“I’m not about to jinx it by answering,” Rudy said with a soft snort.
I grinned in the darkness of the little gutter alley behind the Bird’s house. I barely noticed the alleys before, but the boys seemed to know them better than they knew the main streets. It made sense, though. A person could go from one end of this neighborhood to the other without ever being seen if they stuck to the gutters, especially if they were child-sized.
Being as we were, very much not child-sized, it was slightly more difficult—but not impossible.
The Birds lived in the middle of their street, far from any cross street which would have to be navigated either out in the open or by crawling through cement drainage tubes. We’d parked at the farthest end and carried supplies in as soon as the sun went down, then took off for a while.
It was a smart move, and Rudy’s idea. The theory was if we’d been spotted, someone would have disturbed the massive pile of Halloween junk or posted some kind of watch on the alley.
When we returned around midnight and everything was exactly as we’d left it, we knew we were in the clear.
Chris crept out of the hedge maze then, slipping through the back fence the gardeners used to avoid Mrs. Bird. He held his phone in his hand, his face glowing an eerie blue in the darkness. He fiddled with it for a few minutes, toggling controls and things, then gave us a big blue grin and silhouette thumbs up.
“Got them,” he hissed. “Let’s go.”
My heart pounded harder on our way out than it had on the way in. Before, we could have passed off our presence somehow—a favor to a neighbor or a random adventure, whatever—but now that the traps had been set and armed, our presence itself was an admission of guilt.
I hurried as silently as I possibly could out of the alley, ears straining for any sound outside of our stealthy group, convinced that it was only a matter of time before a shout of, “Hey! You there!” would shatter the night.
Then we were at the car with no one the wiser and I fought a strong case of the giggles.
When we were all inside with the doors gently closed and the windows rolled up, I finally let it out in a breathless gasp.
“We did it,” I squealed. “I didn’t think we’d make it!”
“It’s a rush, right?” Chris said, nudging me with an elbow. “Check it out.”
I looked at the screen. Nine night vision green boxes stared back at me, showing a perfectly innocent hedge maze. All of the traps, jump scares, and fake gore were well-hidden, waiting for Rudy and me to trigger them.
“You’re sure about the whole domino effect thing?” I asked.
Gary scoffed. “You know how many Rube Goldberg machines I’ve made? It’ll work. Trust me.”
When a chronically under-confident guy speaks with that much authority about anything, I’d be a fool not to trust him.
I relaxed between the two younger Seymores, letting the buzz of a sneaky job well done wash over me. Well—half-done, anyway. Rudy and I still had our part to play, but that wasn’t for hours and hours. I was planning to sleep through most of them.
I shared Rudy’s bed that night. It was way more comfortable than the couch in the basement. It was a tight squeeze, but I didn’t mind. I curled up with him and drifted off, fully intending to stay in bed until noon at least.
I should have known better. I’m not sure how long I slept, only that it wasn’t nearly long enough before my phone started ringing. Well, “ringing” might be too generous. The ringtone assigned to my dad was less of a ring and more of an air horn. My fault, I’ll admit it—but to be fair, he never calls me unless it’s an emergency. My mom’s is much more pleasant.
Pleasant enough, I realized as I scrabbled blearily to answer the call, that I’d managed to sleep through six calls from her.
Swearing under my breath I climbed awkwardly over Rudy and stumbled a few steps before I managed to hit the right button.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?”
His voice quivered on the edge of a shout and my belly twisted.
“At a friend’s place. What’s wrong? Wait, where are you? Are you home?”
Fuck, the back door. I completely forgot about it. Damn it, damn it!
“Yes, Kennedy. Your mother and I are both home, along with several birds, a very confused bat, and more insects than I can find, let alone count. Do you care to explain why the back door is wide open to the elements?”
I frowned, confused.
“It shouldn’t be,” I said, rubbing my face hard. “I had it taped up before I left. I was going to get it fixed, I just—kept forgetting.”
“Forgetting? How do you forget something like that? We could have been robbed! We could have had transients living in our rooms while you were off living it up like some kind of-!”
“Give me the phone.” My mother’s voice came through from a distance, cutting him off. Good. I didn’t need to know what kind of whatever he thought I was. “Kennedy,” she said when she got the phone from him. “Honey. What happened? I got your message about a bat in the house, but why didn’t you have it fixed right away?”
“Happened on Sunday,” I told her. “Nobody was open.”
“And Monday...?”
“I…” I trailed off. I couldn’t even remember what day it was right then, how was I supposed to remember what happened on Monday? “…I’ve been distracted,” I finished lamely.
“So I’ve heard. What’s this about you being suspended? A misunderstanding, I hope?”
I shrugged, realized she couldn’t see me, then winced. “Um—not really.”
“Kennedy!” She sounded utterly appalled, and I didn’t really blame her. I’d never been in that kind of trouble at school before. “The message said you were suspended for fighting of all things!”
“Um…yeah.”
“Real fighting?”
“Split lip and everything,” I said.
I could feel my shoulders creeping up to meet the base of my skull and forced them back down again.
