I'm Dying To Live (Rewriting)

Chapter 3

Alex's POV

It was weird without Tay there. We were like the 3 musketeers, we came as a package and it didn't feel right when we were all there. We've all best friends since the start and we've always been there for each other. That's how it always had to be.

We got to my locker. Me, Jack and Tay all shared all of our lockers, we just used whichever one happened to be closest at the time. I waited until Jack had yanked his books out before shutting it and making my way up to Tay's locker.

"Maybe she's asleep late," Jack muttered to himself, biting on his sleeves and looking at the floor.

"Yeah she's probably sick," I replied.

He looked up at me in surprise and I chuckled. "You said it out loud."

He smiled innocently and just answered with a barely audible "Oh."

I opened Tay's locker and pulled out my English book. "Well, her stuff's still in there."

Jack peered in over my shoulder and made a random noise, halfway between a grunt and a yawn, before stepping back and shrugging. "I'll text her a bit later."

I nodded. "Okay then, if she's not in English I'll text you. See you Jay."

He nodded back. "Alright see you Lex."

I turned to walk to my first lesson English, which was alright, it would be better with Jack in there to mess around with too but he was too busy staring at the clock wishing school was over to get any work done and his handwriting was terrible, hence why he was in a lower set. It was weird, I'd been friends with Jack 4 years when we started in secondary school in year 7 and already he was a massive part of my life, someone I always looked to to lean on and someone who I had at least half of my best memories with.

Like when he'd got into a police car when he was drunk, claiming he thought he would be welcome because of the amount of times he'd been in one before, or the time when we ran off and had our own little holiday on the coast one weekend, depending on Jack's life savings, our fake IDs and a bottle of JD to get us through and living it up on the beach and in bars. Or the time he couldn't get me a stripper for my birthday, so he dressed up in a leotard and danced for me, then brought me a huge peter pan themed cake, an electro-acoustic guitar, 3 bottles of alcohol I'd never heard of and flavoured condoms for the lay he got me later on in the night. She was extremely fit.

Or even that time we found a stray puppy on the way to school and he hid it in his bag all through the day, feeding it scraps until he got caught out and sent home. Not going to lie, we both shed a tear when we had to give him into the pound. And those memories weren't even half of the great ones I'd had with him. There's times when he says or does the sweetest thing that you'd never expect from careless Jack Barakat that I can never forget because they make me smile like an idiot. Those memories were the ones that would never fade.

I'd been friends with Tay for around the same time, when she moved schools halfway through year 7, and since we were around the same academic level I found she was in a lot of my classes and I grew to know her. She'd also helped massively in all the little troubles of my life, even though she was always weighed down with her own - which I don't know a fat lot about. I used to ask, but she always skirted the subject and found a way to change it, so I reckoned she'd tell me in her own time.

She wasn't in English, she usually sits next to me but the seat was empty. I bit my lip. She hardly ever missed school I pulled out my phone.

Alex: hey Tay, you alright? U like never miss skwl u lil bugger

Alex: nah Jay she's not here

I played with my phone underneath the table, making sure it was on silent. Last thing I needed was my phone being taken off me.