Stéphanie and Simon's On-Again, Off-Again, Hurtful Romance

Stéphanie and Simon Rotier’s romance is an on-again, off-again relationship whose public appearance as a couple contrasts with its private imbalance. Repeated breakups and reconciliations keep them together, but Simon’s secrecy and disregard for Stéphanie’s expectations leave her caught between recognizing the harm and remaining attached to him.

A Couple by Reputation

By the time Stéphanie is preparing for her exams and summer holiday, she and Simon are widely regarded as a couple. That status persists through breakups, emotional upheavals, reunions, and separations, which have become the relationship’s customary pattern. The label seems settled from the outside, but it does not mean they share a stable or mutually acknowledged partnership.

Stéphanie’s thoughts repeatedly return to Simon even while she is under pressure to study, pass the baccalauréat, and earn the holiday she has been promised. She wonders what he is doing and questions him when they meet at school. Their exchanges quickly turn hostile. She is also jealous of Virginie Vanier, who is spending time around him, but tries to push the distraction aside and concentrate on her exams, a car, and the Basque Country trip. Her imagined holiday includes Simon, making the plans feel bound up with the relationship rather than simply with travel.

The California Departure

The summer plans collapse when Simon tells Stéphanie and Clémence that he will leave for a month in Carmel, California. His older cousin Julien had been due to make the trip to the West Coast, but after breaking his leg roller skating, Simon takes his place. The visit, arranged well in advance, will be with a family of psychologists. Simon sees it as an opportunity he cannot afford to refuse, and his departure is only three days away when he explains the change.

The timing makes the news especially difficult for Stéphanie: she and Clémence had organized their plans around Simon, while he had known about his departure for a week. He apologizes and says he did not know how to tell them. His regret does not undo the delay or the practical disappointment. Clémence responds with anger, and Stéphanie asks whether he is simply abandoning them. Simon’s explanation establishes the immediate cause of the broken holiday plans, but it also brings the relationship’s recurring problem into focus: he makes consequential decisions without telling Stéphanie promptly, while she is left to absorb their effects.

Attraction and Reconciliation

Stéphanie’s anger coexists with attraction. Seeing Simon sit before them in a white polo shirt, hiding behind his glasses, she hates him and still finds him cute. That contradiction is familiar to her: for nearly two years, she has experienced him as both desirable and deeply frustrating. They have broken up about a dozen times, including after she caught him kissing other girls at parties. She also knows him to lie, take money from his parents, use TCE, and fail to keep his word.

The pattern is sustained in part because Stéphanie has usually initiated the reconciliations. She frames their repeated return to each other as the pull of an intense, contradictory love, borrowing a model from the television couple Dylan and Kelly in Beverly Hills, 90210. That romantic explanation helps her make sense of the attraction, but it does not change the conduct she describes. After Simon’s announcement, she calls him an asshole and is asked whether she will leave him; her answer is that she cannot. The inability to end the relationship is not evidence that the hurt has disappeared. It shows how attachment persists alongside her judgment of him.

The Unequal Terms of the Relationship

Stéphanie later describes a relationship with little public or social recognition. Simon never properly introduced her as his girlfriend, and at his home she felt that she might as well have been a boy. They did not go out together as a couple, and their meetings were not integrated into either person’s wider circle of friends. He did not take her to a restaurant or give up a party to see her. She recalls that their intimacy happened on his terms and that he continued seeing other girls while they were together.

These details recast the couple status established earlier. Stéphanie and Simon may be understood by others as a pair, but Simon does not behave as though he is building a shared public life with her. Their time together is separated from friends and ordinary dates, while his other relationships and broken promises repeatedly undermine trust. Stéphanie’s conclusion that he did not care follows from this accumulation of omissions and choices, rather than from the California trip alone.

What the Cycle Reveals

The romance is shaped by the distance between Stéphanie’s investment and Simon’s actions. Her imagined holiday, jealousy, questioning, and repeated efforts to reconcile show that she wants more from the connection than its intermittent meetings provide. Simon’s delayed disclosure about California crystallizes that mismatch: even when their plans include him, he does not tell her promptly that he will be absent.

The relationship therefore has no simple turning point in the available scenes. Stéphanie sees his behavior clearly enough to name it as hurtful, yet remains unable to end the attachment. The cycle of separation and return continues to make them look like a couple without supplying the trust, acknowledgment, and shared consideration that such a label might imply. Its significance lies in that unresolved contradiction: Stéphanie’s attraction does not erase her recognition of how little care Simon has shown.