I braced myself for the lecture, the threats, the heavy sigh and half-assed punishment. She’d been too distracted to really think punishments through for years now.
But she was quiet, and kept on being quiet. I only knew we hadn’t disconnected because I could hear dad muttering away in the background.
“Mom?”
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m thinking. But that’s all right, I think I’ve finished. Will you be home today?”
“I wasn’t planning to be, but I can be if you need me to be.”
“No—no, that’s fine. You keep whatever plans you had. We’ll be home for a few days and would like to see you at some point if you can fit us in your calendar.”
“In my—what?”
She was up to something, I could feel it, like little passive aggressive ghost fingers around my throat, but I wasn’t awake enough to deal with it.
“Don’t worry darling, I understand entirely. You’re a grown woman now with your own friends and your own life and your own responsibilities. I wouldn’t want to take any of that away from you. I’ll go ahead and tape the door back up if that’s all right, then you can have it fixed at your leisure.”
“Uh—oh—um—okay?”
“Great. Love you! Bye.”
“Bye,” I said numbly.
I frowned at the phone. Either my sudden behavior shift had completely broken her brain, or…I couldn’t even think of an alternative, but I knew there was one. My mother wasn’t a person who broke easily.
“You good?” Rudy slurred from the depths of his covers.
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “I’m up now, though. Gonna go get coffee.”
He groaned and started lurching out of bed.
“I know where it is,” I said quickly. “Go back to sleep, I’ll be here when you get up.”
“I know you will,” he howled around a yawn. “Because you’re here and I’m—”
I assume he was going
to say “up,” which was what he attempted to be, but his feet were tangled in the sheets and he landed chest-first on the floor instead.
He wheezed, kicking helplessly at the sheets, looking like some kind of long muscular fish out of water.
I helped him, making lots of sympathetic nonsense noises as I did, and eventually he got his air and feet back where they were supposed to be.
“See?” he said. “I’m as awake as anybody. What was the phone for?”
“Uh—originally for speaking to people from a distance, but as technology advanced—”
He waved off my impromptu lecture impatiently. “No, no, who was on the phone?”
“Oh. My parents. They’re home, apparently, and wanted to know why there’s a giant hole where the door should be.”
He froze and turned a little pale. I watched the wheels slowly turn in his head from panic to resignation, and he nodded firmly. “I’ll pay for it. That was my bad.”
“What, you’re a vampire and you never told me?”
He blinked at me.
“I told them there was a bat in the house and I broke the door because I freaked trying to get it out of there. You’re off the hook. Come on, I can smell coffee from here.”
He followed me down the stairs and into the kitchen, where we found Jason sitting at the counter with his own cup of coffee. He raised it in silent salutation without ever taking his eyes off his laptop.
Rudy didn’t say anything to him. I followed his lead. It’s always dangerous to interfere in the morning rituals of seasoned coffee drinkers.
Rudy and I puttered quietly around in the kitchen until we each had coffee and breakfast.
We started to head to the dining room to give Jason his time and space, but he cleared his throat before we were halfway out of the kitchen.
Rudy stopped.
“I’ve been busy the last few days,” Jason said. “So have you. Didn’t give us a lot of time to talk.”
Rudy tensed up, then blew out a long, slow breath. He turned and set his breakfast down on the counter.
I put my bagel down, but I’d be damned before I’d let go of the coffee. I sipped it quietly and watched.
“What would you like to talk about?” he asked Jason.
Jason measured him up for a moment, then turned slightly to face him. “This suspension. Is it going to be permanent?”
Rudy shook his head. “I don’t think so. They said they’d investigate it before they made any permanent decisions.”
“Do you want to tell me what it was about? They were pretty vague with me, something about inappropriate materials…?” He raised his brows slightly, inviting Rudy to fill in the blanks for him.
Rudy sighed and swept a hand over his face.
I sipped my coffee and focused on a spot on the wall, closing one eye and then the other to make the spot move back and forth.
“These girls from school happened to corner me with a camera when I didn’t have any clothes on. They brought those pictures to school. Since I’m the one in the pictures, I got in trouble along with the rest of them.”
Jason thought that over for a while, then nodded at me. “Kennedy? Were you the one who brought the pictures to school?”
I jumped so hard my coffee sloshed over the rim of the cup and spattered on the floor. “What?”
Jason repeated himself patiently. A question without accusation, but with a promise of action if my answer was ‘yes’. I wondered how he fit all that in a few syllables.
“No,” I said. “I’m suspended because I fought with the girl who had the pictures. I was trying to keep her from doing something stupid with them, and it all kind of got out of hand.”
Jason nodded solemnly. “Some things are worth fighting for. You two have plans for the weekend?”
“We were planning on going out tonight,” Rudy said. “If that’s cool with you.”
“It’s cool,” Jason said. He turned back to his laptop and inhaled the steam from his coffee. “It’s cool. Have fun, kids.”
We moved out to the dining room and I shook my head.
“I’m envious,” I said.
“What? Why?”
