly every rental charge of
KATâs read: CREDIT $0.00.
KAT? Who was KAT? I thought back to the previous assistants. I never took much
notice of them when I was a customer â which was rare anyway. Topps or Skye seemed
to do all the renting, as I couldnât afford a movie every week. I remember a guy who
always wore a red baseball cap. I didnât know his name. And an older girl from school. A
pretty blonde. Was she KAT? And if so, what was her name? Kate? Katrina? Iâd ask
Topps. Heâd been a regular at the Video Saloon for years.
I was so absorbed I failed to notice a customer standing at the counter. I looked up
to see him politely waiting. He had put his hands on the counter and was staring at a
movie playing on the store TV â an old kidâs super-hero animation film, The Incredibles,
that I still found cool. That was the one really good thing about working at The Video
Saloon. You could
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