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Jess hated the fact that neither her twin, nor Gypsy or Jer or anyone she was actually close with was in Hufflepuff with her. She was friends with people in Hufflepuff, sure, but not close friends. Usually she badgered, and she laughed a little at her own pun, the new Puffs, but she figured she'd leave that to the other prefects, like... Elsie Vass. She was good with kids, right? Probably not as awesometacular as Jess was, but that was a given. No one could reach her impossible standard of excellency. She slipped into a random seat, and found herself right beside a familiar blue haired person. It was Dorian Xanders, the one she thought might have been a metamorphmagus, like Gypsy, but it turned out just had blue hair. And that was cool, but like why couldn't she accidentally have turned her hair blue? Or pink? Or purple? Or red? It was still just brown, and that sucked. She hadn't even inherited her mum's blonde locks. She knew Dorian usually seemed to sit with and hang around Miles, but seventh year didn't seem to be around right now. He looked a bit restless. "Hi," she greeted happily enough. "Can't wait for them to be done, yeah? Me neither. I mean, it's nice to see where the little kids go, but sometimes it really stretches out," she groaned, though quietly, because they were supposed to keep their voices down during the ceremony.

Jess glanced at him curiously, wondering if he might be turning a little red of if it was just the heat of the hall. It was certainly warm in here, what with all the people in close proximity and the candles bobbing gently in the air overhead. He didn't sound all that flustered to her, anyways, and she knew she was probably over-thinking. She was pretty nosy when it came to other people, after all, but it was just because she instinctively wanted to get to know them all better! "My mum's a good cook, better than my da, anyways," she snorted, "But we usually end up eating leftovers unless it's a holiday or a birthday- they both work a lot." Having a healer and a doctor for parents wasn't always that easy, since both could be called in at any moment if there was an emergency, and, as her father liked to dryly remark, there were always emergencies. They'd even sent Violante and Thea to public school, even though they'd try to teach them at home when they were younger, but homeschooling was pretty hard when they both worked, and even though they'd been worried about accidental magic and possibly traumatizing innocent muggle children, her cousin and her sister- she swallowed hard just thinking about Thea, for a moment- had seemed to do well in school.

"Oh," she commented, "I have a cousin being sorted this year- he got Slytherin, I think." She enjoyed referring to any of the Lillantines as her cousins, mostly because she sensed that Evander Lillantine would probably hate her if he actually knew her, which was almost comforting. In a burning, fires of hell, sort of way. She figured she might as well cut the kid some slack, though, him being only eleven and frankly looking about nine. It was great to know someone else also seemed incapable of looking their age, though Jess often neither looked it or acted it, so she had him beat there.

She wasn't really surprised by her house mate's boredom- hey, she was bored too! They could stew in restless boredom together. She gave him a sympathetic smile back, which instantly wavered the moment he asked her if she'd had an okay summer. It wasn't his fault, he didn't know, they weren't even friends, she couldn't expect everyone to instantly know, though it'd probably get out eventually and then she'd have to endure pitying looks at every corner... Maybe she was being melodramatic or something but her little sister was dead, she was allowed to not want everyone else dragging her back down with their apologies and their sad eyes. She just wanted everyone to forget about it.

Well, that sounded awful. She was an awful big sister. Not forget, exactly, but she was trying to move on. You were supposed to try to move on! She'd had the whole "time to grieve" thing. She'd sobbed at the kitchen table while her mum gripped the edge of the kitchen counter so hard her knuckles were bony white and her da shook his head and looked so much like Toby it made her want to flinch away from him. She'd stayed with them, in that kitchen, while Uriel forced a bag of frozen peas into Eleazar's limp hands and told him to hold it on his face while he held back tears. Toby had walked upstairs and not come back down, and she'd listened to the fridge hum noisily because no one had bothered to close it and watched flies buzz at the windows because she'd knocked over her soda and it'd dried on the floor...

That was over. She was never going back to that place in her head. But what was she supposed to say? 'No, it was actually awful, until I went to Gypsy's so I could forget everything?' Lie? He'd hear about it eventually, and think she was seriously disturbed because she'd neglected to mention that she'd suffered a death in the family! Your sibling's murder was not great table talk. She looked down at the table, fingers dancing and twisting on it as she tried to figure out what to say. "It was- um-," Oh, for God's sake, she was choking on her own tongue. Get it together, Jessamine!

"Grounded for life?" she settled for asking weakly, nails digging into the wood of the table. "Wow, what'd you do? Kill a man?" She sounded almost serious, and she wanted to die. He'd said for his own protection, though, not the protection of other, so it sounded more like something had threatened his life, rather than the other way around. Maybe an accident of some sort? She could hardly pry right now, when she'd just dodged his question like a bludger headed for her spinal cord. But he'd sounded exasperated, like he hadn't thought it was such a big deal... "Hey, you're home free now, anyways. You're in fourth year, right? What electives did you start last year?" she asked in a more normal tone.