Hook Shot (Hoops #3)(85)

“Lo, I don’t see Iris anywhere,” she says. “Go find your cousin so we can go. I don’t want to be in that death trap of Ron’s on the road at night.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I take off toward the field where I last saw Iris playing with one of the dogs someone brought along.

“Bo!” I call. Aunt Priscilla is Creole. Iris’s father is German, so Iris is all mixed up and got a little bit of everything in her. That’s why I call her Gumbo.

I wander into the old sugarcane field that borders the community center. Looks like no one harvested it last season. All the tall stalks, some of them rotting, make it hard to see.

“She wouldn’t have come this far in.” I turn, ready to retrace my steps and find my way out, but I bump into something solid.

“Oh, Ron,” I say, looking up at him cautiously. “Hey.”

“Hey, Lo.” He addresses the words to the little buds on my chest in my tube top. “You growing up fast.”

His smile makes my stomach knot with nerves, but I’m not sure why. I glance around and see nothing but stalks and Ron.

“I better get back.” I go to step around him, but he steps with me. When I step right, so does he.

He chuckles and touches my face. “We got a few minutes.”

“I-I gotta go. Aunt Pris sent me to find Iris.” My voice shakes a little, and my heart is pounding so hard I hear it. “She’ll be looking for me.”

“Naw. Her new man just got here,” he says easily. “She’ll be occupied for a while, convincing him to pay next month’s rent. We never get to talk, you and me.”

“I’m gonna go on back, Ron.”

He grabs my wrist and pulls me into him. “You been running around here half-naked all day,” he says, his voice coming deeper, rougher. “Looking all good.”

The word naked sets off alarms in my head. He shouldn’t be talking to me like that. Or looking at me like that. Or sneaking in little touches every chance he gets.

“No, I haven’t.” I try to pull away, but his fingers tighten. “Let go.”

“Just one kiss, Lo,” he whispers, leaning forward and pressing his mouth to mine.

“No!” I jerk back, but he holds my head in place with one big hand. I open my mouth to scream, and he shoves his tongue inside. It’s wet and thick and muffles my voice. I gag. How can Mama like this? I bite his bottom lip until I taste blood.

“Little bitch,” he snarls, letting me go and touching his bleeding mouth.

I run, but don’t get far before he pushes me from behind. I fall, and my head hits the ground hard. The world darkens, spotted with little pegs of color like the Light Brite toy I got from Goodwill last summer.

Then everything goes black.

When I open my eyes, I can’t move. Ron has my wrists in one hand over my head. A breeze passes over my legs and I realize my shorts and panties are gone. I’m trapped beneath his hips and thighs, and something hard pokes at me.

“No!” I scream, turning my head back and forth so hard, one of my ponytails comes loose. I can’t see through the thick, dark curtain of pressed hair. “No! Please.”

“This’ll be just between us,” Ron hisses in my ear. “You’ll like it. Promise.”

“Please,” I sob, the smell of my hair and his cheap cologne and rotting sugarcane clogging my nostrils. “Ron, don’t.”

But he does.

And the pain is everywhere. In my head from the fall. In my wrists from the iron fingers clamped below my hands. Between my legs where it feels like a pipe is on fire and forcing its way inside. He grunts over me like a rooting pig happy in mud, his mouth hanging open, and his eyes rolling back in his head. Spots swim in front of me, and I squeeze my eyes shut. Tears scald my cheeks and trickle into my hair.

There’s a scream in my head that no one hears but me. I keep screaming, but my mouth is frozen shut, the sound trapped inside. It’s a secret cry, so loud in my mind it’s all I hear, but it won’t come out. Oh, God, the sound won’t come out.

Look up.

It’s the faintest whisper barely heard through the screeching in my head.

Look up!

That whisper comes again, urging, more urgent, and through the pain and the noise, I look to the sky. Two clouds bunched together slowly pull apart. They look like jaws and as they stretch open wide to reveal the sun hiding behind them, my mouth opens, too, stretching with the clouds. And finally, my voice floods the rotting field.

“Hopscoooooooootch!”





*



“May, now you know how fast these girls are.” Ron stands shifty-eyed and shadowed in the setting sun, belt hanging loose and his zipper undone. “Lo may be young, but she already got a taste somewhere, the way she was coming on to me.”

“You lying!” Iris yells, squeezing me protectively.

I huddle deeper into her, shaking so hard it hurts, my teeth chattering in the summer heat. My hair is half down, half up, and wild. That private place between my legs is so tender, even the cotton panties burn against my torn flesh.

Mama glares at Ron then at me, as if she’s not sure who she hates most right now.

“Lotus, I told you about being fast,” Mama says, but doubt trembles in her voice. She knows. She has to know he’s lying—that I wouldn’t.