Them Seymore Boys: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 1)

by Savannah Rose

  I would love to figure out how she does that, I thought. How she manages to make everybody around her assume that she knows better than they do about whatever it is. I’ve seen her use her influence to get people to do things they would never dream of doing themselves—

  “Like buying a useless baby-sized backpack covered in blue butterflies,” I said, scowling at the screen.

  But to take it so far as to accuse someone of murder or kidnapping?

  It struck me that she might actually have manipulated the cops into opening an investigation on Kitty May’s “disappearance.”

  On the surface it would be stupid, since any investigation would turn up exactly what I’d found—that the family moved to Alaska for Leon’s health—and would be closed without comment and possibly an admonition in her direction for wasting their time.

  But it would also come with paperwork. Phone records or the police report, something to prove that she had, in fact, been in touch with the police. Not that any of us had asked for proof—we sort of just believed what she told us.

  I don’t know why the others did, but for me it was because I had a sneaking suspicion that any challenge to her world-view would be met with destruction.

  Maybe that was an indication of my own issues—but maybe it was instinct.

  The next day I returned everything I bought without bothering to go through it, then took my time buying things I liked and actually needed.

  Chapter Six

  “Kennedy! Did you have a stroke or something?” Julianne frowned at me and crossed her arms.

  Macy and Joan mimicked the expression, which looked like something out of a horror movie since they were all matching.

  We’d agreed—sort of—during the shopping trip that we’d all be wearing the matching blouse and jeans combinations we’d picked up at the mall. Julianne in pink, Macy in lavender, Joan in green, and me in blue.

  The outfits —which they all wore—were intended to match the strawberry, teddy bear, watermelon, and butterfly mini backpacks we’d all bought.

  I’d returned mine - outfit and backpack - and replaced them with something that didn’t make me look like Julianne’s sun-darkened quadruplet.

  I tossed my hair and adjusted the wide, buckled straps of my red dress and gave a little twirl, flashing my grey-and-red backpack as I did so.

  The bag was big enough to hold my books, which, you know, was kind of the point to a damn school backpack.

  “You like the dress?” I asked. “It has pockets.”

  I shoved a hand into one of the deep apron pockets on the front of the dress and grinned like I hadn’t just defied her majesty.

  Julianne raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips. “I’m going to assume you forgot,” she said slowly. She sighed and touched a hand to her brow. “It’s too late to do anything about it now. It’s fine. I’ll come over tonight.”

  To pick out tomorrow’s outfit for me, no doubt.

  Irritation ground down my spine, but I followed her into the school. Macy walked beside her, as usual, and Joan beside me. When the other two pulled ahead a little bit, Joan dropped her voice.

  “Ballsy,” she said quietly. “Why’d you do it?”

  I shrugged. “Nobody’s dressed me since I ran off my last nanny,” I replied under my breath. “I’m not about to break that streak.”

  She looked at me in some confused combination of horror and respect, but didn’t have a chance to say anything.

  The four of us had most of our classes together. In a town this size, it would almost be easier to keep the seniors in one room and just swap out the teachers, at least for the core subjects, but Starline High had enough funding to pretend that we were a much larger group than we actually were.

  As usual, the four of us took the four seats in the second row on the left-hand side of the room.

  Stew, Renard, and Adam took up most of the second row on the right side of the room. If Kitty May had still been here, she would have taken the right-hand seat nearest the aisle—part of Julianne’s group, but not too close.

  I had never really been sure whether that was her decision, Julianne’s, or just the natural effect of their personalities.

  The Seymores were late as usual. There were two of them in our class, and they had their preferred sitting arrangement too.

  Rudy, the dark-haired one with the piercing blue eyes, sat behind me.

  Bradley, the pale Viking, sat behind Macy.

  Neither of them had ever sought out the seat behind Kitty May. Come to think of it, if either of them were responsible for targeting one of us, it would have been me or Macy.

  Tension rose in the room as the boys took their seats. It was never a question at Starline High as to whether or not the Seymores and Julianne’s crew would be at war; the only question was who would make the first move.

  Before the shopping trip, I would have expected them to start it—from my perspective, they always had before. But today I kept my eye on Julianne.

  “All right, seniors! Let’s buckle down and pay attention. You all know me, I think—yep, no new faces this year, but just for the hell of it—and because I never practiced different ways to start a class—I’m Mr. Franks, and this is your homeroom.”

  Franks had only been teaching for as long as I’d been in high school. He still looked like he’d be more comfortable behind the desks than in front of them.

  He’d worn jeans and t-shirts the year before until some parent complained about professionalism, and the credibility of a teacher who dressed like a teenager.

  Now, left with no other choice, he begrudgingly wore polo shirts and khaki pants. He didn’t kick the Converse’s though. If anything, the sneakers on his feet grew brighter and more obnoxious.

  He was as aware of the tension in the room as any of the other students, and knew where it came from. The thing about looking like a student is that people tend to treat you like one. They tell you things they wouldn’t tell an older or more severe teacher.

  He shot a glance over the second row, then the third. His sweeping gaze paused just behind my head. “Mr. James had a long talk with me this morning. You remember Mr. James, the poor man you all drove into a nervous breakdown last year? Yeah. He’s back, and doing very well now, thank you for asking.”

