Hoops Shorts: A HOOPS Novella Collection

“I’m home,” I called loudly. The noise and voices continued on obliviously. Marcos and Daniel, my youngest two twin brothers probably had headphones on while they gamed, but what about Antony and Luis?

Were they seriously watching TV at—I pulled out my phone from my pocket to check the time—three in the afternoon? They promised me they’d actually try to get jobs while I was gone this time.

Luis was almost twenty-five and he’d never had a job in his life. Antony occasionally tried. Bullshit attempts if I was being honest, but at least he made the barest effort. Luis could at least do that, considering everything I’d given up for them.

I jogged up the stairs, trying to get a hold of my temper.

And I was doing a good job of it too.

Until I got to the top of the stairs where it opened up to a large second den. The surround-sound was blaring and the ninety-eight-inch screen flashed in the otherwise dark room, illuminating the scene of my two oldest brothers in their underwear, with several passed-out naked women draped over the couches around them. The room was a disaster too. Old pizza boxes. Beer bottles everywhere. There was barely a path to walk through on the floor.

And there was the residue of white fucking lines covering the center coffee table.

My brothers’ eyes were hazed over as they watched the screen. So they didn’t even notice when I came in the room.

I flipped the lights on. “What the fuck is this?” I roared.

My brothers jumped and one of the women stirred but didn’t rouse.

“Shit, Tank.” Luis scrubbed at his face, sliding to the side out from underneath a woman who was sleeping on his lap. “I didn’t know you were coming back today.”

“Oh, ’cause you woulda cleaned this shit up and tried to hide it from me?”

“Naw, naw,” Antony said, holding up his hands. He always had been the smarter one, and he realized how pissed I was. “It was just a one-time thing, we swear.”

“Yeah, fuckin’ right. You think I’m a goddamned idiot?” I roared. The other two women stirred. One of them had the sense to snatch a blanket from the side of the couch and cover herself as my tirade continued. “From the way it fuckin’ smells in here? Get those girls outta here. Marcus and Daniel are only eighteen and you’re doing this shit around them?”

The woman who’d woken and covered herself got to her feet and scurried for the stairs. The other two were getting the picture. Antony helped get them up and out, but Luis just stared at me obstinately.

Luis crossed his arms over his skinny chest as the women’s feet pattered down the stairs.

He was the opposite of me in every way. “So you get to go out and party all over the world, but we can’t have any fun?”

Was he fuckin’ serious? I stalked towards him, crushing cans and pizza boxes underfoot. “When you’re under the roof I’m fuckin’ paying for, you goddamn bet.”

Luis rolled his eyes. “The roof you pay for, the roof you pay for,” he muttered. “You ever gonna stop holding that over our heads? Just ’cause you’re famous doesn’t make you any better than us, you know?”

I laughed in his face. I couldn’t believe this kid.

I’d heard children could be ungrateful, but this took the cake. And he wasn’t a kid anymore. He was a grown ass man.

“I worked for everything I have,” I said, getting up in his face. All my brothers were big, but they didn’t call me Tank for nothing. I towered several inches over the biggest of my brothers, and Luis wasn’t the biggest.

“Please,” he scoffed anyway, obviously not intimidated by me in spite of my size. Disrespect dripped off his tongue. “You play bass. It’s barely an instrument. No one even knows your name. Hell, I coulda been you if I’d been the one to find grandpa’s stupid old guitar in the attic.”

He was really starting to piss me off. So I laughed in his face. “That’s fucking hilarious. All right. You think you could’ve pulled all this off? Fine. I’ll buy you a bass guitar and you can have at it. Try to see if you can keep a roof over your own damn head.”

Confusion registered on Luis’s face suddenly, the bravado dropping only a little. “But I’m your brother. I’m family.”

“Yeah, and you been trading on that to squeeze me dry without lifting a damn finger yourself for long enough.”

My words froze in my mouth as I looked past him and realized that it wasn’t just powder on the table—on the floor underneath the coffee table were several syringes. I grabbed Luis’s wrist, yanking his arm forward so I could expose the inside of his elbow. When I shoved his shirt up, sure enough, track marks dotted the inside of his arm. “Son of a bitch!”