"Do you ever wonder if we're bad?" Daphne's too loud in the dark room. Millicent grumbles unpleasantly, woken by the sound. Daphne doesn't hear. "If we got put in Slytherin because we weren't good enough for the other houses?"
There's an embarrassed silence. Tracey speaks. "Like we aren't smart enough for Ravenclaw, not brave enough for Gryffindor...?"
"That'd be fucking annoying," says Millicent.
"What would that make us?" Everybody can tell Daphne's given this considerable thought, and nearly everybody's wondering where Blaise has been lately, since the girl doesn't waste her time thinking with him around.
"Stupid cowards without moral substance," Tracey offers sourly.
Pansy has been silent, but nobody really believes she's asleep. Her silence is suddenly deafening, and she hears it. Finally she joins in. "Does it matter?" Her words feed the heaviest silence yet.
Daphne seems bewildered. "Of course it matters." Sheets rustle as she sits up in the dark. "I'm not stupid or a coward!"
Millicent snorts. Daphne glares.
"Only if you care that you have no moral fiber—and if you care, don't worry about it, since you clearly have enough of a conscience to get you that far." Tracey's comment is dour enough to belong to Millicent, but too intelligent.
But it isn't good enough for Daphne. "Do you wantto be a stupid coward, then?"
"We're not," Tracey says with a confident sort of exasperation. "Well," she relents, "except for Crabbe and Goyle, we're not stupid. And some of us are cowards, let's just face it. But what does the Sorting Hat have to say about Slytherin? We're all blood snobs." Pansy scoffs nastily and even Daphne giggles, illustrating Tracey's point. But the halfblood is more than used to this sort of abuse, and ignores them. "'Teach those whose blood is pure' and that shit. What else?—'any means to achieve their ends;' 'cunning.'"
Pansy looks at Tracey with horror, but Tracey pretends not to see in the dark. "You have the hat song memorized? Shit, you should have been in Ravenclaw. You and Smartarse Granger'd get along."
Tracey ignores Pansy again, something she she has become quite adept at. "We've got our own little niche—we're not leftovers."
"We're the backstabbers and the power-hungry fools and the rule-breakers and the Death Eaters," Millicent finishes. Pansy shudders a little at that last—she knows firsthand how true it is—and Daphne gives a little gasp, as if she can't imagine why Millicent said such a thing out loud.
"Yes." Tracey's tone is a challenge, and nobody speaks after that.