Albus Dumbledore looked confused, which everyone else found utterly confusing. They found it confusing because they had rarely seen him look confused, which made some idiot wonder if he looked confused at his own look of confusion. It couldn't be that he was trying to make logical sense of the previous statement, as Albus Dumbledore had realised over a decade ago that logical sense wasn't always the best way to go about things. No sense, logical or not, could be found in the letter he had in his hand, nor the announcement he was about to make, so he looked confused. Helena had this effect on people.
He cleared his throat, looked over the banquet hall, looked confused and looked back at the piece of parchment. It still didn't make sense. "We have," he said in the dazed voice of someone under the confoundus charm that Minerva had already checked for, "a...err..."
He took one final look at the paper to make utterly certain.
"...a transfer student." The end of that sentence, which was obviously a statement, sounded so uncertain, so much like a question, that there would have been a question mark would it not make the reader unsure of who was speaking.
In the Great Hall no one was speaking. To the best of anyone's knowledge this had never happened before. It went against the natural order of things. Not that anyone could figure out why, as surely wizards and witches occasionally moved house and made their children change schools. But, again, to anyone's knowledge this had never occurred before. Severus Snape suspected something, but then, he was the suspicious sort.
An adjective collecting young woman stood up and made a lengthy speech in a cheery voice that would have made That Woman's toes curl, and contained the word 'like' more than grammatically possible.
Ron Weasley, who had hit adolescence like an exploding sack of pheromones thrown against a brick wall that, in turn, exploded nightly over his sheets, said, "She looks kinda hot."
Under the table, Hermione jammed her heel between his third and fourth toe with some force. Above the table she rolled her eyes and said, "She looks like an utter twit."
The Twit was sorted into Gryffindor.