Joan hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them. “What else could it mean?” she asked rhetorically. “Kitty May is gone, her house is empty—and the Seymore brothers are responsible. Besides, you heard Julianne. They’ve already gotten away with murder once.”
“They won’t get away with it twice,” Julianne said grimly. Her lips, which were usually red and full and glossy, were pressed into a thin, furious line. “We’ll make their lives hell for what they’ve done.”
Renard slapped his hands over his ears. “Plausible deniability, plausible deniability,” he chanted.
Renard’s father was a lawyer, in case you couldn’t tell.
Julianne rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut up, Renard. If you didn’t want to know you didn’t have to come.”
He lifted his chin defiantly and pulled his hands away from his ears. “I just wanted to know if you really had Grandmother Bird’s Ouija board. I can’t believe she let you bring that to camp, do you know how much that thing’s worth?”
Julianne shrugged. “’Let’ is a strong word,” she hedged. “I borrowed it because she’s taking some time off. She won’t need it until after we get home tomorrow.”
I shook my head at her in admiration and a little bit of awe.
“Ballsy,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to get on that woman’s bad side, even if I was her favorite grandkid.”
Julianne grinned at me slyly. “That’s why I’m her favorite.”
It made sense. Grandmother Bird wasn’t exactly your conventional grandmother. She was pure white with raven hair and eyes to match. Her lips were always done in black, and she only wore black eyeshadow.
She always looked like she’d stepped right out of an old black-and-white horror movie, whether she was baking cookies or running a séance.
The only resemblance I saw between her and Julianne was their porcelain skin and the shape of their faces—sharp, with high cheekbones and a pronounced widow’s peak. Julianne’s light green eyes and blonde hair were purely her mother’s.
Joan wrapped her arms around herself and gave an exaggerated shiver, looking pointedly at Stew, who pretended not to notice.
“So what do we do with this?” I asked. “I don’t really think the cops will take us seriously, not without proof.”
“You saw the pointer,” Julianne said. “That’s proof enough for me.”
“It’s not proof enough for a jury,” Renard said. “Hell, it’s not even proof enough for a cop.”
“We don’t need cops and juries,” Julianne said impatiently. “We just need them to know that we’re onto them, that’s all. Give them hell when school starts next week. Let them know that we are not to be fucked with. Get it?”
I grinned, leaning against the solid wood bunk at my back. “So—same as every other year, then?”
Chapter Two
My dreams were full of guilt that night.
I was the villain in a dozen different nightmares—tripping kids, stealing ice-cream, dumping my mom’s expensive makeup all over the bathroom and blaming the dog.
I watched people get punished for my crimes and felt horrible about it, but I couldn’t seem to stop.
The dreams lost coherency as I began to resurface, eroding and smearing into vague pictures, but the guilt wasn’t taken with them when they faded.
It stayed, sharp and heavy in my gut.
Imagined guilt for imagined crimes, I thought.
I tried to ignore it through my shower, but it was still there at breakfast.
The camp had gone all-out on the buffet-style breakfast this morning. It smelled good and it looked better. Even then, I couldn’t seem to stuff a single bite past the tightness in my throat.
“Ugh, I know,” Julianne said, flipping her hair as she sat down across the split-log table from me.
The benches we sat on were also split logs, matching pairs lining each of the long tables, giving the impression that small trees had divided in half to birth the big ones. It sort of creeped me out, just like the antlers on the walls did.
“They always go overboard with the fat and sugar on the last day,” Julianne continued. “They pretend it’s to send us off with good memories, but I think they’re really just celebrating our departure. Or trying to use up all the sugar in the kitchen so the ants don’t get it before next year.”
She wrinkled her nose at the syrup-drenched waffles on her plate.
“There’s no law that says you have to have waffles,” I pointed out as I forced myself to swallow a bite.
She slid a guilty look at me, then took a quick bite.
“I know,” she said, then lowered her voice. “If I try to eat this at home, mom will have a fit. But, like—I don’t really want people to think I enjoy it, you know.”
“Of course not,” I said solemnly. I only rolled my eyes on the inside.
It wasn’t like anybody was paying attention to what Julianne was or was not shoving into her mouth.
The dining hall was crowded, but not uncomfortably so. The camp never quite filled to capacity—it could be because there weren’t that many families who could afford it, but I thought it was more likely that they kept the numbers down to cultivate an air of exclusivity.
Either way, there was nobody close enough to take any interest in the contents of her plate, and there was enough noise that nobody would be paying attention to her complaints.
I kept picking at my breakfast, trying to figure out why I still felt bad.
The dreams had already faded so much that I couldn’t remember any details, but the guilt spiked in irregular waves.
Maybe it had something to do with the Ouija board?
“Are you sure your grandma won’t be upset about the Ouija board?” I asked quietly. As I said the words, I realized that, no, that wasn’t it—it was close, I could tell, but that wasn’t the reason I felt like shit.
