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

by Savannah Rose

  “So was she,” Joan said with a frown. “Kennedy, you aren’t really sympathizing with a Seymore, are you? Julianne will have your head.”

  I shook my head. “I just don’t understand. If he wasn’t fighting back, why did she keep it up?”

  “Because he insisted on telling anyone who would listen that she was wrong, that Eric was innocent, and that Eric was going to be a big detective when he grew up so he could find the real killer, and said that he was going to help him as soon as he was big enough.” Joan gave me a look that almost made me wince. “Julianne doesn’t like it when people say she’s wrong. She took it as a direct challenge, and made sure that he didn’t have the opportunity to spread that story around.”

  Seemed shitty, but okay. “So what happened in seventh grade?”

  Joan groaned. “That was when things really got rolling. Mr. Seymore started taking in foster kids again—for some reason, he’d only had Bradley for the longest time—and Julianne made a point of figuring out who they were and asking them questions about Eric and Mr. Seymore. They didn’t like it, so they started picking on her.”

  Even that made sense to me. Julianne pushed and they pushed back. “What did she do?”

  “She went to Bradley with gum in her hair and ink on her skirt and told him to control his foster siblings. He smiled at her and didn’t say anything, so she figured he’d do what she told him to do. He sort of did, just not in the way she meant for him to do it, I guess.”

  I snorted. “He coordinated their efforts, didn’t he?”

  She nodded. “He got them all pointed in the same direction. Next thing Julianne knows, she’s got a locker full of spider webs—some with spiders still in them—and green paint on her shoes and signs on her back and all kinds of stuff. I had to help her, they made a target out of her.”

  “I guess Macy felt the same way?”

  “Macy didn’t show up until eighth grade. By then me, Kitty May, and Julianne were already pretty heavily involved in the whole Seymore situation. Chris was there by then and he hated Julianne on sight even before she did anything to him. He glued her to the bench in the lunchroom on the first day of eighth grade. They had to cut her out of her skirt, it was humiliating.”

  I winced. “Brutal.”

  “Right? Then he went and picked on Macy, too. Splashed red paint all over her new white dress after school. Her mom was coming to pick her up and had to borrow tarp from the janitor’s closet to put down for her to keep the paint off of her new white suede seats. Macy was mortified. She found Julianne and the rest of us the next day, telling us that if we weren’t planning payback, we better get to thinking.”

  So Chris really kicked the bullying into high gear, but Julianne started the process years earlier. The escalations from both sides muddied the waters, though one thing stuck out to me in spite of all of that: Julianne was still holding the Seymores as a whole responsible for the death of her maid’s daughter years before any of them had even set foot in the Seymore house.

  That could have sealed the deal for me, but it didn’t. I could see too clearly how grief and anger could snowball out of control, how it had already spiraled out of control. Every time Bradley argued his point, it would have made her anger grow. Every time he fought back, it would have given her rage a little bit more justification. I’m not saying it was fair—but I could understand it even though I sort of wished I couldn’t.

  From where I stood, nobody seemed entirely in the wrong or entirely in the right. I wanted to be on the right side of this conflict, but I couldn’t even see that there was one—or only one. Being able to relate to Julianne’s pain and Bradley’s certainty didn’t help to clarify anything at all.

  “How did Rudy get caught up in all of it? I mean, apart from being a Seymore.” I kept my voice as casual as possible. Julianne already suspected that I had a crush on him. I didn’t want to give Joan any extra ammunition. Sure, we were having this conversation without Julianne, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think there wasn’t a chance she wouldn’t key Julianne into what we talked about. Not in a tattle-tale kind of way, of course. But if she ever felt like she needed to save her own butt, then yeah, she’d hesitate, but she’d still hang my ass out to dry.

  “That’s actually kind of funny,” Joan said as she twisted a hanging fern thoughtfully this way and that. “He was really quiet when he first started going to school. He didn’t really step in when his brothers were in trouble or anything. I don’t know what the deal with him was—one day he wasn’t even there, next day he was a Seymore—but he didn’t seem to want to claim them as family. At least not in the way the other ones were quick to bond with each other.”

  I frowned. “What do you think changed?” I asked because Rudy certainly stuck beside his brothers fiercely these days.

  “Julianne,” Joan said ruefully. “I think she still regrets it, honestly, because it brought Rudy into the conflict and strengthened their numbers. That’s how she talks about it sometimes, you know, like it’s war? Real war, not high school war. Anyway, she’d just found out that Gary’s real dad is a neo-nazi and she started teasing him about having to live with a half-breed Hispanic like Rudy.”

  My jaw dropped. “She said what?”

  Joan gave me a nervous little smile. “Like I said, she regrets it. She thought it would turn them on each other, but it backfired. Gary stood up for Rudy. He almost kicked her ass, but Bradley intervened. This wasn’t even at school, I don’t think—no, it couldn’t have been because Gary’s a grade or two behind us.” She rubbed at her temples, as though massaging the memories to life. “It must have been at the park. Rudy wasn’t there, but I guess he heard about it later because the next day he came to school and filled Julianne’s locker with refried beans.”

