I play solitaire until the buzzer goes off, and then I empty both dryers, and text Salem to let him know his hamper is waiting in the laundry room. After, I bring my stuff upstairs, get ready for bed, and lie staring at the ceiling for far, far too many hours until sleep finally comes.

“Do it slower,” Isabel insists, her big green eyes like saucers as I finish the same card trick—my favorite one—for the third time in a row. “I’m going to figure it out.”

“If you can figure it out, it’s not going to be a very impressive talent-show display,” I point out as I intertwine my fingers and flip my hands inside out to stretch them. “The point is to dazzle everyone with my skills.”

“Well, your skills and my legs,” she says with a grin, holding the bodysuit she’ll be wearing as my assistant up against her torso again. I don’t know why she owns such a thing, but then again, if I had her body, I’d probably have it in twelve colors.

She showed me the outfit the minute I showed up in her room for practice, after a morning spent over waffles and math homework, and suggested I wear something similar. But even the new and improved version of me can’t fathom wearing something quite so … so. Seeing as I’ll be playing the role of magician, I figure I can just put together an all-black outfit that works.

“I also had a thought about music,” I tell her, searching for the song in my phone I listened to in Salem’s room yesterday. “Thought it might be fun to have this in the background. What do you think?”

She listens while I put on Måneskin’s cover (Salem made sure I knew this) of “Beggin’,” and when her body starts moving to the music after the first ten seconds or so, I know I’ve got her, and I’m strangely proud. “I like this,” she says with a smile. “Yeah, let’s do this. Where’d you hear it?”

I’m certainly not telling Jenna London’s best friend that I heard it from Salem, so I tell her someone was blasting it in Rumson.

“God, I still can’t believe you live there. What’s it like?”

“Loud.” I shuffle the cards once, twice, three times. “Guys yell a lot of shit to each other. And they stink. They come back from sports and smell rancid, and then they take showers and smell like too much body spray. They leave their shit all over the place. I wish I could tell you it’s as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s mostly just gross.”

“Oh, I believe it,” says Isabel. “But I don’t mean the boys. What’s it like for you, having no girls around?”