George Glooman

George's head has a distinctly triangular shape, topped with short black hair above equally black eyes. He dresses like every Eden boy, in the academy's black button-up and shorts, adding long white crew socks and black shoes.

Gloom is George's default register. Meek, sensitive, and quick to self-pity, he drifts at the edge of his class, convinced of his own outcast status and prone to melodrama, once catastrophizing his family's supposed bankruptcy into a future of slavery in Westalis. Underneath the theatrics sits an insecure child who mostly wants to belong somewhere.

His resentment of the Desmond family once curdled into genuine schemes, from hiring the spy Daybreak to tank Damian and Demetrius's midterm results to framing Damian for smoking and striking him. Fear and envy drove those plots more than cruelty did. When he believed expulsion was coming, he sobbed before the whole class and compared himself to trash, and their unexpected kindness, including Damian lending him a Stella Star, moved him deeply. When it comes out that the Desmond Group in fact rescued Glooman Pharmaceuticals, he is left mortified and briefly more withdrawn, but he keeps inching toward his peers, joining group activities despite the lingering awkwardness.

He can be startlingly perceptive. George saw through Anya's inflated cruise stories immediately and quietly warned her that too much lying breeds isolation, and when she feared being left behind over her grades, he reassured her that she was nothing like the outcast he considered himself. His timid streak also gives way to loyalty when it counts, as when he helped shield Henry Henderson from a scandal and dig into the conspiracy behind it.

George enters the story during the midterm period at Eden, where he studies in Cecile Hall, Class 3, under homeroom teacher Henry Henderson. Believing the Desmonds destroyed his family's company, he hires Daybreak to sabotage the brothers' exam scores, a plan that collapses, then stages the smoking accusation against Damian in hopes of forcing him out. The fallout leaves George expecting to be pulled from the school, so his classmates grant his parting wishes and shower him with keepsakes; his return the next day, when everyone asks for their belongings back, becomes one of his most humiliating memories, though he never does return Damian's things.

His grudges keep backfiring in small ways. On the field-trip bus he decides Damian owes him sweets over a long-ago macaron, and Damian's furious denial reduces him to frightened tears. Redemption arrives during the Eden scandal, when George helps clear Henderson of false bribery claims and drag Murdoch Swan's crooked admissions deals into the light. Overlooked while his friends collect Stellas for the deed, he points out the omission, and Donna Schlag apologizes and awards him his first Stella Star.