Cassiopée

Cassiopée is a university student whose life is shaped by divided loyalties: she is deeply attached to her friends, fiercely concerned for her younger brother Theo, and repeatedly pulled back toward the anger and exhaustion produced by her family. Her story combines secrecy, addiction, sleepless fear, and fierce affection. She initially hides cannabis and other troubling objects from Dorcas, yet she also becomes one of the group's most direct protectors, most emotionally responsive friends, and most outspoken advocates when Shelby is endangered. By the later stages of the narrative, Cassiopée has begun to recover a sense of agency and happiness without pretending that her family history has stopped hurting her.

Identity and Family Background

Cassiopée is closely associated with Dorcas and Shelby at the university, but her emotional life extends beyond campus. She remains tied to her father and her younger brother Theo, even though visits to that household leave her depleted and consumed by anger. Her stepmother Ella is described as opportunistic and manipulative rather than genuinely caring. Each time Cassiopée visits her father and Theo, she returns feeling emptied, suggesting that family contact is not simply nostalgic or affectionate but a recurring source of psychological cost.

Her relationship with Theo nevertheless contains genuine warmth. When she arrives at her father's home, he bursts through the door with the energy of a living whirlwind and jumps into her arms, prompting her to laugh with pleasure. That welcome explains why Cassiopée continues to return despite the hostility surrounding the household: Theo represents an attachment she refuses to abandon. The bond is therefore double-edged. Her love for her brother draws her back, while Ella's manipulation and the wider family atmosphere leave her angry and emotionally exhausted.

Sleeplessness, Secrecy, and Substance Use

Cassiopée's private life is marked by vigilance. After waking in the middle of the night because of a bad feeling, she unsuccessfully tries to reach Theo and decides to wait until morning before calling again. She spends the rest of the night watching the environment around her and envying Dorcas, who sleeps peacefully. Unable to remain indoors with her thoughts, she goes outside with a joint between her lips. Like Jungkook and Shelby, she cannot return to the comforting arms of sleep, making her insomnia part of a wider atmosphere of distress rather than an isolated habit.

Her cannabis use is also concealed. When Dorcas's bed is already made and Cassiopée realizes that her roommate has gone to class, she retrieves a box hidden beneath the bed, a container filled with objects she does not want her best friend to discover. Among them is a King Kong bong. She takes cannabis from her bag, prepares it, inhales deeply, and continues smoking in sequence despite the harshness of the smoke in her throat. The scene exposes both dependence and concealment: the ritual is familiar, controlled, and private, but it is also organized around keeping Dorcas from learning the truth. When she later sees someone who may have been smoking, her immediate, unfiltered question is whether that person has smoked, a blunt directness that contrasts with the secrets she keeps about herself.

The narrative does not leave Cassiopée in that state. Later, conversation establishes that drugs no longer form part of her daily life. The change does not erase the household that helped produce her anger, but it removes one weight from her shoulders. Her recovery is consequently presented less as a miraculous transformation than as a regained ability to hold her head high and smile openly while the underlying family pain remains real.

Friendships and Emotional Protection

Cassiopée's friendship with Dorcas is intimate enough to include concealment, conflict, reassurance, and physical comfort. When Dorcas sees her again, she immediately runs toward her and embraces her while crying and repeatedly apologizing. Dorcas responds by gently stroking her back, and Cassiopée experiences a sense of calm. The exchange reveals that their friendship is not merely social companionship. It functions as a place where guilt can be expressed and distress can be received without immediate judgment.

Her bond with Shelby is equally protective, though it often takes a more active form. Cassiopée notices when Shelby is emotionally withdrawn, pulls her to her feet, and offers her a fluorescent red shot during a gathering at Maison Upsilon. She is also attentive to Shelby's difficulty with attention: within the larger student group, she helps create occasions of shared pleasure while Shelby remains uncomfortable at becoming the center of attention. When the two friends meet with Dorcas for an afternoon of conversation, Cassiopée shows them a new sunflower tattoo on her left arm. The image moves Dorcas to tears, and Cassiopée's reaction turns the tattoo into a shared emotional sign rather than a private decoration.

