"No El here either," she volunteers. "And no Yvette, I don't think, and definitely no 'my'."

He cracks a smile. "I just meant she's from my world. There's not any other meaning for 'my', uh, yet. Technically."

"Uh-huh."

"I am probably closer to dating her boyfriend than I am her," he says thoughtfully.

"Is her last name Higgins?"

"No, Villeneuve."

"Well mine isn't Lake so that's not a deal-breaker, clearly, but it does mean I can't just go 'ah, yes, clearly.' Is she...incorrectly rumored to be a maleficer?"

"Oh, yes. She's strict mana but has an aura of doom and New York thought she was maleficing me or something. At least Chloe and Jermaine apologized."

"Well of course they did, she's a social lever on the mal-slaying wunderkind." Bitter snort. 

"I... kind of understand why they did. Think she was maleficing me. They could've tried to spend five seconds around her to see how obviously she's not bad but in their defense I've, uh. The way Jermaine put it was 'if you want us to ask you how you are and mean it then you have to answer honestly'. I kind of... stonewalled them for years—them and everyone else—and Yvette kind of broke me out of it. They freaked out."

"...Huh, okay. I did not have that specific problem, I would answer questions honestly it's just that sometimes the honest answer was 'fuck off, I have better things to do than add to New York's consequence.'"

These people put so much thought into their social lives.

Mood.

Yeah he does, though apparently he didn't need to, if everything is working fine for those two.

"I think the only one who really cares much about that is Tebow. On my end, at least. Not that everyone else is saints, but, like. ...they're just people."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, you know, there's people, and then there's people who suck, and then there's people who are great? And, like, Tebow sucks, and El is great, and Chloe and so on just sort of have the amount of goodness and suckage typical of their circumstances?" 

He smiles a bit. "I think everyone has the amount of goodness and suckage typical of their circumstances. Tebow has good traits, too."

"Tebow has good traits but he is underperforming his reference class. I'm not saying there's anyone who's all bad but there are people who under- and over- perform their reference classes, and Tebow underperforms, and Aadhya and Liu overperform, and El way, way overperforms." 

"...Aadhya?"

"Aadhya and Liu--Aadhya Iyer and Yi Liu--are the rest of our graduation alliance, besides El and me. Aadhya does artificing, her affinity is exotic materials, she's making me a kickass polearm out of this argonet I killed. Liu does incantations."

"I have a Liu, too, but not an Aadhya. ...Yvette and Liu are in an alliance with a Russian boy named Alexei? Who is Yvette's boyfriend and who may or may not be my boyfriend?"

"Wow, shame you don't have an Aadhya, like, I like her as a person but, also, it is really convenient to be on a team with a really good artificer with an affinity for mal corpses, given how many of those I make. There's a Sasha in my year, but no Alexei."

"...huh. Alexei is also a really good artificer, he was—wait. What... year is it for you guys. And day of the year? I'm a senior as of a week ago."

"Iiiiii'm a junior, like, about a week and a half from graduation?"

"Almost a senior in like... a month? I have a calendar in my room but need to look at it to know exactly."