Theeeeeey are going to attract a bunch of mals if they clump uuuuuup how have they survived this looooooooong it is very plausible that Scorpius's existence is how they've survived this long.

"Good morning," he says to the loser group that is increasingly becoming the Scorpius-and-his-loser-friends-???-I-guess group.

"Morning!" Ibrahim replies, cheerfully. He isn't exactly part of said no-longer-loser-question-mark group, what with how most people in this group find him kind of grating, but he is very happy to be around Scorpius anyway. "Did you sleep well?"

"As well as I ever do. How about yourself?"

"I did! I guess everyone coming back to the dorms together earlier than usual helped me get some good few hours of sleep."

"Good morning," she says, instead of the snide 'well good for you,' that comes to mind at Ibrahim having a good night's sleep. She does not, actually wish him a bad night's sleep, just. She really did not have one herself.

Instead... Yeah she'll have another shower. Since there are this many people and she's not a pariah anymore. Don't mind her, everyone, she is going to aggressively scrub herself until she can maybe pretend she's clean again!

A few mals do take pot shots at the group like he fucking told them they would and Scorpius deals with them without at any point complaining and so the juniors do in fact leave the bathroom in smaller groups, afterwards, causing his stress to gently and quietly go back to background levels.

Yvette has a sort of tired acceptance of people being fucking idiots. Noticing that people are being fucking idiots does actually persuade her to stop scrubbing herself raw in the shower, though, so. That's nice? And once she's done she goes to guard Alexei her own, smaller group of people that are less dumb.

If this were a normal day, Yvette might be expected to have more people showing up at her table at breakfast, curious about the book. Today is not a normal day, and there is a bigger source of gossip, noticeable as soon as they arrive at the cafeteria: a senior is sitting alone at the middle of a prime table, hunched over his tray.

Completely alone. Not even loser freshmen and sophomores are trying to sit at the same table as him, and the surrounding tables are all only occupied by said freshmen and sophs; every single senior is avoiding being anywhere near him.

Chloe and Magnus arrive at the cafeteria shortly after Yvette's group, apparently having sped up a bit to catch up, but as soon as they notice the lone senior they freeze in shock.

"Todd? Todd Quayle? Why would he... what's he doing sitting by himself??"

... Is it bad that Yvette thinks this works out well for her. That's probably bad. Eh, she's thought to be a bitch anyway. At least this way she gets less attention. Can she grab a table and get food while all of this... whatever... is going down?

There's another junior trying to slip right past them but Scorpius stops him. "What happened?"

The kid looks somewhere between star-struck and terrified. "Poached," he mumbles.

Scorpius drops his arm to the side and stares.

... That would do it, yep.

If there's one taboo that's worse than being a maleficer, it's what is colloquially known as 'room poaching,' or just poaching. The rule is one student per room after curfew, and if the student assigned to the room dies, that room loses the protections student rooms get. The door doesn't have any kind of natural warding, doesn't lock properly, the drain and vent aren't cooperative about keeping mals out, that sort of thing. The same sort of thing happens if students try to swap rooms, to a less but still noticeable degree. When the dorms lower a level, the walls get shuffled around to put use to the space; Yvette had the dubious benefit of having the empty room above her added to hers to have an incredibly high ceiling.

A loophole comes in if, technically speaking, the student assigned to that room doesn't die, but also isn't in that room. The most straightforward way to do that is to shove the student out into the void, but Yvette supposes no one's tested to see if students technically still alive by other means also count. (Like being eaten by a maw-m, no, stop it, Yvette, stop thinking about that.) But the void responds to will, and most people do not want to be lost forever to the void, actually. So a person attempting to shove another out into nonexistence has to really work at it. It's not, as she understands it, a particularly fast process, and requires magic and mana to achieve. All while the person struggles and tries, desperately, to keep some hold of themselves on reality. Until, eventually, the person is so far out they just... disappear into the darkness. They don't come back, or at least not that Yvette's ever heard, but they're also technically not dead. And they'll never be in their room, ever again.

But then the question is: why the hell would a senior so close to graduation do that? He's about to lose his room anyway. Did he poach a younger student's room to try and stay longer at the Scholomance, for some godforsaken reason...?

Someone else doesn't believe it either, and she's going to be much more loud about it.

"No way. No fucking way. This is a mistake!! There's no way he poached. He doesn't need to! He's going with Annabel and River and Jessamy, and they've got the valedictorian on board!! Why would he?"

"What the f- Lake what are you doing," Magnus hisses.

What he's doing is marching directly towards the table. "Quayle," Scorpius says, in a tone of voice probably no one has ever heard him use.

Or at least, no one alive.

But for all of that he doesn't then flinch. He just keeps eating, mechanically, not looking up, while the entire cafeteria falls rapidly into a hush. Some kids up in the mezzanine are even specifically leaning over the railing to watch.

Yvette is not getting involved in any of this. She's going to the food line. Let New York sort its own damn self out. The gossip network will tell her the important bits later, but it is not so kind when it comes to granting calories.

Chloe is totally going after Scorpius, though.

"It's a mistake! Scorpius, please calm down, there's no way it's true..!"

"If it's not fucking true then Todd fucking Quayle can say so himself."

One forkful after another, still not looking up.

"Who? Why?"

"... You're graduating!! Todd you have one of the best graduation alliances this year, there's no reason to!" She doesn't quite go so far as to say 'you'll be fine,' because that's just not done in Scholomance, not even enclavers are that assured of their safety, but it's heard perfectly well anyway.