Hump Day Hook 7/17

I missed last week’s hook! Oh noes! But I’m back today and will try extra-hard not to do that again. For those of you just tuning in, all my Hooks, WeWriWas and Sneak Peeks starting from July 1st are coming from my upcoming book, The Last Hour of Gann, so scroll back a bit to catch up and if you like what you read, feel free to leave a comment and ask to enter my Gann Giveaway. Your name will go into the ol’ hat and when the book is ready to go live, one lucky winner will be drawn to receive a free ecopy! Good luck!

Hump Day Hook is a weekly blog hop where writers are invited to hook readers with just a few paragraphs from a work in progress or published work. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love!

“I can get another job!” Nicci insisted.

“Yeah, you can. So can I. And they’ll be two more full-time shifts at minimum wage under that fucking salary cap because we dropped out of school. And that means that the most—the absolute most, Nicci—that we can make between us will be not quite half what we’d need for the new rent.”

“What…? N-no…” Nicci fumbled at the papers on the table, staring without comprehension at the neat, lawyerly print on the new lease. “They…They can’t do that!”

“Yes, they can. They did. Maybe they couldn’t raise Mama’s rent, but they can sure do it to us.”

“How do they expect us to pay this much every month?”

“They don’t. They expect to evict us. They want to get a better class of person in here,” she added with a trace of wry humor, “and I can’t say I blame them.”

“But…But where are we supposed to go?”

“They don’t care,” said Amber, shrugging. “And they don’t have to care. We do. And we’ve only got about four weeks to figure it out, so you really need to—” She broke it off there and made herself take a few breaths, because stop whining wasn’t going to move the situation anywhere but from bad to worse. “We need to think,” she finished, “about what we can do to help ourselves.”