Facade [h.s]

forty

"How do we do that, though? If Joel finds out, we're dead" Indigo said, a frown on her face, speaking the words we were all thinking.

If Joel had found any of us inside his house, it wouldn't have ended well. We'd already been lucky enough to get away with it once, it didn't seem likely for it to happen twice. What if we'd only made the situation worse by trying to fix it? Was it smart to risk our lives to, in an odd twist of fate, save ourselves? Or should we have just done nothing and hoped that one day things would've changed?

"We have to plan it out carefully so that it won't happen. We should choose a day in which we know he won't be at home for some hours" Harry intervened, and I sent him a grateful look. In moments like those, it looked like he was the only one that was able to maintain a clear mind and working towards finding a solution in the most effective way possible.

I, sometimes, on the other hand, just felt lost.

"That would be every morning because he goes to uni, but won't he find it suspicious if he notices none of us is present on the same day?" Indigo asked him, furrowing her eyebrows.

"It can't be in the morning, it has to be another moment" I intervened, knowing that she was right.

"Like when?" My best friend asked again, a lost look in her blue eyes.

Harry shrugged, biting his lower lip as he seemed to think about it, a slight frown on his features. "I don't know. We have to find out."

"Do we stalk him for a week and see what he does?" Indigo supposed, sounding a bit unsure.

I shook my head quickly, knowing that was potentially the riskiest thing we could've done. We wanted to find a way out of that mess, not create an even bigger one - if Joel had got even as much as a whiff of what we were planning to do, we would've all been dead. "If he notices he's being stalked he'll surely suspect something."

"We also can't wait too long" Indigo replied. "He could get rid of the papers anytime. Maybe he forgot about them and that's why they're still there. If he destroys them we'll be back to square one."

"Then how do we find out about his schedule? It's not like any of us can just ask him about it, that would be weird" I said, sighing. Sometimes I wished things weren't that complicated - it felt like the situation was only getting worse and worse, with no hope for us of ever coming back out.

"You don't need to" Harry stated suddenly and I turned to look at him, a puzzled look in my eyes.

"What do you mean?"

He gave me a shrug, as if what he was about to say the most obvious thing ever. "You don't need to talk to him directly, you just need to talk to someone that knows."

Indigo asked him, raising an eyebrow, not seeming to consider it such a brilliant idea. "Which would be?"

"Callie" I immediately replied, quickly earning Harry's attention again. "She's in love with Joel and siding with him, she surely knows when he's busy."

Harry gave me a slight nod, as if he thought my pick was actually a good one. "How would you talk to her?" He asked, "if she gets suspicious she will tell Joel."

I looked at him when he spoke, lowering my gaze when my eyes met his green ones. It felt odd to have him talk to me about something else like nothing had happened between us, but I also was glad that he was acting like that, since it didn't seem the right time to let arguments break us apart.

That was one thing that worried me around being around Harry, the fact that we wouldn't be able to stay away from each other even if something happened between us. We could've been broken up, but we still would've had to come together when it came to the situation we were in. We could've been in the same team without effectively being in the same team - it was odd to think about. Were we mature enough to handle the entirety of that situation?