Jenny is helpful. Cam can fill out forms - actually, he's good enough with paper that a lot of the time he can just command forms to fill out themselves - and he can sound like a grown man on the phone, but for the handful of things that require an adult to go somewhere in person, she's useful. He grows - he's adult height before his sixteenth birthday, and if he grows a little stubble and holds himself right and talks in the level, mature way he's learned on the phone, he can meet with investors and clients in person, and Jenny only has to do things that require proof of age. She's still handling most of their money, at that point, but Cam's doing the business end.

He calls it Seedling Enterprises. He has a field in which he grows test plants to make sure they're stupid, and to take their seeds; after he's happy with a strain, he sends it off to a partnered firm with operations in Mexico for mass reproduction and he has someone else handling distribution. Seeds are much easier than pharmaceuticals. He hasn't given up on being able to make wonder drugs, but they're harder to make and drastically harder to scale, so he's starting with the plants.

Matilda and Jellybean aren't the most consistent helpers - they have their own stuff to do - but Jellybean is good at talking properties into the seeds and Matilda's good at turning ideas into spells that Cam himself can use, when they show up and entertain themselves at Seedling for a day or a week before haring off. They're even a net positive after factoring in all the time Cam and Jellybean spend making out.

Cam asked Renée, early on, to keep an eye on any kids at her school starting to talk to non-person objects with atypical pauses between their sections of the conversation, and so he now routinely babysits a third-grader wizard named Luke (for cheap, but not free, because Luke's mother doesn't know about magic and Cam doesn't want to explain to her that her son is earning his supervision by talking to plants) and casually violates child labor laws with same. Luke, for his own part, couldn't be happier with the arrangement, especially since Cam was on hand to command a rabid dog presumably sent by Iggy to stand the fuck down.

Cam's sixteenth birthday present to himself is finally letting Jellybean into his pants.

It is a good present.

It's about a month later that Cam tells Jellybean: "Luke's mom tried to set me up with her niece, the other day, and I told her no thanks, and she asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I said no, and she asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I didn't know what the hell to tell her. I wound up saying something about not wanting to discuss my personal life. And now I'm wondering if I have a boyfriend."