  I snorted and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh. Joan grinned too, her eyes flashing deviously. “I’ve never seen her so angry,” she said reverently. “She was like a goddess of wrath. It was kinda sorta glorious, to be honest.” She paused for a quick minute, then looked over the paper full of price stickers and bar codes I’d been carrying around.

  “How are you going to get it all home?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the end, I only took the hummingbird feeder home with me. Everything else would be delivered and professionally installed on Friday—which would give me plenty of time to figure out how to explain to my parents what I was going to do to their backyard.

  That was what I thought, anyway, but when I turned onto my street after dropping Joan off, I found the tour bus sitting tight and pretty outside my house. I frowned. I’d actually been keeping myself updated on my parent’s schedule this time, and they didn’t have anywhere to be until next month, so seeing the bus definitely took me by surprise.

  One of the regular roadies gave me a sympathetic look as I raced into the house. I didn’t like that at all.

  Usually the roadies pretended like I didn’t exist (at my father’s insistence, I was sure) so to have one acknowledge me—with pity, of all things—made my stomach twist anxiously.

  I found Mom in the foyer, on the phone. She held up a finger at me in a one minute gesture, so I walked right on past her. Dad was directing traffic in and out of their bedroom, his voice high and tight.

  Once upon a time I would have waited for one or both of them to stop being so stressed or busy before I asked what the hell was going on—but I’d learned the hard way that when the bus is outside, there is no end to their stressed-out tunnel vision, and I’d be lucky to get any answers at all if I didn’t push for them.

  “Dad?”

  “Just a minute, honey—careful with that! Those props weren’t easy to find, you know. Yeah, put that one in the very back, we won’t need it till we get to Oklahoma City. No! Leave that here, it’ll just take up room. We can rent a kit on the road if we really need to, but I’m not going to spend another month tripping over that case.”

  My father’s hair was sticking out in all directions. He ran his
fingers through it again, making it somehow wilder as his sharp eyes took in every detail. That should have been enough of a warning to back the hell off, except, I was too damn anxious. And mad.

  “Dad. There’s nothing on the calendar,” I said, planting two firm hands on my hips.

  “Hm?” He hadn’t even glanced at me, his gaze fixed on the things that his roadies were moving around as though they were the most important things within inches of him. I stepped into his doorway, effectively blocking all progress in or out, forcing him to look at me.

  “Kennedy, do you mind? We’re on a schedule, sweetie.”

  “A schedule that you neglected to put on the calendar,” I said. Maybe I yelled, I don’t know, but either way his eyes flashed dangerously and his mouth flattened into a thin, pissed off line.

  “Well excuse me, madam president, I didn’t realize that we—your parents—needed your permission before going out and making a living. A living which you are burning through at an unprecedented rate, I might add.”

  There would have been a time when that passive aggressive power play would have shattered me, but he’d overplayed his hand by a long shot and I was over it.

  I stood where I was and raised an eyebrow, staring him down. After a long moment he turned on his heel and shouted across the house. “Angela! Come deal with your daughter.”

  There was a soft cough at my shoulder and I stepped out of the roadie’s way. It wasn’t his fault, after all. He was just trying to do his job. It was the same guy who had given me the sympathetic look outside, but he didn’t look at me now. I didn’t blame him.

  Dad was standing a couple yards away, glaring in my general direction. I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall, glaring back. Even Joan’s mom had enough decency to tell her kid when she was going out of town.

  Mom’s expensive high heels clicked across the marble tiles in the foyer, then faded into dull thumps as she stepped onto the thick carpet in the living room. She glanced from his face to mine, then her eyes widened with horror.

  “Oh, no,” she said, clapping her hands to her cheeks.

  She shot a question at my father with her eyes and he tilted his jaw defensively. She pinched the bridge of her nose, took a long deep breath and sighed it out, then turned to me.

  “Sweetheart, your father and I have spent years trying to get approved for a nationally syndicated tour. A lot of very famous, very wealthy, very influential people speak on this tour—and even more attend it as the audience. This is the level-up we’ve been waiting for, and we were officially invited last night. It’s a very last-minute thing. The person who was supposed to go cancelled at the very last second due to some kind of family emergency, and we were first on the second-tier list.”

  “Only because Bruce Hovind has deep family ties to the sponsors,” Dad growled. “We would have been first years ago if his father wasn’t patching the gaps in his knowledge with millions of dollars.”

  Mom shot him an irritated look, then turned back to face me. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you this morning. I didn’t want to stress you out, then by the time you would have been out of school it completely skipped my mind.”

  I nodded and gestured at the organized chaos. “You were busy, it’s understandable.”

  “Oh, now it’s understandable,” Dad hissed under his breath.

  “We’ll be gone for six weeks,” Mom said, ignoring him. “I know it’s longer than we’re usually gone during the school year, but you’ll stay out of trouble, won’t you? You’ve always been such a good student, so well-behaved and responsible. You’ll be okay, won’t you?”

  “Sure will,” I said blandly. “I’m an adult, remember? I’ll be fine. You guys have fun. Good luck with the rich and powerful sponsors.”

