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 deadly 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.