When Julia's done eating she starts looking around for people who should join the room decorating party. The polishing, in particular, is going to take forever and she should have some more people on it, and you don't want to draw your circle too narrowly on the first day and miss a bunch of perfectly satisfactory minions who happened to be on the other side of the cafeteria. 

That table is full of weirdos but one of them is,like, the kind of weirdo who'd have an Instagram page and be good at interior decorating, so, worth a try?

She sits down next to him. "Hi! Want to help me decorate my room after dinner? We're going for a sort of spaceship aesthetic, but like Buddhist spaceship, around my rug."

He laughs, a little awkwardly, trying to figure out the exact nature of the joke.

"Hi. Uh — you just got here too, right?"

"Yep! I'm Julia, New York. I'm putting together a team of people to work on my room, and you look -" gay. He looks gay. But you're not supposed to say that. " - gay," she finishes the sentence, because you're also not supposed to care too much what other people think. 

“…are you, like…meeting a quota?”

(Mal, at the next table over, turns three-quarters of the way around to investigate. ...yep, sure does look gay.)

" - I need interior decorators!" Julia says. "I need the kind of people, who if we weren't fighting for our lives and subsisting off horrible cafeteria food, would have a really fantastic Instagram."

“…I look like I have an Instagram?” he says, forlornly.

"- yeah! Oh, don't be offended, I'm sure it's a cool Instagram that wouldn't follow me at all, for, like, a tattoo parlor or something."

He is temporarily appeased.

“—wait, so — you’re serious about the space buddhist redecoration thing?”

"- yeah? My room is incredibly depressing and no one has homework yet and I have polish and metal and mirrors and enchanted lights and a guy who can do metalworking and a guy who's doing the polishing and a vaguely Buddhist rug and we can do so much better. Are you in?"

“…what’s your offer?”

Might as well start grinding mana now, right?

"Well, I don't know how useful you're going to be yet, but so far people who have been helpful to my projects have gotten some of my magic makeup and some of New York's graduating seniors' leftover craft and alchemy stuff and work gloves and the furniture which I'm not using because it's not space Buddhist."

“…sure, why the hell not. Show me the spaceship room.”

He wraps an uneaten chunk of bread in a napkin and tucks it away in his tin.

Julia, delighted, will add gay dude to the herd of people she is leading off to her dorm to build a Buddhist spaceship room.