Hook Shot (Hoops 3)

“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.

I can’t even defend myself. I haven’t said a word since I yelled hopscotch and brought Iris running. Mama and Aunt Pris weren’t far behind. The five of us stand in the middle of this field, and Ron’s lies are as rotten as the sugarcane.

“May,” Aunt Pris starts, her lips pressed tight together. “I don’t know if—”

“That’s right, we don’t know,” Mama says, her eyes narrowed on her sister. “I just need a minute to think, Pris. Gimme a . . .”

Her voice breaks like a dish crashing on the floor, and she starts crying, both hands covering her face. Ron reaches for her, and she slaps at his shoulders, at his face and head.

“You no good . . .” she screams, her light skin going red. “How could you, Ron?”

“Baby, come on now,” he says, capturing

her flailing limbs, trapping the talons of her fingers in one hand and pulling her against his chest with one thick arm.

“I ain’t coming on,” she screeches at him. “Not this time.”

“Baby, you know me,” he coos into her hair, making circles on her narrow back with his hand. “I love you. You know how it is with us.”