“Honestly, she won’t even know it’s gone. I’ll have it back to her long before she’s ready to use it. She’s not even home right now. She uses her vacation time to play around in Tijuana and seduce men half her age or younger. She won’t miss it, promise.” Julianne’s attention wandered as she spoke, her eyes subtly taking in all the people around us.
“Looking for anybody in particular?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Cataloguing,” she said. “Next year is important. A lot of these people will be taking their gap years in Europe, some of them already have positions ready at their parents’ companies, and some of them are going straight to the Ivy League. I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, so I’ve collected a little of everything.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Collected, huh? You have got to work on not sounding like a comic book villain when you’re talking about people.”
She grinned. “Oh, it’s just you,” she said in a way that didn’t make me feel any better. “Connections is what I’m collecting, not men. I’m not Joan’s mom.”
“You aren’t?” Joan said in mock-surprise as she came up behind Julianne with a tray.
I could have warned Julianne that Joan was coming, but how was I supposed to know that she was about to be a bitch?
Julianne narrowed her eyes at me.
I busied myself with my breakfast. It tasted like cardboard even though it smelled fantastic, which annoyed me. If I was going to ingest the calories, it made sense that I enjoyed them.
Julianne sniffed. “Well, it’s true,” she said defensively. “How many boyfriends does your mom have?”
“Currently none,” Joan said. Her voice was firm, but her eyes were uncertain. “She hasn’t had spare boyfriends since she married David.”
“Uh-huh,” Julianne chuckled, clearly not believing her. “But I bet she never pays to get her car fixed. Or her lawn mowed. Or her pool cleaned. Or her pipes—”
I stabbed a sticky gob of waffle off of Julianne’s plate with my fork and shoved it into her open mouth.
“Eat your forbidden calories,” I said blandly.
“Or should we talk about your mother?”
Julianne glared briefly, but was mollified by the sugar and real butter.
Joan shot me a grateful look, then dug into her own breakfast.
I knew I would pay for that later, but Julianne’s petty vengeance wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. She mostly claimed me as hers, so whatever she would do to get back at me wouldn’t be too bad.
Besides, dealing with Julianne was kind of like dealing with a feral dog. Once in a while you had to prove you were just as mean as she was, or she’d eat you alive.
“Oh my God, I thought I would never get through that line,” Macy said, flopping down beside me.
She had yogurt and fruit on her tray and none of the sugariness that sat atop just about every other plate. She raised an eyebrow at our loaded trays but didn’t say anything.
Julianne’s pale skin flushed slightly around her jaw.
I could have pointed out to Julianne the spot of syrup clinging to Macy’s collar, a clear indication that she’d done her indulging on the other side of the room before coming over here to flaunt her apparent self-control in Julianne’s face—but I sort of felt like Julianne deserved to be shamed after what she’d said about Joan’s mom.
Besides, the only ones who cared about Macy and Julianne’s calorie counts were the two of them. They’d been dieting competitively for as long as I’d known them, and probably for a lot longer. It showed, I guess—they were both fashionably thin and looked Instagram-worthy in bikinis—but their eating habits had almost nothing to do with health or beauty, and everything to do with out-doing the other.
Joan interrupted the silent censure by reaching across the table to grab the syrup pot which sat between the two blondes.
“More for me,” she said with a dismissive look at Macy’s tray. “There’s no better way to say good-bye to summer than a sugar rush and four hours of carsickness.”
I caught her eye across the table and we shared a secret smile.
I liked Joan more than I liked Macy or Julianne, though Julianne had been the first person to talk to me when I moved to Starline at the beginning of my Sophomore year.
Julianne and Macy liked to play power games that exhausted me to watch. Joan played them too, but mostly in a supporting role. She knew there were worse things in the world than being at the bottom of the social ladder—and better things in the world than being at the top of it.
It was good to see her smile, even if it was at Macy’s expense. Her half-brother’s abortive birth and her mother’s subsequent moodiness had left Joan surly for months. Camp was exactly what she’d needed, and I hoped her lightened mood would carry over even after we were back home.
“So, speaking of the end of summer. It’s time to switch up the wardrobes, don’t ya think?” Julianne’s comment broke the tension around the table and the conversation moved away from food and onto fashion.
Julianne wanted to do a mall run with all four of us before school started on Monday. It was a conversation I didn’t have to think much about.
I would go, we all would, because Julianne was the one organizing it. You didn’t get to be in Julianne’s circle if you weren’t inclined to move as a pack.
Without the conversation to distract me, though, my mind wandered back to the guilt which was still weighing heavily on my chest.
I started picking at it without really meaning to, still wondering where it was coming from. Some word in the conversation the girls were having made that guilt spike again, and I tuned back in.
“—and you know we won’t have to worry about running into anyone disreputable there,” Julianne was saying, wrinkling her nose.
“I thought one of the Seymores worked at the mall?” Joan asked.
There it was. Guilt rose to fevered levels, making bile rise in my throat. I washed it down with a tumbler full of apple juice.
Why the hell was I feeling guilty about the Seymores?
“No,” Julianne said. “Benjamin Seymore used to work at Spencer’s, but he got fired for shoplifting or assaulting a customer or something.”
