I channeled that anger into my legs as I dodged meandering crowds and awkwardly placed loners. I caught up to the Seymore brothers just as they slipped inside the boy’s bathroom. A vision of them dumping my bag, project and all, into the toilet put a little extra speed in my step.
Drenched in adrenaline, I crashed through the door after them, scaring some poor freshman at a urinal.
Bradley, Rudy, Chris, and Gary were all huddled around the big accessible stall, arguing. They stopped when I slid to a halt behind Bradley’s broad back.
“Bag, please,” I said shortly.
“Bag, please,” Chris repeated in a mocking, high-pitched voice.
Gary snickered beside him and held my bag up. “This bag?” He edged toward the toilet.
“Yep, that one. Hand it over.”
“What are you gonna do if I don’t?” he asked, dancing closer to the toilet, then farther away again.
I shrugged. “Tell Mr. Boughs that the bullies ate my homework, I guess. Be a shame if you flushed my tampons, though. I’d have to petition the school to put tampon machines in every bathroom. Every. Single. One.”
Gary’s face wrinkled in disgust and he dropped my bag on the floor. I dashed into their huddle and snatched it up, my sides tense as I braced for kicks, but they didn’t touch me.
“Do these all have tampons in them?” Chris asked, his voice a panicked squeak.
“Do women bleed?” I asked in reply.
The part of him that was still bundled in immaturity dropped the bags. To be honest, I almost left them there, but Bradley picked them up and shoved them toward me.
“You got lucky,” he said, not shifting his eyes to meet mine. “You tell those girls to keep their ignorant mouths shut or you might not get so lucky the next time.”
I wanted to tell him—all of them, really—that whatever it was Julianne and the rest of the girls were pulling, I was no longer a part of it. But I couldn’t say that with any confidence, since I still didn’t know exactly what was going on, except that Julianne seemed to be the main instigator. Well, her and Chris, who hated me on principle.
So I didn’t say anything at all.
I marched out of the bathroom just as the warning bell rang and met the girls at the junction outside the bathroom.
Joan’s cheeks were streaked with mascara.
Julianne looked livid.
Macy, as usual, seemed bored.
I held out the tangle of bags and they each claimed theirs.
“They’re dry?” Joan asked before she touched hers.
“Yeah. They didn’t make it to the toilet.”
“Oh, thank God,” Joan said, hugging her bag to her chest. “I so didn’t want to have to write that damn essay again.”
“You didn’t save it?” Julianne asked incredulously.
Joan shrugged, her streaky face burning red. “I don’t save my homework. Once in a while Mom will decide that she’s interested in my education and she’ll go through my stuff and start correcting things. It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t correct things incorrectly.”
The bell rang again and we hurried to class. The guys still hadn’t come out of the bathroom, neither had they found their way out of my mind.
I wondered what they’d been arguing about. Before I’d entered the bathroom, Rudy’s voice had been the loudest, but he’d snapped his mouth shut and hadn’t said a word the whole time from the moment I set foot in there.
Walking into history class with Joan I tried my hardest to push them out of my head. Not that it would last for too long. Macy and Julianne had something else for this period, but Rudy was in this class with us. Except, five minutes later, he still hadn’t pushed his way through the door.
Ten minutes later, he still wasn’t there. And then, a quarter past, just as I was about to pull the stupid card and try to find him, he walked in.
I kept my head down and my eyes on the book in front of me, focusing…focusing…focusing on something that wasn’t him.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” Ms. Hill said from the front of the class.
I jumped in my seat.
She was looking at me—how much did she know?
Why call me out like that in front of the whole class?
Her eyes slid past me, scanning the room, willing it into silence with the power of her gaze.
“Can anybody tell me who I’m quoting?” she asked.
“John F. Kennedy,” someone at the back of the class said.
“Ah, he quoted the quote, but who was he quoting?” She smiled a challenge at us. I’m usually not one to pass up on a challenge, but the content of the quote had me distracted.
“Thomas Mercer,” someone else offered.
Ms. Hill shook her head, obviously pleased. “No, but you’re getting closer. It was said to Thomas Mercer in a letter.”
“Oh! John Stuart Mill!” Joan called out.
She grinned at me, mischief marring her brow as she flashed me her phone from under the desk. Spread across the screen was an article about the origins of the quote.
Ms. Hill’s eyebrows stretched up to her hair. “Mill did something similar, but not until the late 1800s. The quote is probably a hundred years older than that. So who was he paraphrasing? Where did the quote originate? These are the questions historians must ask themselves whenever they are presented with a snippet of the past. It’s entirely too easy to muddle up history with mistaken attributions.”
She launched into a lecture on the value of critical thinking and was in the midst of a deep dive into source material when Rudy raised his hand impatiently. She ground herself to a halt, then shot him an irritated glance.
“Yes, Mr. Seymore?”
“So who was it? Who was the original?”
Her frown melted into a sunny beam. “Excellent question! As far as we know, the phrase originated in the mind of Sir Edmund Burke.”
“You said Mill said something similar,” Joan said, clearly put out. “What was it?”
