The Group enter together and acquire food together and then make their way over to Bella together. Annisa contemplates how it'd be embarrassing if they dropped her between afternoon classes and dinner and maybe that's why they haven't except Malak's the only one who even thought of that, she bets.

Malak sits down and slides a slice of cake across the table to Bella.

"I think this is traditional pay for holding a table?"

"Is it? I've been stiffing Suze. I have one already though, you can keep it."

Maybe the etiquette is different for enclaves? Not that he knows. 

"How was your last class?" 

???? What is her game here?

Malak accepts the returned cake with no visible confusion.

"Thanks."

"Last class was mostly fine but one of the Pisa kids was in there, kind of creeping on a Santa Barbara girl."

Pisa?? Is this supposed to mean something? He knows it's an enclave in Italy but that's it. 

"Eeesh." Santa Barbara is an enclave, though, so it doesn't quite compute - "does she not have people who can tell him off?"

"She seemed weirdly receptive! So that's something to keep an eye on, I guess!"

"Honestly there are more things to keep an eye on than I expected on the first day of class! - on the student front, the mals are about as advertised."

Is it still creeping if the target is receptive? And other things she is NOT going to ask this enclaver who probably adheres to weird enclaver rules.

'degenerate westerners' says Sabah's voice in her head. "More so than two kids flirting normally?"

"It's possible I'm reading too much into it but if he'd done it at me I would have been tempted to cut the rest of class!"

Julian is maybe 85% sure there's context here but he doesn't want to sound like some kind of idiot who isn't familiar with the main traits of all the European enclaves.

Flirting! Okay. Something he can work with. "Who has the time to flirt on the first day?" 

Malak has no context on Bella's flirting standards so this is not very helpful information!

"Ah, yikes."

"I feel like the kids whose plan was to be a low-key maleficer should be doubling down on the 'low key' now that we've had two mysterious deaths already."

"I basically expect the Pisa upperclassmen to continue their tradition of stomping on him if he overdoes it but that only helps after he overdoes it, you know?"

"By the standards of everywhere else in the world, 'noticeable at 14 at all' is way overdoing it! But yeah, I don't really suspect him in the murders and I don't bet they'll stop him until there are some to his name and -" She kicks the table. "Valid to skip class, if he seems to register your existence!"

"It'd be a temptation to burn a lot of mana for sure."

"Well, fortunately instead I was sitting with Raleigh from Sacramento and he seems like a completely normal and nice boy, which I suppose could also mean he's a secret maleficer but at a certain point you have to accept the best risk you can find."

"Well, this year's crop of maleficers seem to be pretty determined to eschew secrecy entirely."

"Oh, I know Raleigh!! He was helping my next door neighbor with her drawers yesterday." ...and he thought Malak and Annisa were Boston but he's presumably had that straightened out by now and will simply avoid them forever about it.

"Shannon? She's nice too. She's got a healing affinity, going to adjust her own braces with it."

"Oh! Like Naima. Annisa, you should introduce them." 

"Oh yeah, I met Shannon this afternoon. She was in my history of alchemy class."