I raised my eyebrows, battling a surge of nausea.
“That’s a big difference,” I said. “You’re talking petty theft versus felony.”
She shrugged dismissively. “Does it matter? Point is, he won’t be at the mall, and that’s all that really matters.”
I frowned at my bacon, which was drowning listlessly in a sticky brown pool.
The flippant way she said that rang a bell in the back of my head, a little voice saying, this is why.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and picked at my breakfast, chopping my food into smaller and smaller bits.
It didn’t make sense for me to feel guilty about listening to rumors about the Seymores.
Even if they hadn’t done exactly what Julianne said they did, they’d more than earned my ire anyway.
That thought pushed the guilt back a little bit, so I rolled with it.
I remembered the second week of school two years ago, after Julianne had brought me into her group and one of the Seymores—the smaller of the skinny blonde ones—had flipped my tray, getting spaghetti all over my new clothes and in my hair.
Or last year, my Junior year, when one of them printed out dozens of copies of my yearbook photo from Sophomore year and scribbled WHORE all over it in bright red ink before pinning it up all over the school.
Not to mention the time they flooded the girls’ bathroom—while I was using it. They were mean, feral even, and didn’t deserve an ounce of sympathy from me. Guilt assuaged, I dug into my breakfast with renewed enthusiasm.
“—and they just got in these amazing tiny backpacks. Like, 90’s retro. We definitely need to get those.”
I tuned back in and shook my head. “Not unless Grandma Bird has an enlarging spell,” I said with a smirk. “I have Chemistry this year. There’s no way I’m going to fit that textbook in a tiny backpack.”
Julianne laughed. “You say that like you’re actually planning on doing homework!”
I grinned and went back to eating. Normalcy restored, and not a moment too soon. The bus trip home would have been awful if I’d had guilt stacked on top of motion sickness.
Chapter Three
My mistake was thinking I could take a nap on the bus. Dreams rolled over me in a sun-speckled pattern, their colors bleached and indecipherable in the light that filtered in through my closed lids.
The emotions weren’t bleached, though. If anything, they were stronger, jerking me awake with a brutal twist as the bus took the last turn into Starline High’s parking lot.
People stood and started moving toward the door almost before the bus rolled to a complete stop.
Sitting in the very back gave me the excuse I needed to curl around myself for a little while longer, to let the nervous sweat dry and my heart slow down.
I took a few very deep breaths to unclench the cramp in my solar plexus that was pressing on my lungs and making my stomach wriggle.
Even though most of the campers drove their own cars, almost everybody had parents waiting for them in the parking lot.
Nobody wanted their precious car sitting out in the parking lot for three solid weeks, and at least half the parents around here had enough job security or free time on their hands to get away for an hour and take their kid home.
I let the bus empty all the way before I tried to move.
Honestly, I was sort of afraid I’d throw up, and the fewer witnesses to that, the better. Eventually, though, when the luggage locker underneath the bus was beginning to sound hollow and the crowd outside was reasonably thin, I made my shaky way to the front of the bus and down the steps.
My luggage was already set aside for me, a matching brown-and-pink set my mother bought ages ago and had grown bored with.
She had offered to buy me my own. If I hadn’t been feeling particularly forgotten that day, maybe I would have let her—but I had no intention of allowing her to ease her conscience
with presents, not after she’d skipped every holiday plus my birthday and Christmas and Mother’s Day last year.
Dad had too—but I didn’t blame him quite as much as I blamed her. He was just the face of the operation. My mom was the one who scheduled the tours. She could have made sure they were home for at least some of the important days.
Like picking your kid up from camp day, I thought as I scowled at the rapidly-emptying parking lot.
Watching kids leave in cars stuffed full of balloons didn’t help my mood much.
Some parents actually enjoyed seeing their children.
Mine—well, let’s just say I’d left my car in the shadiest part of the parking lot the day the bus left for camp.
Leaving my luggage where it was, I hiked across the sticky-hot asphalt and found my car right where I’d left it—tucked between the dumpster and a raggedy old pine tree.
After swinging back around to pick up my things, I started for home. It was a longer drive than it should have been, considering there was only one high school for the whole town—but this was Texas, land of the widespread.
I’d lived there two years, almost three, and still couldn’t get used to how spread out everything was.
You’d think you were on a back road in the middle of nowhere, then boom, you’d find yourself at a busy intersection. Half a mile on down the road, you’d be back to nowhere again.
It was mind-boggling for me.
I’d spent most of my life living in the Bay Area, where the only reason to stop building was for water, fire, or poppies.
I was used to disappearing into crowds and losing myself in classrooms so full that the teachers couldn’t even match names to faces on sight.
Kids flowed in and out like the tides, with only a few staying longer than a few years at any one school.
I never really had a group of friends until I moved to Starline. Of course, I never really tried hard either.
“Honey, I’m home,” I called ironically as I let myself into the house.
Even after two years, the paint smelled fresh and the carpets stayed fluffed without encouragement. It wasn’t surprising.
Them Seymore Boys: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 1) Page 2