Ms. Hill squinted for a moment, then gave up and turned to her computer. “He said, ‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. A little wordier and not quite as elegant as the original, but the meaning remains the same.’”
My stomach churned.
I didn’t know exactly who the bad ones were in my situation, but I did know that it had reached a point where I could no longer ignore what was happening and maintain any kind of innocence. Especially since I wasn’t exactly doing nothing.
I was feeding Julianne benign lines that she used as jumping off points in her anti-Seymore crusade.
I was rescuing her backpack from them.
I was walking with her every day, silently giving her more authority with numbers alone.
But would I really be in the right if I abandoned her and helped the Seymores instead? They did shitty things too. Sure, a lot of them were retaliatory, but what if Julianne was retaliating against something I couldn’t see? An invisible, or simply well-hidden, enemy.
This war had been going on for a lot longer than I’d been living in Starline. Without knowing what started it all, I was stuck looking at two shitty groups who went out of their way to be shitty to one another.
I shuddered to think what Rudy could have done to me if he’d wanted to when I was alone in the arcade. I didn’t know how long he’d been watching me. I assumed the only reason he didn’t spill a drink on the dance pad or trip me with a broom was because he didn’t want to get fired—or maybe not.
I thought about his eyes again, the way he’d looked at me when he freed me from the locker.
The bell rang, shaking me out of my thoughts. I looked at my notebook and saw that, like a looney, I’d doodled “good men do nothing” dozens of times all over the page. It wasn’t exactly the message I wanted to be sending to my brain, but whatever.
I tore the page out and crumpled it up, then tossed it in the tr
ash can by the door as I passed. If I was a good guy—okay, if I wanted to be a good guy—it was time for me to do something. Wasn’t it?
The door clicked shut behind me and a few more steps had me at Joan’s side. “Are you doing anything after school?” I asked her.
“Just dodging my mom. She’s back on her baby kick even after what Grandma Bird said and she keeps hounding me to pick out things for the nursery. It’s too sad to bear.”
“I’m dodging my parents too. What do you say we dodge them together?”
“Mall?” she asked.
I shook my head. Too public, too many ears, too much risk of running into Julianne. “I was going to pick out a new water feature for the backyard. My parents haven’t done a damn thing with it in the last two years and I’m tired of looking at all the dirt.”
She squealed and clapped her hands. “I love building gardens! Okay, yes. Julianne and Macy too?”
“No,” I said quickly. I smiled softly in an attempt to dull any kind of negative impact. “I might want to check out different kinds of soil and fertilizer. They’d absolutely hate it.”
Joan nodded seriously. “You do have a point. They’d absolutely hate that. Okay, just you and me then. Mochi after?”
“Sounds good to me.”
It was a normal, natural way to spend an afternoon. And, even though before this very moment, I hadn’t had a single plan to renovate the backyard, it wasn’t exactly a lie. My parents hadn’t done jack-shit with it for all the time we’d been living here.
Another trip to the mall, another gossip round at Julianne’s – there were much more productive ways to spend my afternoon and digging dirt was one of them. I didn’t put it into that many words and I might not have gotten into my full intention of having her just one on one, but the dryness in my mouth and the quickening of my heart made me feel like I’d set an entire kingdom on fire.
Chapter Sixteen
Joan and I had picked out two gazebos, a pond with a waterfall, a fountain, a bird bath, three kinds of trees and a set of stone benches before I worked up the nerve to ask her the question that had been weighing on me for weeks.
“It’s crazy how much Julianne and the Seymores hate each other,” I said casually as we looked over the flowers in our cart, smoothing our fingers over loose petals and leaning in to sniff at the goodness mother nature provided.
“I know, right? But you can’t really blame her. She hates injustice, you know. It rankles her like nothing else.”
I cracked a smile that felt shakier than it should have. “Never really pictured Julianne as the social justice warrior type.”
Joan smirked. “No, no, not like that. But like— she can’t deal with people getting away with things, especially things close to home for her, you know? She knows the young Seymore boys all cover for the older one. What was his name? Arron? No, not Arron. Eric… I think it was Eric.” She squinted her eyes a little, thinking. “Yeah, Eric, that’s it.”
I frowned. “Never heard of an Eric Seymore. What did he do?”
Joan gave me a conspiratorial look and glanced around to make sure no one was listening.
“Officially nothing,” she said quietly. “But Julianne knows for a fact that he killed Sabrina Fisher. And she would know, too. Better than anyone, at least. Sabrina worked for her parents. Well… sort of. She was their maid’s daughter. Eric was dating her. The night before she disappeared, Julianne heard the two of them arguing. Not like a cutesy argument either. She said they were both pretty heated and really going at it. According to her, she was pretty damn surprised that they didn’t kill each other right there in her driveway.”
“Really? Did she tell the cops all this?” I asked, doing my best to keep my voice neutral.
“Yeah,” Joan said with a shrug. “But she was only nine at the time. And besides, the cops had their eye on him already, so it wasn’t exactly breaking news that they should be looking at him. Thing is, they held him as long as they could without hard evidence. When her body turned up and it didn’t show anything more useful, they were forced to let him go for good.”