  I resisted the urge to wriggle in my seat. I still felt bad about that.

  The back and forth between us and the Seymores had left Mr. James virtually incapable of teaching us anything for the entire first half of the school year.

  When we all failed our mid-terms and the room exploded in accusations of meddling and cheating, Mr. James had an attack. It looked like a heart attack to me, but it was something else. A nervous breakdown, apparently.

  He’d spent the rest of the school year in a little town four hours away from Starline.

  Some people claimed he was living with his sister.

  Other people insisted that he was locked up in a mental institution.

  I suspected the truth was somewhere in between or perhaps a little bit of both.

  I was glad he was okay, but I still felt like shit for letting things go as far as they did.

  Julianne smirked. “Nobody asked, but, I guess thank you for telling. So, what did he have a long talk with you about? Retroactive detention?”

  Macy snickered, and so did a few of the others. Julianne sent a cool look down the row toward me and Joan.

  We were expected to join in with the snickers, but it was too late now. Franks was speaking again.

  “That’s enough,” he said coolly. “Your interpersonal bullshit has no place in my classroom. Understand? You don’t have to be best buddies, though I might pair some enemies up for labs if I’m feeling sadistic. Or if you keep pushing my buttons. We’ll see how much you appreciate that. And if you bring your back-stabbing bullshit into my classroom, I will make your lives a living hell. That’s a promise.” He met every eye in the room, piercing right through us with his olive-green gaze. His face was so deadl
y serious that even Julianne stopped breathing for a moment when he looked at her.

  Then, satisfied that he’d made his point, Franks grinned at all of us. “All right, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the syllabus!”

  Chapter Seven

  The tension which had been forcibly broken in homeroom was back by second period, but Ms. Fields was old and stern and began teaching way back when corporal punishment was acceptable in the classroom.

  It wasn’t the place to start some shit, though I wouldn’t put it past Julianne or the Seymores to finish it there. Julianne ate up the nervous non-attention as if it had been rousing applause. For me, it was just distracting.

  I caught some of the whispers in the halls between classes. The words “Ouija,” “black magic,” and “murder” were used a lot more often than usual, which told me that Julianne’s performance in the food court had been successful.

  Thinking about it, I don’t think she had ever attempted anything that wasn’t successful. No, that’s not quite true, I reminded myself. She hadn’t been successful in keeping me convinced of Kitty May’s disappearance or the Seymores’ involvement, so at least there was that. And at least I made one less person who was going around whispering that bullshit.

  Not that it mattered much. Julianne was the queen of this school, the mother hornet, so to speak. And her sting was the kind of sting that reminded you she wasn’t to be fucked with and so they didn’t do any fucking with her. Instead, they ate up the bullshit she fed them like it was a steaming pile of pudding pie.

  Nobody was going to listen to me over Julianne, and even if they did, she’d find some way to turn it in her favor and make the Seymores look bad in the process. I didn’t know how she’d do it, but I had no doubt that she would, so I kept quiet as the rumors spread and expanded around me. If nothing else, I figured if I just didn’t add anything to the rumors, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  By the time lunch rolled around, I’d gotten a lot of practice ignoring all of the conversations around me.

  I sat in my usual seat, across from Macy and next to Joan. The Seymores, all four of them, sat at the table across from us. Two of them weren’t in our class—a junior and a sophomore, I thought, or maybe two juniors.

  Since they weren’t exactly blood-related, they weren’t spaced out through the grades as evenly as some of the other sibling groups in school—but they were just as tight, maybe tighter, than the true siblings who attended this school.

  “You’re going easy on them,” Macy said quietly with a sideways look at Julianne.

  Julianne grinned, that devilish smile splitting her lips into something sinister. “Am I?”

  As if on cue, the boy that Kitty May had been flirting with last year stormed up to the tables where the Seymores sat. He was tall and pale with red hair and freckles—freckles which stood out starkly on his face now that it was a few shades paler than usual. His green eyes flashed dangerously and he towered at the end of the table, glaring at each of the four boys.

  “What the hell did you do with her?” he growled.

  Bradley—the Viking—twisted one shoulder to look at the ginger head-on. “Do with who, Doug?”

  Even those across the room could see the way the rage in Doug grew. His shoulders tensed, his jaw tightened and his knuckles cracked as he balled his hand into a fist and sent it thundering against the table in front of him.

  “Kitty May!” Doug barked. “What. The. Fuck. Did. You. Do. To. Her?!!”

  Everyone far and near shuddered.

  None of the Seymores so much as flinched.

  Chris, the smaller and prettier Seymore actually managed a laugh just as mocking as it was sweet. “What do you think?”

  Doug shouted wordlessly and lunged across the table, jerking Chris out of his seat.

  He was an idiot if he thought he’d be able to take him.

  He was even more of an idiot if he thought he could pull that crap in front of the other Seymores.

  Almost instinctively, Bradley’s massive hand slammed down on Doug’s right wrist while Rudy grabbed his left.

