Gideon hesitated. "A lot of things could happen," he began, and thought about leaving it at that. He didn't want to scare her into assuming the worst would happen or ruin her enthusiasm over going to Hogwarts in the first place. In an ideal world, he wouldn't have had to mention any of this at all, and she could have just... been a kid, for her last summer before going to school. That being said, if he was going to ask her to make this decision with him, she needed to know what the stakes actually were, which meant there were some unpleasant realities that they were going to have to discuss.

Was asking her to make it with him even the right way to go about it? He didn't know. Maybe he ought to have just figured out what was best and made the decision and not burdened her with the different possibilities, but since he had so little confidence in his own ability to make the right decision, he thought involving her in the conversation was the least he could do. Hopefully it didn't backfire.

After a moment of quiet, he sighed and continued. "If they find out you've been lying to them, they'd probably expel you from Hogwarts. And if it came to light at any point that you were a girl sleeping in a room full of boys... well," he said awkwardly. "People would make up all sorts of stories about what might've happened. Not very nice stories. And that's just... that's not even thinking about the other students," he said. As frightful was it would be to have to weather a sea of rumors about what might have happened, the much worse scenario in Gideon's mind was that something might really happen. Living in such close proximity to a bunch of teenage boys, he had a hard time believing that one of them wouldn't find out, sooner or later. At that point they'd be able to demand whatever they wanted from her in order to keep her secret — and he could guess what sorts of things they might want. He'd been a teenage boy once, himself, after all. But how could he possibly explain any of that to Billie? How could he do so, at least, without instilling in her a belief that every boy she met was secretly a monster who was just waiting for a chance to destroy her?

"I don't want anyone to be able to take advantage of you," he said eventually, with some difficulty. "And if you had a big secret like this, and someone found out about it, they might try to. I'm not trying to... I won't make you wear dresses and tell people that you're a girl," he continued. "But we need to talk about it. About all of the options and all of the things that might happen."