“If there was no evidence linking him to her death, maybe he didn’t do it? I mean, couples fight all the time, and Julianne was nine—”
“A very knowledgeable nine,” Joan said hotly. “She knows what she’s talking about, Kennedy. She was there for all of it. Besides, think about it, if he wasn’t guilty he wouldn’t have skipped town right after they released him, would he? Nobody’s seen him since, you know. The Seymore kids know where he is, I’m sure, but they aren’t talking and neither is Mr. Seymore.”
I passed a box full of pinwheels and spun them, one after the other.
“Why does she care so much?” I asked. “Enough to harass Eric’s brothers, I mean. Even if Eric is to blame for Sabrina’s death, it’s not like they could have possibly had a hand in it.”
Joan sighed and started rearranging fairy garden miniatures on their display board. “She was super close to Sabrina. She always, always wanted brothers and sisters, but her mom refused to have more than just one kid.”
“Why?” I asked, because Joan paused expectantly, the way one would when wanting to share more, but still wanting to be prompted.
Joan gave me a sorrowful look and checked behind her again before lowering her voice to a whisper. “She says that kids aren’t worth the cost to fix the damage they cause. She wasn’t talking about the house, either. Tummy tucks and stuff, I guess. Hell, you’ve seen Natalie so you know exactly what I’m talking about.”
I had. And I did. Mrs. Fisher’s lip injections had been a running joke around the school last year, and the year before that it was her new breasts. The jury was out on whether her butt came from two-hour days at the gym or from a plastic surgeon in Dallas. My money was on Dallas because I couldn’t picture Natalie Fisher sweating voluntarily.
“So Julianne bonded to Sabrina hard. Sabrina was only seven years older than Julianne, I think. Seven or eight, and her mom had been working for the family since before Sabrina was born, so Sabrina was sort of a constant in Julianne’s life from the get-go. When she died, Julianne said it was like losing a sister.”
I could hear the envy in Joan’s voice when she said the word ‘sister’. “Do you wish you had siblings?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t wish my mom on another kid.” She smiled, trying belatedly to make a joke out of it, then gave up with a shrug. “My mom’s okay, I guess, but I only survived to self-sufficiency because my grandma would move in with us whenever mom was between live-ins. Husbands, boyfriends, whatever. She never picks objectively terrible guys, but she’s also never picked one who understood her, either—not until Logan, anyway.” Her voice warmed when she said her stepdad’s name and I looked at her sharply.
“You like him? Or you like him,” I asked, with emphasis, arching a brow.
She shot me an amused look. “He’s five foot two, balding, and carries a beer belly around like it’s his prized possession. He’s warm and cuddly and he makes my mom laugh. I don’t like him like that—blech.” She shrugged then shifted a flirty smile to her lips. “But like, honestly, I’m not above crushing on my mom’s guys…sometimes. Especially not when they’re Cuban underwear models who are five years older than me.” She zoned out for a minute, dreaming. I laughed, and she shook herself, grinning at me.
“But not Logan.”
She shook her head. “No, I love Logan like a dad. I just wish he wouldn’t give into her so much, you know? He’ll move the moon to give her anything she wants, even if the thing she wants isn’t what she needs.”
“That’s really sucky,” I said sympathetically. “Maybe you could slip her birth control on the down low.” I wasn’t really serious, but she looked like she was really thinking about it. I pointed at hummingbird feeders, trying to distract her before she could work up a truly devious plan to keep her mom from getting pregnant. “Red or yellow?” I asked.
“Yellow,” she said firmly,
and I put one in the cart.
“So… Julianne was in, what, fourth grade when all this happened? Were the Seymores we know even around then?”
She shook her head. “Bradley showed up a year later, in fifth grade I think. I’ll never forget the look on Julianne’s face when the teacher called role that first day—as soon as she said ‘Seymore’ Julianne went dead white. I thought she was going to faint, but she didn’t, thank God. She did corner him on the playground, though, and demanded to know where the hell Eric was and when he was going to pay for his crimes.”
My heart sank. Grieving or not, it was sounding more and more like Julianne started the bully campaign. Not that she didn’t have a reason to. If someone close to me were murdered…I’m not sure what I would stop at to find out the truth. Still, knowing the history of the Seymore boys – that they were adopted and all of that – it was hard to accept that they really should be blamed for what happened to Sabrina. Especially if they weren’t even around when she died.
“How did Bradley react?” I asked, making my way to some decorative flagstones.
“I don’t know for sure, I didn’t see the whole thing. Not well, I guess, since she got the whole class to pretend he didn’t exist for the whole year.”
I winced. “Ouch. That must have hit him pretty hard. I went to a pretty big school in fifth grade, so everybody was sort of anonymous to one degree or another, and that was rough enough. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be snubbed for a whole year in a town this size.”
Joan shrugged. “I don’t think it bothered him much—ooh, get the green ones! He was still friendly and everything. The cold shoulder sort of stuck, though, all the way to seventh grade. After that, the different classes and the fact that he was bigger than everybody else and started to bulk up gave him the advantage. Julianne didn’t like that much.”
I stared. “You’re telling me that she kept him isolated for two whole years? He was a kid!”
Them Seymore Boys: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 1) Page 10
