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"Take off your shirt!
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"Pick a card. Any card." Joey held out the card deck to me. "Alright, now memorize it. Show it to everybody." He turned away so he couldn't see the card. "Got it? Alright, give it back to me." He faced me again. I handed him the card, which he looked at for a second before putting it back in the deck. He held the deck up to his forehead. "Five of hearts." He smiled down at me.
"Real magic does exist." Ross said in the most sarcastic voice I had ever heard from someone other than my brother.
"Wow." Rachel and Monica held out for a couple of seconds.
"Joey, how do you do it?" I sank back into the couch.
"I can't tell you that. No." He shook his head. Then we heard knocking coming from...the ceiling.
"Uh, somebody's at the door on the ceiling." We all looked up.
"He took out the carpets, and now you can hear everything." Monica rolled her eyes.
"Well, why don't you go up there and ask him to just please step lightly?" Phoebe suggested the obvious.
"I have, like, five times, but the guy is so charming that I go up there to yell, and then I end up apologizing to him." Monica chuckled.
"That is silly." Phoebe furrowed her brows and scrunched up her nose in disgust. "I'll go up there. I'll tell him to keep it down." And she headed out the door.
"Good luck." Monica and Rachel called out to her.
"Alright, alright, alright, alright. If you really want to know how I did it, I'll show you." Joey smiled excitedly while the four of us shared a look. "When you handed me back the card, what you didn't see was that I looked at it so fast, it was invisible to the naked guy." The three of us pretended to be fascinated. "I just did it. I just did it again." He demonstrated a couple of times. "Here, I'll slow it down just in case so you guys can see it. Ready?" And he showed us a slow–mo version.
"Oh!" Monica, Rachel, Ross, and I nodded our heads in realization. We could hear Phoebe shouting at the guy upstairs, but then he complimented her, making Rachel and Monica roll their eyes. Later, Chandler came over. Rachel and Ross had moved to share the arm chair, and Joey and I were sitting on the ground with me between his legs.
"Anybody got a length of rope about six feet long, little noose on the end?" He sat down next to Monica on the couch.
"Honey, what's the matter?" We looked at him in concern.
"I just saw Janice." He admitted sadly. "She was at Rockefeller Center, skating with her husband. She looked so happy. Almost feel bad for whipping that kid's pretzel at them." He stared at the coffee table blankly.
