Hook Shot (Hoops 3)

Sobs shake her against him, and she tosses her head back and forth, denying, but she stops scratching and clawing and starts clinging, burrowing into his neck.

“How could you?” she whispers over and over again, sounding more hurt than angry. Broken, not outraged on my behalf.

“We gotta tell the police,” Iris says, as if she’s the adult.

“No!” me and Mama say in unison.

“No,” I say again. Iris’s face blurs through my tears. “I don’t want anybody to know.”

I turn pleading eyes to my mother. “Mama, please, no cops.” I glare at Ron. “Just make him go away.”

She stiffens at my words, looking helplessly between me and the man who hurt me, like there’s a hard choice to be made.

“Make him go, Mama,” I beg again. “Please, we don’t have to talk to the cops. Just make him go away.”

“But, Lotus, we . . .” She licks her lips. “We all probably need some space to figure out what happened.”

“I know what happened, Mama,” I protest. “He ra—”

“Lotus!” Mama cuts in like a blade. “Don’t say that.”

“But he did,” I weep into Iris’s hair. “He did.”

“Maybe you should stay somewhere else for a while,” Mama says, avoiding my eyes. “Until we all feel more comfortable.”

“Me?” I bounce my shock between Mama, Aunt Pris, and Ron, whose bloodied lip pulls with a smug smirk. “But, Mama, I—”

“Just for a few weeks, Lo,” she says, some of the guilt on her face turning into impatience.

“No,” Iris screams, squeezing me tighter. “Don’t send her away.”

“Just for a few weeks,” Mama says again, her tone firmer.

“Then I’m going with her.” Iris pulls her lips into a flat, determined line.

“You ain’t going nowhere, girl,” Aunt Pris says. “What I tell you about getting in grown folks’ business?”

“But Mama,” Iris says, her voice thick and wobbling. “Where’s she gonna go?”

The stalks shift and part, snapping under someone’s feet, startling us all. It’s my great-grandmother MiMi. She takes her time looking at each of us, but finally fixes wrathful eyes on Ron. He gulps, shivers.

“I’ll take her,” MiMi says, looking at me with those ancient eyes. “She can come stay with me.”

31

Kenan

If there’s one place I never expected to be, it’s here.

New York Fashion Week. Front row of the JPL show. Yet here I sit, anxiously awaiting the first “look,” as Lotus calls it. She told me the show JP has been designing and planning for months will be over in less than twenty minutes.

My kind of event.

The waiting audience is seated on a terrace overlooking Lincoln Plaza. I can’t fully appreciate the city on the verge of sunset, or the excitement electrifying the air because I’m ready for it to be over. I’m happy for JP and his team, whom I’ve come to know and actually like over the summer. But the sooner the show and the after-party are over, the sooner I can have Lotus to myself. She warned me her schedule would be bruising in the last few weeks leading up to the show, but I wasn’t prepared for how little time she’d have for anything else.

How little time she’d have for me.

I’ve never been involved with someone whose schedule and commitment to their craft rivaled mine. In three weeks, I report for training camp, and the NBA will own almost all my time for the next nine months, at least. Ten if we make playoffs, which August and I are determined to do. Then Lotus will be on the receiving end of my career. It’s not easy to live with. I’m not easy to live with. I’m even more obsessive about my eating and workout regimen during the season. I watch film constantly. I talk even less because I’m in my head studying plays, scoping other teams’ offenses, mentally picking apart their defenses before games.