Taboo (Verboten sequel) (Jalex)

Chapter 9

As soon as Alex got home, he grabbed his A3 sketching pad and flipped it open, deciding to get to work immediately. In the middle of the white page, he drew (in orange, because why the fuck not) a circle which was so nearly perfect and then wrote inside (still in orange): THE PLAN.

So he wasn't feeling particularly original that day.

The way that Alex saw it, this page needed to be in two, but he couldn't find his ruler to draw a line. And like hell was he settled for a wonky line. He just had to make do with an imaginary border instead. One half of the page was for Amy; the other was for Jack. Revenge and rebound. Well, not rebound entirely, more like getting Jack to date him again, but Alex wanted alliteration for his plan and 'rebound' was the best word he could think of.

He wrote, in block capitals and black Sharpie, AMY and JACK at the top of the two sides. He put Amy first because he needed revenge before he could get the rebound, but Jack was the first priority really. Jack with his stupid hair and stupid smile and stupid penis.

Stupid Jack.

Alex spent several minutes debating the pros and cons of a ballpoint pen (reliable, sturdy, easy to use but boring) against a red fine-liner (flimsy, harder to write with but so pretty) before he wrote anything, eventually settling for red fine-liner for titles and ballpoint for writing. He was so good at compromise; no wonder Jack had never really wanted to break up with him.

After an hour of scribbling and biting the pens and spending way too long staring at the ceiling because he couldn't think of what to write next and then getting distracted by something, Alex had Amy's half of the page written up.

He had four titles in a diamond pattern: DRUGS, TRUTH, BLACKMAIL, and MURDER.

The last one was drastic. Alex was willing to admit that much. (Again, compromise. He was such a catch.)

Under 'DRUGS' he had scrawled a few phrases, such as 'caught before???' and 'locker'. To anyone else it looked like the ramblings of a mad man, but it all made sense to him. Amy had told him once that she and a group of other girls had been found with weed on them at school and had been suspended for three days, with a warning they'd be excluded next time.

Alex knew someone who could sell him some weed for a tenner, and he knew that Amy's locker was H675 and that its passcode was 6209. It would be all too easy to slip a plastic bag inside, then go to a teacher and tell them all about it with wide eyes and stuttering, saying that he was so scared that Amy was going to become addicted because cannabis was a gateway drug and he didn't want his friend to get addicted to cocaine or heroin and what else could he do but tell a teacher?

That was plan number one, and Alex was pretty certain it would work. The only problems with it were that if Amy were to be excluded, she might then figure out it was Alex and just go ahead and tell the headteacher all about their illegal relationship, which would put Alex not back at square one but at square minus thirty. And the other? He couldn't remember whether Amy had been part of the group suspended or whether she'd just told him about it without actually being involved, in which case it would be ever so slightly ineffective because Amy didn't seem to think of suspensions as anything worth worrying about. In fact, she viewed them as holidays.

Plan number two was to tell Amy that he knew that she knew about him and Jack, explain that he wasn't being taken advantage of, and hope for the best. Optimistic but ultimately unrealistic.

Third plan: find something to blackmail Amy with, as she had done to Jack. Perhaps the drugs thing? Probably wouldn't work. And he wasn't that guy who did the whole revenge porn thing, so he was not going to send around her nudes because that was just the lowest of the low. There was nothing he could think of that would work.

Which led onto plan four. Make Amy disappear.

He already had a vague plan which had formed without him really thinking about it, and whenever his brain brought it up (hey, guess what, let's murder Amy and here's how) he felt kind of sick at himself for even thinking about pushing his best friend in front of a train and telling cops that she'd been high and had just...wandered in front of it...and...wait, his friend was dead?...I just can't quite get that into my head, it seems so weird...

Alex was hoping that plan one was going to work, but he felt comforted by the fact that he had three back up plans just in case it didn't work out.

He was tempted to throw everything aside after that hour but he forced himself to storm on with Jack's side. It was easier, after all; Amy was the real problem he had to face here, then it was all patching things up and making it happily ever after again.

So on Jack's side he simply wrote one heading: RELATIONSHIP.

Underneath that, he wrote 10 words (eleven if you counted symbols).

Tell him not to worry about Amy.

Kiss.

Everything = great.

That was all planned out then. 

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a plan is forming my children