  Mom smiled at me. I could see the guilt in her eyes, but I wasn’t going to do anything to alleviate it. She took a couple steps closer, pulled me into her arms and hugged me tight. I returned the gesture half-heartedly because honestly, it didn’t really feel like I had my whole heart left.

  “I put our itinerary on the fridge, just in case,” she said. “You have our cell numbers and the satellite phone number and all of the other emergency numbers. I love you so much, sweetheart. And I can’t thank you enough for being okay with all this for so long.”

  I couldn’t tell her she was welcome, because it wasn’t true. Not even a little bit. I was not okay with this. Never had been.

  All the money in the whole damn world couldn’t replace the feeling of not having fucking parents who cared and were there and loved like their hearts depended on it. It didn’t matter if I told them that, or how many times I told them that. Their job meant they should already know these things. All the big bucks they were pulling in were big bucks spent on bullshitting people because here they were not even trying to live what they were preaching.

  Dad caught my eye as Mom stepped away, and nodded at me. “You’re a good kid,” he said flatly. Then something gave in his expression and he sighed. “Come over here Kenny and give your old man a hug. You know I get cranky when I have to change plans in a hurry.”

  I let him hug me. “We’ll play mini golf when I get back. Me, you and mom. All three of us,” he promised. “Like we used to do whenever we got back from a tour. Remember?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  My throat tightened and I was afraid to say anything else because the tears he didn’t deserve to see were too damn close.

  I missed being their priority. It hadn’t lasted nearly long enough. Hell, the last time we’d played miniature golf was when the golf clubs were pretty much as tall as I was.

  “Good,” he said in a crisp, businesslike tone which told me the moment of nostalgia was over. “We have ten minutes to get on the road. I love you, be good, don’t burn the place down.”

  At least he didn’t say not to dig the place up.

  I stayed out of the way of the flurry of activity, then waved from the door as the bus pulled away. I hadn’t told them about the yard. They would just have to be surprised by it when they got back, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t even get a heads up from the bank statement, since I paid cash for it all.

  Imagining their reactions lightened my mood and ignited something reckless in my soul even as I watched them disappear down the road—again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Oh my god, Kennedy, I thought I told you to throw those hideous thrift store rejects away?”

  Julianne stared at me in shock as I walked up to school wearing the bright-orange Mickey Mouse bell bottoms I’d found on a vintage rack in California way back in eighth grade.

  They’d been too long for me then and too baggy around the hips, but I’d kept them anyway and I was glad I had. They fit like a dream now.

  The high waist showed off my hips and butt, the rhinestone in the middle glittered like a navel ring, and the color was just bright enough to bring out the deeper tones of my slightly tanned skin. I’d paired them with a cold shoulder navy blue sailor striped shirt, and had spent way too long admiring the effect in the mirror.

  “You’ve told me lots of things,” I said, affecting the same careless tone that Macy used for everything. “I like the pants and the pants like me. Let it go.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me, but then something over my shoulder caught her attention. “Oh look, here come more hideous cast-offs.”

  I didn’t even have to turn around to know who she was talking about. All it takes for evil to succeed is for halfway decent women in bright orange pants to do nothing, or whatever Burke said.

  “Speaking of things you should let go—that’s top of the list,” I said.

  I was glad for the purple-tinted sunglasses I wore. It was easier to say things like that when she couldn’t make direct eye contact with me. But even though it was easier for me to say them, it wasn’t easy for Julianne to take it.

  She raised an eyebrow and lowered her voice. “What did you say?”

  I shrugged, holding onto
whatever bravery I’d walked into this situation with. “I’m just saying, it’s getting boring. I feel like there are a lot more interesting things we could be talking about besides how much you hate the Seymore boys. Like, I don’t know, how fast paint dries or the life and times of a fruit fly.”

  I’d never seen her this speechless before. It was gratifying.

  With the shit my parents pulled, dipping out of town the way they did, I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods, despite my outfit chirping me up a little.

  So yeah, stupid as it might have been, I decided I wasn’t going to put forward my best behavior, either. Plus, I really was getting sick of this whole pick-on-the-Seymores shit.

  There would be consequences, of course, but I wasn’t living in the past or the future and those consequences weren’t going to be immediate. They were things to think about at another time. A time that wasn’t now.

  I walked past Julianne and headed into the school, messing up the usual order of things as I took my ass to class. I might have been feeling reckless, but I wasn’t stupid enough to stick around and wait for her to think up a retort.

  When she finally showed up to homeroom, she wore a triumphant smile that should have worried me. But again, I charted off her retaliation to an ‘at a later date’ kinda thing. No way would she be able to get me back before lunchtime.

  A few minutes later, Rudy and Bradley walked in together and immediately everybody in the room started coughing.

  There was an acrid, poisonous scent wafting off of them that was almost familiar, as if every masculine body spray known to man had been applied to them at the same time from the glands of a skunk who had a nasty case of gastroenteritis.

  “What the hell, guys?” Franks wheezed. He tossed a couple of hall passes at them from the other side of the room. “You know what? I don’t even think I want to know. Handle it before you kill somebody.”

  They snatched up the hall passes, but before they left, they pinned me in place with twin deadly glares.