Cassiopée's drug relapse

Cassiopée's drug relapse exposes how quickly private distress can become bodily crisis. Following a turbulent weekend at her father's house, she retreats into concealed cannabis and cocaine use, and her friends later recognize the consequences in her appetite, speech, and appearance. The episode is not presented as an isolated lapse: it is tied to the hostility of her family environment, the secrecy surrounding her coping methods, and the painful fact that Dorcas has already seen her friend at the bottom of a similar collapse.

Causes and Hidden Context

Cassiopée returns to her student room after an unpleasant weekend with her father, Ryan, where conflict with her stepmother Ella has left the household tense. Cassiopée regards Ella as malicious, entitled, and unwilling to build a healthy relationship with either her or Theo. Theo, who was only two when Ella entered the family after Ryan's divorce, has grown up watching repeated arguments between Ella and Cassiopée. During the weekend, he chooses to remain with his older sister in her room or in the garden rather than stay near Ryan and Ella, making Cassiopée's substance use part of a larger domestic atmosphere of estrangement rather than a disconnected act of self-destruction.

Ryan recognizes that his children are distant, yet Cassiopée believes he refuses to examine the woman living beside him or to understand the damage caused by the household's conflicts. Her anger is intensified by his passivity: he feels bad about the distance between himself and his children, but does not truly question his own failure to intervene. The episode therefore places the relapse inside an unresolved family structure. Cassiopée waits for Ryan's eventual realization, while simultaneously returning to substances that offer immediate escape from the emotional pressure he has left unaddressed.

The Relapse in the Student Room

When Cassiopée wakes in the student room, Dorcas has already left for class. The empty room gives her privacy to retrieve a cardboard box hidden beneath the bed, a container holding objects she does not want her best friend to know about. The hiding place makes secrecy physical: the relapse begins not with an open request for help but with an object concealed in the shared space of friendship.

She removes a King Kong bong, searches her bag for a packet of cannabis, and takes a deep inhalation. The smoke irritates her throat before settling in her lungs, after which she exhales and repeats the process. The sequence is methodical and repetitive, suggesting that the act has become familiar rather than accidental. A second packet draws her attention. When she identifies it as cocaine, she abandons the bong and prepares the white powder while singing "That Smell" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The cocaine use proceeds in escalating beats. After the first line, Cassiopée smiles; after the second, she giggles; after the third, she drops the tube and stretches out on the floor, cursing. The progression compresses pleasure, disinhibition, and physical collapse into a single morning. The contrast between the playful singing and the final fall gives the scene its particular instability: the ritual is treated as ordinary by the person performing it even as the body reveals its danger.

Recognition by Dorcas and Shelby

The relapse becomes socially visible at a meal with Dorcas and Shelby. Dorcas asks Cassiopée directly whether she has smoked, and Cassiopée nods rapidly, with the careless manner of a child. Dorcas cannot believe that her friend has returned to drugs so soon after managing to avoid them for several months. Her reaction contains both disapproval and helpless concern; she wishes she could remove the rage inhabiting Cassiopée and the sadness striking her, but understands that Cassiopée has already endured a depth of suffering from which even a smile was difficult to recover.

Cassiopée reveals that the relapse has lasted since the beginning of the academic term. This detail changes the scene from a single morning's excess into a concealed recurrence. The drug use has been continuing while her friends remained unaware, and her earlier abstinence proves temporary rather than secure. The admission also clarifies why Dorcas's response is so immediate: she is not discovering an unfamiliar habit but witnessing the return of a pattern she had hoped was over.

The cannabis has a visible physical consequence when Cassiopée suddenly announces that she is hungry. Her tray is already empty because she has finished eating before Dorcas and Shelby have touched their meals. Dorcas hands over her dessert, which Cassiopée seizes and devours under the other women's gaze. Her bloodshot eyes appear ingenuous, while Shelby understands that cannabis has produced an appetite that is almost voracious. The scene turns an ordinary act of friendship into evidence of altered bodily behavior, and Shelby's recollection of painful memories makes even Cassiopée's hunger difficult for her to witness.

Connections to the Novel's Trauma Pattern

Cassiopée's relapse parallels the novel's broader treatment of trauma as something that returns through the body and through repeated behavior. Jungkook's childhood is marked by domestic violence: he is held back by his older brother Ye-jun while their parents argue downstairs, and his father Dong-hyun later instructs him that a man must never cry. In another account, Sunmi remembers Jungkook arriving with a badly injured face, lying that he had been in a school fight, before fleeing home at sixteen and finding refuge with her. These episodes establish a world in which pain is concealed, misnamed, or endured until it erupts.

That pattern gives Cassiopée's hidden box and delayed confession a wider significance. Like Jungkook's false explanation of his injuries, her concealed substances place suffering behind an apparently manageable surface. Yet the novel also distinguishes concealment from permanent isolation. Sunmi welcomes Jungkook when he runs away, Namjoon seeks her help after Jungkook relapses, and Dorcas and Shelby remain present when Cassiopée's behavior becomes undeniable. Support does not erase the relapse, but it changes the meaning of its exposure: the collapse is witnessed rather than left entirely alone.

The novel repeatedly places destructive bodily habits beside gentler forms of contact and care. Jungkook eventually asks Shelby to remain beside him and intertwines their fingers, while Shelby tells him that Kayla's unwanted kiss was a sexual assault because it occurred without his consent. Against this developing language of safety and consent, Cassiopée's cocaine and cannabis use represents an earlier, more solitary relation to the body—one organized by rage, appetite, secrecy, and immediate relief. Her relapse therefore functions as both an individual crisis and a counterpoint to the difficult, imperfect movement toward mutual care elsewhere in the story.

Consequences and Significance

The immediate consequence is physical disorientation: cocaine carries Cassiopée from smiling to giggling to lying on the floor, while cannabis leaves her ravenous and visibly bloodshot. The social consequence is equally important. Dorcas learns that the relapse has been underway since the start of term, and Shelby recognizes that Cassiopée's altered behavior is not simply eccentricity or carelessness. The secret becomes part of the friendships' shared reality, even though the scene offers no completed recovery or definitive resolution.

Cassiopée's drug relapse consequently occupies a tense middle ground between recurrence and possible recognition. It confirms that earlier abstinence has not ended the underlying rage and sadness, yet it also allows those closest to her to perceive the crisis. The episode's force comes from that contradiction: Cassiopée is surrounded by people who care about her, but the substances remain hidden until her body can no longer conceal them. Her relapse makes addiction visible as a symptom of unresolved family pain and as a test of whether friendship can respond without pretending that affection alone is a cure.