“He. Is. Smitten,” Cinnamon says as we walk. “That was so hot when he asked for your Instagram and you just said no. So mysterious! So aloof! You have him right where you want him.”

“Well, I don’t have a personal Instagram,” I say. “I have my dumb astrology Instagram, but I don’t want him to know about that.” I kick a stick off the sidewalk. “I told him I am a screenwriter.”

“Perfect,” Cinnamon says.

We spend the rest of the walk talking about Cinnamon, which is a nice break from my own head and, unlike most social interactions, not boring at all. She is in love with her professor, which sounds glamorous to me, even though she appears tortured about it. Precious Starlet Hazel fucked her professor at The New School and always claimed he “ruined her life,” but it still sounded enviable to me. I would kill to have my life ruined by a torrid affair.

Cinnamon tells me she is writing her grad school thesis on “the politics of desire” and working at Mirror Box as field research. She hasn’t told anyone at Mirror Box this, as the bosses frown upon CalArts students exploiting their establishment for the academy.

The professor has seen Cinnamon dance a few times. But the bosses don’t like him because he refuses, in his words, to “throw money at women.”

“He is British,” she explains. She also tells me he is married.

My dad is also a married professor, but at community college, which is by no means as glamorous as CalArts. I wonder if he’s ever fucked a student. I hope he has. My mom is terrible and he deserves it.

Cinnamon walks me to my doorstep. She says her apartment is “a few blocks up,” which I assume means the bougie hills where Rachel lived. I want to see her apartment. The MDMA makes me feel open to this idea of “friendship.”

On the sidewalk in front of my building, Cinnamon tells me that Beau will probably go to Subtropical in the morning—well, it is the morning, but when it is bright out— because he will be dying to see me again and doesn’t have any other way to contact me. So I have to not go. I can go the following day, however, when he has waited long enough.

This sounds difficult, but reasonable and not impossible.

I am a Scorpio. I can withhold.