I nodded at the kitchen door. “He actually talked to you about it like you were an adult or something, instead of telling you that you were an adult in a tone that made it sound like being an adult was a character flaw.”
Rudy boggled at me and I sighed.
“I know, I know,” I said. “It didn’t make any sense to me, either. I’m hoping it’s just because I’m under-caffeinated.”
But it wasn’t, and the whole situation continued to bother me more than I wanted to admit.
We still had hours and hours before Julianne’s party, and there was really no chance of going back to sleep again. I tried not to obsess, but didn’t have much luck.
“Okay,” Rudy said with a little chuckle. “Let’s go.”
I glanced outside in confusion. The sun was still fully out.
“Go? We’ve got hours before we need to be there.”
“Yeah,” Rudy said. “Which means you have hours to fight with your parents. You’re super distracted, babe. We’ve got a very meticulous task to do tonight. If you’re arguing with your dad in your head we might as well call the whole thing off now.”
For one irritated moment, I wanted to take offence to that.
I glared at him for maybe three seconds before the reality of the situation thudded down on me like a heavy feather pillow.
“Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”
“Cool! I’ll grab our costumes.” He darted for the stairs.
“Hold on! Why the costumes? We aren’t going to be there that long.”
He raised his eyebrows at me incredulously.
“No, really. They like to keep things like this short and to the point. I say my piece, they say their piece, they dream up a resolution which could fit, and that’s the end of it.”
“Ah,” Rudy said, drawing the syllable out way longer than he needed to. “I’m sure that didn’t build any resentment.”
“Not even a little bit,” I said ironically.
“Yeah, no unheard feelings or pent up rage happening here at all,” he continued, sweeping his hands through the air to frame my face. “Totally well-adjusted.”
I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms. “Oh, just get the costumes already.”
He flashed me a grin and dashed up the stairs, then thundered down again and tossed the costumes at me.
“Last one in the car’s a rotten armadillo!” He raced out to the car, grinning like an idiot.
“Are you excited about this?” I demanded.
He beat me to the car by a full second, cackling gleefully the whole time, which wasn’t anything like an answer.
I slid into the car beside him, slammed my door, and fixed him with what I hoped was an intimidating glare.
He blinked innocently at me and gave me a smile that would give a cherub imposter syndrome.
“Of course I’m excited,” he said, fluttering his lashes in a way designed to make me laugh. I definitely mostly almost resisted.
“Why wouldn’t I be excited?” he continued, but his voice dropped back into a more serious register. “Since we started hanging out they’ve actually been in town, what, twice? And I didn’t even see them either time. It’s kind of like meeting an urban legend.”
I snorted. “Like sewer clowns and vengeful ghosts? Yeah, that fits.”
He laughed, making his eyes crinkle up and sparkle. I could almost forget my anxiety, watching him.
“That bad, huh?”
I shrugged. “I guess not. I don’t think Dad would actually crawl around in sewers for attention, and Mom would never be caught in white after Labor Day—even if she was dead. They’re just…” I trailed off, grasping helplessly for words to describe them and coming up empty. I finished with a lame little annoyed huff. “You’ll see.”
“Well,” he said, conspiratorially. “If there’s one good thing about
being me and living my life, it’s this.” He pulled up to a stop sign and used the opportunity to give me a long, deep, warm look. “No matter what kind of parents you have, I can guarantee that I’ve met worse.”
My giggle faded to a sympathetic noise which made him curl his lip at me in a joking grimace. I kissed it away, maybe a little longer and harder than I should have under the circumstances.
We were interrupted by a horn honking behind us, which was fair.
“Onward!” he bellowed, holding one arm out like he was holding a lance. “Into the belly of the beast!”
“I feel like that means something else,” I said, laughing.
When we pulled up to the house, though, I wasn’t so sure about that.
My belly turned to ice, making my hands clammy. I wasn’t sure if I was more nervous about Rudy meeting them or about what they would have to say to me.
Mom had sounded—strange on the phone, and I still hadn’t worked through that enough to even guess at what we would be walking into.
“Mom? Dad? I’m home! I brought someone I want you to meet.”
Rudy came in the door behind me and closed in. We stood there for a moment, waiting. The house was silent, which I was used to, but knowing that my parents were home—or should have been—made the silence a little eerie.
Frowning, I led Rudy deeper into the house.
I finally heard voices when we reached the kitchen. They were coming from outside, and they didn’t sound happy.
My Mom, usually calm and level-toned even under stress, was speaking to someone—Dad, I assumed—in a wavering, undulating stream. I’d never heard her so upset.
I put a finger to my lips and crept through the kitchen, stopping far enough from the ruined back door that my silhouette wouldn’t show through the half-hung plastic.
“But blackmail!” she wailed.
I gave Rudy a wide-eyed look.
Dad spoke up then, his voice hard and sharp—he sounded angry, but I could hear the embarrassment fueling that anger. That frightened me more than anything.
Dad wasn’t very good at dealing with shame or any of its nearest relatives.
“We don’t know that it’s blackmail,” he said. “We don’t know what it is.”
Something Wicked: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 2) Page 17