Cassiopée's concern becomes more forceful when Shelby reports that another woman has acted outrageously toward her. Cassiopée reacts with immediate disbelief and asks whether Shelby will file a complaint, treating the matter as a wrong that requires public action rather than quiet endurance. Later, when Shelby appears in court, Cassiopée sits beside her with Dorcas and Namjoon. Her presence is not ornamental: it turns friendship into witness, solidarity, and protection at the moment when Shelby must confront the legal consequences of her trauma.

Cassiopée Within the Student Group

Cassiopée helps give the university friend group its comic energy and its emotional momentum. She creates the Christmas group chat and repeatedly pushes the others toward celebration. At the student house, she proposes a party at Maison Upsilon while Dorcas and Namjoon look doubtful; Jungkook and Shelby, newly reconciled, laugh at the idea. Her enthusiasm can irritate or overwhelm the quieter members, but it also prevents the group from becoming organized solely around injury and crisis.

Her social role extends into shared play. During a snowball fight, Jungkook and Namjoon pursue Shelby, Dorcas, and Cassiopée after the women run away as though their lives depended on it. At another meal, Cassiopée debates drawing techniques with Shelby while Dorcas talks with Namjoon and Jungkook quietly watches Shelby, placing Cassiopée inside the ordinary rhythms of intimacy that make the group feel like a community. She joins picnics, reading, and painting sessions in the park, and she is present when Chen embraces the younger members of the group after they approach him in the street.

Cassiopée also takes part in the group's mythic and theatrical imagination. In one performance, Dorcas portrays Eurydice while Cassiopée represents Athena, the goddess of strategic warfare. The choice suits her role: she is affectionate and impulsive, but she is also alert to danger, quick to assess threats, and willing to confront them. Her friendships therefore combine playfulness with a practical ethic of defense.

Love, Recovery, and Later Stability

Cassiopée is not only a witness to Shelby and Jungkook's relationship; she helps register its meaning for the group. When the couple reunites, she and Dorcas smile at once on seeing them comfort each other, while Namjoon remains angry because of what has recently happened. At the group's usual table, Cassiopée is ready to celebrate their relationship, even though the attention makes Shelby uncomfortable. She later explains that she wants Shelby to be happy and that Shelby seems more open and less cold than before, attributing part of that change to the support of the whole group and especially to Jungkook.

Her own romantic future also becomes a source of hope. Cassiopée speaks of a girlfriend with whom she gets along wonderfully, and Dorcas is reassured that her best friend may find happiness too. The relationship matters because it arrives alongside, rather than after the complete disappearance of, her family troubles. Cassiopée has not forgotten the father she has not seen for some time, but she is no longer allowing that pain, or her former drug use, to occupy every part of her daily life.

Her movement toward stability is visible in departures as well as reunions. When she leaves to visit friends from high school in Miami, she says goodbye to the others and boards the train with sadness. She is happy to return to the city where she was born and spent her childhood, yet grieves because the one person she most wants to see will not be there. The scene preserves her characteristic emotional complexity: joy and loss coexist instead of resolving into a single mood.

Narrative Role and Significance

Cassiopée embodies recovery through connection. Her concealed bong, sleepless nights, and anger after family visits show how easily care can coexist with self-destruction; her embrace with Dorcas, defense of Shelby, bond with Theo, and later drug-free confidence show how those same capacities for attachment can become resources for change. She is neither reduced to addiction nor purified into a flawless friend. The narrative keeps both sides visible: she hides objects from the person closest to her, yet runs toward friends when they need comfort; she is wounded by family, yet continues to protect Theo; she seeks escape through cannabis, yet eventually walks with her head held high.

That balance gives Cassiopée a distinctive function in the ensemble. Shelby's recovery is often expressed through trauma, testimony, and guarded intimacy; Jungkook's through violence, guilt, and the difficult learning of tenderness. Cassiopée offers a parallel but quieter pattern in which friendship, romantic possibility, and the gradual abandonment of drugs make ordinary life imaginable again. Her ending is not a declaration that the past has vanished. It is the more credible achievement of remaining connected, acknowledging pain, and beginning to live beyond the habits that once carried it.