Ah, someday I think Sabrina and I are gonna have a lot of lovely talks about siblings who suck.

“So they put you in a boys’ dorm?” Heather furrows her neat brows. “That’s a pretty nerve-racking first day, isn’t it?” Then I guess she realizes I’m still standing in the doorway, looking like a creeper. “Come in, come in.”

I do, and immediately take in the way their room looks as if each half is in a different universe. There’s no confusion over whose half is whose, either, unless Heather is way more into pentagrams than she lets on. “It was not a great start!” I concede, grabbing Heather’s desk chair for myself.

“What’s the deal with your hair?” Sabrina asks, eyeing me like an exhibit at the clown museum. “It’s fascinating.”

“Sabrina!”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I assure Heather, tugging on a springy blond curl. “No one’s ever that direct about it. I mostly get a lot of staring and an occasional ‘Is that real?’ It is, for the record—not just me going wild with a curling iron.”

“Well, it’s pretty epic,” says Sabrina, and I can’t tell if it’s a compliment.

I offer a “Thanks?” anyway, and she nods, so I guess it was.

“So what’s it like living there?” Heather asks as she pulls a bunch of random stuff from her bag, including a stuffed unicorn, a stack of picture frames, and an extremely well-loved fantasy novel I recognize as being one of Claire’s favorites. For a brief moment, I miss my former best friend, and the way she’d drag me to the bookstore every single time a new sci-fi novel with a Black main character released, how she’d call them her “supreme autobuys” and hug them to her chest.

Then I push her out of my head so I can answer Heather. “It’s still new, but I have a feeling it’s going to be very … loud. And that I should really stock up on scented candles, or at least air freshener. I’ve never been so grateful not to have to share a bathroom in my entire life.”

“I’ve never actually had my own bathroom,” says Heather, arranging the frames on her shelves so I can see an array of photographs of her with a pair of girls who must be her little sisters and a woman who looks like Heather with a “You in Twenty Years” filter on. It’s an entire family of French-braided doppelgängers. “Our apartment only has one bathroom for the four of us, which was another point in favor of boarding school. At least here, when we share, there’s more than one shower.”

“Yeah, I definitely don’t miss sharing with my sister,” I mutter, watching Heather arrange the stuffed unicorn on her pillow.