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Which was why he had to bite back laughter when it actually happened.
He’d been waiting in some sort of restaurant area when Linda hurried into the room, all energy and smiles, telling the dancing star of the Squeaky Lion bar how much she was looking forward to September. Hayley seemed muted by sadness today, even before she spotted him, and Nick wondered what could’vehappened to bring her down from the night before. Hayley couldn’t still be dwelling on him, could she?
You’d like that, wouldn’t you,he thought.Doesn’t matter how much of an asshole you are, as long as the pretty girl keeps you in mind.
“Mr. Freeman!” Hayley slipped past him before he could speak to her, and now Linda had him in a firm handshake, which meant he had to be mindful of his balance as he kept one hand on the walker. “Can I call you Nick, outside of school?”
“I’d actuallypreferNick.” He gave his best “Mr. Freeman is my father” sort of smile. “What happens in September?”
“September is when you’ll want to be sure to come back and catch a show.”
Nick remembered Hayley’s words to Rory in the bar:“You might want to check out Vivez Dance soon.”Sooner than September? Maybe September was an unwelcome change of plans.
He cleared his throat. “So, how can I help, Mrs. Brandazzio?”
“Linda, please!” she said, and he nodded. Then, to his confusion, Linda’s gaze went skyward, her head tilting back and forth as if debating something before she met his eyes apologetically.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I feel like I shouldn’t ask you to commit until you actually see what you’ll be doing. But I also don’t want to make you walk through the theater just to tell me no.”
Nick preferred not to have this conversation at all; it would have been worth sore legs and sweaty clothes to have Linda treat him just like anyone else. “How about this,” he said. “You give me the headline, and we’ll take a walk if I’m still interested.”
Linda grinned, visibly relaxing. “I need you to put footage from a mountain of VHS tapes on the computer and organize it.”
Nick tried to hide his surprise. “Do you have all of the equipment you need?”
“Oh yes,” she said dismissively. “Ben helped me find the software and everything.”
“I’m sure Ben could do the conversion easily enough.”
She laughed. “Ben and I would both be better off with him working for someone else.Anyoneelse.”
Nick laughed along, buying time to think. He didn’t need a summer job, but Ben had said his mother very much wanted to work withhim, specifically. The Brandazzios knew Nick taught computer electives, so he was qualified for the job, but what made him so essential here? Nick decided he wanted to find out.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
Before long, they were standing in the doorway of a small room packed with shelves. A table with a monitor and a VCR on it was against the left wall; Nick spotted the computer under the table, though his view was partially obscured by a cheap office chair. His walker was about two feet wide and three feet deep, and there was space enough to get it into the room, but not to turn it around. He’d have to walk out backward.
“So,” Linda said. “We’ve got years and years of VHS tapes in here, shows we did and rehearsal stuff. They may or may not be labeled correctly. There are binders …” She went to the shelf at the back of the room and indicated a row of dusty binders with a sweeping hand, game-show style. “These have programs from our shows in them, so that may help you figure out what you’re watching.”
Nick took in the scene in front of him. “So you want me to digitize all of this and organize it somehow?”
Linda nodded. “First priority would be just to get it on the computer with some sort of label on it. But yeah, the easier it is to sift through all this stuff, the better.”
“Okay.”
“It’s too much,” Linda guessed. “Too boring.”
“No …” Although it would be boring, and he was under no obligation to help this woman. “When you transfer fromVHS, the computer captures the footage as it plays,” he said. “So if I’m capturing a two-hour video tape, it’s going to take two hours.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “I read about it online.”
“I’m saying a lot of this job is just going to be pushing a couple of buttons and sitting there while the tape rolls. You’d be paying me to wait.”
Linda’s eyes widened as she remembered something. “Oh! Right. I want to pay you ten thousand dollars for the summer.” Nick stared at her. “Whether it takes two weeks or three months,” she said. “It’ll be simpler than keeping track of the hours.”
Nick’s eyebrows rose in disbelief. “You’d be paying me this to …”
“I’d want you to be done by Labor Day, but you can make your own hours.”
