For some reason people seem to think asking around to find the New York table is a very weird thing to do, but eventually someone points her to it; two tables actually, right in the middle of the Anglosphere side of the cafeteria, under a stretch of ceiling with no air vents and a stretch of floor with only one drain, which a sandy-haired boy is sitting atop and periodically looks at hopefully.

....Isn't that a bad idea here? 

“I’m Marian, the school nurse,” Marian says, trying to sound like someone who is extremely qualified for this and 100% knows what she’s doing. “I was looking for Julia?”

People look vaguely startled at this!

Oh right, the school nurse exists!! Poor thing!! The original idea the NY redesign team had in the 1950s was that, being a mundie, the school nurse would be ignored, and that having an infirmary would solve the tragic problem where even minor injuries were often deadly if you didn't have really solid healing magic, which the indies can't afford. They even tried to tweak the spell to specifically search for the kind of people who'd want to save dying teenagers even if it meant never going home again. But the school nurse, despite being a mundie, turned out not to be ignored anywhere near hard enough to survive, and so it's just kind of a way to murder random people, which is pretty unethical if you think about it!!!

"I'm Julia," says Julia brightly. 

“Hi! I, uh, wanted to ask you about something. I heard you have a - magic rug? Is that right?”

"I have a friendship with a magic rug." Healing Our Souls, Healing Our World: A Year In A Circle With Gwen Higgins, the bestselling book by a New York indie author who also filed the serial numbers off and sold it as a self-help memoir to mundies, argues that the reason items go bad is that we think of them as possessions rather than agents, as instruments of our will rather than allies in our shared goals, that it's a form of modern-day slavery that damages us and damages our relationships. Julia thought it was very deep. 

Uh oh was that a faux pas. “Sorry,” Marian mumbles, sheepish. “I— anyway, is it true that your rug is - helpful for doing therapy and talking about your feelings? Because, uh, the mental health of students is one of my serious concerns right now, and I think this school could really badly use a support group for anyone who’s finding it a rough adjustment? And, uh, I was wondering if - I was hoping you might be interested in helping with that?”

"You think we should have, like, therapy sessions? With my rug? Where everyone talks about how they're coping with high school and with how, like, traumatically ugly this place is?"

Wow that was surprisingly easy! 

“Yeah! That was basically what I was picturing! I mean, also the part where being attacked by magic death monsters is presumably pretty traumatic? But…yeah. Uh, does that - sound like something you’d be up for helping with?”

"Yeah! It could be on Wednesday afternoons? I have Wednesday afternoons free. I think we need snacks, can the infirmary dispense snacks if they're for therapeutic purposes? That'll also get a lot of kids to come, if you tell them that there'll be therapeutic snacks. And tea! New York has a teapot and I could probably borrow it for therapy but I can't use New York's tea, it's really expensive here, but maybe if it's therapy tea the infirmary can provide it? I read the design plans and they said the infirmary is supposed to give you medically necessary things for the students, and I think the tea is medically necessary for therapy!"

“I was kind of thinking about that! I think the food being terrible is - actually pretty bad for kids who’re already struggling? Because depression can mess with appetite and then not eating enough makes you more depressed. I— oh, I should’ve realized I could try to sell the void on Ensure meal shakes being medically necessary. I can try it for tea and cookies too. …Uh, how many people could realistically do group therapy in your room at once? Trying to think if we should have more than one session back to back, or alternate weeks or something, depends how long a gap you have on Wednesdays I guess…”

"Oh, I have the whole afternoon off from lunch to dinner, I guess we could do back to back sessions! It's a freshman dorm, it can maybe fit eight people if we really squeeze, but probably that's good for us? Because it's intimate and will make us feel closer to one another."

“Yeah!” Hmm, what else can she argue has therapeutic benefits for a school full of traumatized kids. “I wonder if I could sweet-talk the void into giving me - hmm, art supplies to do art therapy? Scented candles for aromatherapy?”

"You're a genius," says Julia cheerfully. "...emotional support animals would be really neat, except people will eat them, and I dunno if they'll be good for emotional support, given that..."

"- Also maleficers would drain their life-force for more magic and apparently that's actually really bad for your mental health," Marian says. 

"Well, we shouldn't invite maleficers to therapy! But yeah I guess they might steal the animals afterwards."

"- I feel like they need therapy even more than most people!" Marian is mostly thinking of the disturbing horror-movie-soundtrack murder kid. "But, uh, super fair if you don't want them in your room." 

"New York can't consort with maleficers, everyone else would freak. It's like how, uh, maybe Osama bin Laden needs therapy but if he showed up somewhere and was like "hey, I want to hang out here and do therapy", we'd actually just kill him, with a drone strike - I don't know if that's a good analogy -"

"Maleficers are doomed," says Silas flatly. "They'll rot from the inside out. There's no way to save them but there is a way to save other people from them, and it's not therapy."

"Ohgod. Eww." 

Marian takes a deep breath. Focus. 

"...Is it possible to reverse?" she asks quietly. "I mean, it's - like an addiction, right? And in the mundane world, even if people are doing crimes because they're addicted, we - it's an illness, and sometimes it's possible to treat. And that would also stop them from murdering anyone, right, if you got them wanting to quit and recover so they wouldn't rot?" 

- shrug. "Some people go clean after graduation?" 

"If they've got family who can protect them so they don't have to use magic while they're trying to shake the habit," Silas says. "Trying to use magic but only mana as a maleficer is like trying to drink in moderation as an alcoholic, it doesn't work, you have to stop. If you've gone far enough you can't even make mana normally anymore. And no one can stop using magic in here. The Scholomance isn't the outside. If you're a danger to people, they put you down, nothing to do with whether it's your fault."

Oh no that's so upsetting. ...Marian is also not taking it at face value. She has to remind herself that, given her complete lack of cultural context on this, she has no idea whether this viewpoint is more analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous or that 12-step program for quitting street drugs that the hospital has flyers for, or...what's a good comparison point...those horrible abstinence-only-sex-ed-esque support programs run by Christians for people with "porn addictions." (Which might be fine? Marian doesn't want to accidentally be biased against religious people just because she herself isn't. It's just that the documentary they showed in class was really weird and unimpressive.) 

"....I guess it makes sense that quitting would be really hard in here," she says quietly. "But - I mean - the version where people just use animals isn't a crime, right? And - my sense was that people do do that, sometimes, until they graduate, and they don't go on murder rampages in the meantime?" 

"New York doesn't abide maleficers," says Julia firmly. "We aren't going to go out of our way to kill someone who hasn't killed anyone else, but if they want a rehab they can't use my rug, and I haven't got life advice for them, except 'I guess you shouldn't have blown up the Twin Towers'."

....Okay. New York is institutionally required to be incredibly judgy. Good to know? 

"Right. I understand," Marian says, very professionally. "It'd be - probably not a great fit anyway, honestly. In the mundane world, they do group therapy in, like, prisons and stuff, with convicted murders, but they don't have them go to the same therapy group as high school students."