  It didn’t take a second before Chris was free and watching the action like he hadn’t been the one attacked. Straight faced, they squeezed until Doug cried out in pain.

  “Back the fuck off,” Bradley hissed, his voice quietly threatening. “You don’t want this fight.”

  “Not until he tells me where the hell Kitty May is,” Doug growled, stabbing a finger through the air at Chris.

  “Man, how the hell should I know? She’s your girl, isn’t she? What’s the matter, can’t keep ‘em on a leash?”

  Doug, seeming to have lost a few braincells during this whole thing, was going to lunge again, but Bradley put a big hand on his chest and shoved him. He’d timed it just right so that Doug would bump into someone’s full tray of food.

  In the chaos that followed, Bradley kept a calm face while he looked at Chris and shook his head.

  Everyone who wasn’t a Seymore was going mad, though. Doug was shouting, the person whose lunch he had ruined was shouting, people at nearby tables were shouting because they’d been splattered—but Bradley just glared at Chris like a disappointed father.

  He didn’t seem quite as scary as he had last year. Or maybe that was perceptions changing in light of what I’d found out because, truthfully, last year I would have been under the impression that they had done whatever a random kid was accusing them of doing.

  I wondered how much that had altered my perceptions. I knew for sure that if I’d watched this very situation happen last year, I would have been confident that the Seymores were the instigators.

  Julianne smiled triumphantly and lifted her chin to Macy. “Work smarter, not harder, darling,” she said in a low voice, before clearing her throat and lifting her voice even louder. “That’s something those Neanderthal Seymores are never going to understand.”

  Gary, the youngest and meanest of the Seymores, spun around on his bench. “What the fuck did you call us, bitch?!”

  Julianne grinned and turned around, meeting him eye to eye. “No, I didn’t call you a bitch. I could, though, if you’d like. You wanna be my bitch, Gary?”

  His face bloomed bright red, his dark eyes flashing under his bleached-to-hell hair. He shot a look at Bradley, who gave him a cold smile.

  It was permission, I gathered, because just as Julianne turned around smugly to finish her meal, a carton of milk exploded all over her back. Gasping, she whirled back around in time to get a face full of Jell-O.

  “Knock it off you little punk!” Macy was out of her seat, her hands jerking forward to grab Gary by the ear.

  Rudy shot up before Gary could react beyond wincing, and shoved Macy’s shoulder hard. “Don’t touch my brother,” he growled, his voice tinted by the gently Hispanic accent he got sometimes when he was really pissed.

  Macy scoffed. “Your brother? You keep telling yourself that lie, wet—”

  “Macy,” Joan said frantically, cutting off the insult that would have pushed all kinds of boundaries.

  Joan caught Macy’s eye and jerked her head at the moderator who was making a beeline for the two of them. If she overheard Macy using a racial slur, Macy would be in deep shit. That was one of the few things clearly spelled out in the anti-bullying section of the student handbook—a book we all knew very well, at Julianne’s insistence. It had a lot to do with why we never ended up strictly on the wrong side of the letter of the law.

  Macy grinned and blew Rudy a mocking kiss. “Wettle baby,” she said instead, sitting down before the moderator got close enough.

  The speed with which she pasted an innocent look on her face was almost impossible to fathom.

  The Seymores might have been Neanderthal’s, but this group within which I found myself, we were a whole new species, entirely. Not decked out in hardened muscles or iron jaws, but cruel right down to the very bone.

  Rudy stood, tense with fury, eyes burning murderously.

&nb
sp; “You,” the moderator said sourly. “All four of you, come with me. You can eat in the kitchen if you’re going to be causing trouble, and you’re lucky I don’t give you all detention.”

  She was talking to the Seymores, because, of course she was.

  A whip of guilt lashed through me, steaming through my veins.

  Julianne had started it, all of it.

  Doug wouldn’t have confronted Chris if she hadn’t spread that rumor.

  Gary shouldn’t have thrown things, but she antagonized him. She didn’t even look upset as she wiped the Jell-O off of her face or when Macy was blotting the milk off of the back of her shirt. She looked pleased. Like she’d won something. Which, I guess, in a sense she had.

  “They made the first strike,” she said quietly. “And everybody saw it. Anything that happens now is justified.”

  My heart thundered in my chest. I was more scared of speaking up than I was angry about her manipulation. Especially now that it was all over, the details seemed murkier.

  Maybe she hadn’t intentionally said that loud enough for them to hear, maybe it was an accident. And I would never be able to prove that she’d said what she did to Thomas in the food court, and I wouldn’t be able to remember exactly word-for-word what she said anyway, and if I got any part of it wrong she’d discredit me, and the whole thing, in some humiliating way.

  My appetite decided that it was lost and not in the mood to be found.

  Walking to the other end of the room, I dumped my untouched tray in the trash without a word to the girls.

  As I left the lunch room, I caught Julianne watching me thoughtfully. I forced a smile and waved to her. She didn’t wave back. My stomach lurched painfully.

  I was going to have to do a fair bit of groveling to get back in Julianne’s good graces.

  I just wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  Chapter Eight

  I had automotive for third period and track for fourth. Both were subjects which Julianne would not be caught dead attending.