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“And then he cheated on me and smooched her,” Levi announced in mock disgust. “You dirty cheater you.”
Glaring at him, I took another mouthful of beer hoping that the conversation would move along so that I could make my excuses and go to the peace of my home.
“We rarely saw Dahlia after that,” Erica murmured. “I wish I’d thought to go and check on her. I feel terrible that I didn’t think to do that.”
“She went to high school with us,” Ariana added, looking at Levi. “She was in your grade wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, focusing on his beer and peeling the label off it. The way he was suddenly acting made me feel uneasy.
“Did you know her?” I asked, a sinking feeling in my gut already telling me the answer.
Groaning, he slammed his bottle on the table beside him and put his face in his hands.
“Yeah, and I was an asshole to her one time,” he said, his voice muffled by his hands but we still caught every word.
“You were an asshole to her?” I stood up and went to walk over to him, but Noah, Luna’s husband, caught my hand and shook his head.
“Get your face out of your damn hands, son, and give us an answer,” Jer snapped as he stood up and glared down at his son.
Doing as he was told, Levi looked up at us. “I didn’t say anything to her, but the guys that I was friends, well acquaintances, with did.” His eyes moved to look at the side of the house and then back to us. “I should have stopped it, but I was worried if I stepped in and handled them in front of everyone, it would make them even worse to her. I wasn’t even good friends with the guys. They just followed me and my best friend around, bugging us like we gave a shit about what they were talking about.”
I didn’t want to know the answer to the question I was about to ask, but I had to ask it, anyway.
“What did they say to her?”
When he didn’t answer, Jer took a step forward, catching his attention.
“What did they say?” he repeated my question slowly.
“They called her a taco muncher, a rug muncher, said her mom was a muff diver and shit like that,” he whispered looking sick to his stomach. “The worst one was when we had beans at lunch one day, and the guys started flicking them at her. When she looked up, they yelled that seeing as how her mom like to flick the bean, they thought she would too.”
Kids were such fuckers!
“Who did this?” I growled, ready to beat the shit out of them.
“They’re long gone. I think one of them works for the CIA now,” he said as he looked down at his bottle again. Blowing out a breath, he looked back up at us. “I got the worst one back, though.”
I’d been silently stewing over the information and feeling the rage building up inside me for the poor girl who had been tortured because her mother was a heartless, selfish bitch, but now he had my full attention again.
“What did you do?”
“Poured a bag of sugar in the gas tank of his new Jeep,” he smirked. “And then filled it up with water because I wasn’t sure which one would actually kill his car. He was picking up the head cheerleader for a date and I followed behind him and waited for him to go to her door. Then I got out, did it and waited on the stretch of road he’d be driving down in case she needed a ride home. The next day, I left a flyer in the girls locker rooms that said he’d been diagnosed with anal herpes and anyone who’d touched him should get tested.”
“That was it?” Jer asked, sounding almost disappointed.
“Well, we had to be careful at school,” Levi snapped, glaring over at his brother Archer. “Because of some people, the teachers thought we were assholes and were just waiting for us to do something.”
Archer slowly lowered his beer while he glared at his brother. “I was a victim of teacher brutality and stalking!”
All the Townsends snorted at the same time, avoiding direct eye contact with him when he glared at each one of them individually.
Fucking hell!
“You listen to me,” Erica said firmly, walking up to Levi and pointing her finger in his nose. “You will apologize to that beautiful girl, do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma,” he replied sullenly, looking like a little kid.
In all honesty, he hadn’t done anything apart from not stick up from someone in front of everyone else. We all had a kid at school who got bullied for something. In fact, we all got bullied at school at some point. I could also understand his reasoning for what he did. In all likelihood, it would have made them attack her even more just to get a reaction out of him.
