Hoops Shorts: A HOOPS Novella Collection

We didn’t have much, but I didn’t know that till later. It was all I knew and yes, we were hungry a lot, and I cried about it. But it made Mommy sad whenever I did and then she’d lay on the couch and not get up. So I stopped crying.

Then she stopped getting up from the couch anyway.

One time I came out from my room where I’d been playing with my one stuffed animal, pretending I was a princess in a kingdom far, far away…

And when I came out to see if Mommy had somehow found some food for us to eat, I found her on the couch like always.

… But something was different. I didn’t know how, but I could tell. Even at four and a half, I could tell.

There were pills all over the couch, for one thing. And Mommy had what looked like dried up chalk coating the edges of her mouth. Her eyes were funny too, and her whole body slumped weird.

“Mommy!” I ran over to her and shook her arm.

She looked at me with her funny eyes that didn’t look like Mommy’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, honey.” She reached out like she was going to run her fingers through my hair. I loved when she played with my hair.

But her hand dropped before she could make it to my head. Her eyes closed like it was too much effort to hold them open anymore.

The last words she ever said to me were an exhausted whisper, “I’m sorry. Mommy can’t love you enough.”

“Looks like we’re here early,” Cash said as the bus came to a stop.

His voice pulled me out of my morbid reverie. He tugged the blackout curtain aside and grinned when he saw the Vegas strip blinking at us. There was an unholy sparkle in his eye. “Vegas, here we come!”

Tank squeezed my shoulder. “Hey, you okay? It felt like we lost you there for a minute.”

Damn Tank. He was too observant for his own good.

I shook his arm off and tried to smile. “I’m fine.” I popped to my feet and looked around at everyone, then repeated Cash’s words with an enthusiasm I hoped I’d actually feel soon. “Vegas, here we come.”

NINE

TANK

I kept watch over Luna all day as we set up the venue for our concert tomorrow night and did sound check.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about Bishop’s latest scheme. He was a crazy bastard, that I knew. Between him and Cash, the band had been through our fair share of scrapes.

At the same time… sometimes, just sometimes… the crazy shit Bishop came up with was actually, well, fuckin’ genius. Like putting the band together in the first place. All his idea. He wrote all our first few hits. I didn’t think the angry, punching beats and lyrics he wrote would be popular.

But he insisted that what people missed was a sound that went deep, hard, and visceral.

And he was right. We didn’t even bother with ballads until our second album when Mason started writing more.

I was hoping that all of us deciding to go poly with Luna was one of Bishop’s genius ideas. And not one that would end up fucking us all up the ass in the end. Like when he started a brawl in that bar back in Phoenix a few years back. I’d ended up with two black eyes and Mason got his arm broken by some long-bearded hick with more muscles than sense.

A keyboard player with a broken arm wasn’t much use. That was when things really started to go to shit between Bishop and Mason. Mason thought Bishop had started the fight on purpose. Bishop said he was crazy, that there was no way he could have known that the guy was going to go for Mason’s arm. Mason said none of it would’ve happened in the first place if Bishop hadn’t lost his cool like that. It was true, but Bishop was never one to let the truth get in his way.

They’d been at each other’s throats ever since. We could barely keep them in the studio together to finish the last album. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for Luna holding us all together, I wasn’t sure we would have made it the last few years.

So maybe it was a genius move to cement us all closer with this new intimacy…

Or maybe the feeling in my gut was right because I knew sex complicated everything. And no matter how much Bishop and Luna tried to play this off like it would just be sex—come on, man. We’d all been too close for too long.

Which was why, in spite of my better judgment, I was still going along with it. We were so close.

Well, two reasons. The first was that it seemed to be what Luna wanted. I respected that.