Cecilia shuffles a deck of cards over and over again for almost the entire duration of our interview. It’s her new hobby. I haven’t seen her anywhere in the past week without her deck of cards. She practices over and over again to keep her hands busy at the tables in the library cafe, or after we all eat dinner together, or in my room while I’m interviewing her. It’s a great habit, and it’s nice to have a deck of cards handy. Cecilia and I and the rest of our friends been playing card games we know from childhood—simple ones, but relatively violent, like Spit and Speed and Egyptian Rat Screw. It’s hard to interview someone when you’re snatching and slapping cards, though, so we don’t play now, but Cecilia is perfectly happy just to shuffle her deck.

I ask her if she likes to eat breakfast. She says sometimes, but not necessarily. Only when she wakes up in time. She hates breakfast for dinner, though. We talk for a while about our opinions on the various dining halls at Smith. Cecilia tells me she avoids eating at Tyler because the rugby team eats there after practice and stink up the entire dining hall.

Cecilia and I both have perpetually messy rooms. She tells me that it’s embarrassing to have people over when your room is messy, because then you have to clean your room in front of them. Most of the time, when she has people over, she just shoves everything in her closet.

I ask if she has siblings. Two sisters, she says. The older, Sophie, is a Scorpio sun and Sagittarius moon, twenty-five, and in grad school. She lives in LA and she’s really good at picking up hobbies, Cecilia tells me. She’s really into communal living, acupuncture, gardening, and astrology. The younger, Monica, is a senior in high school. She has a boyfriend, who is weird, but kind of cute. Ugly-cute. Monica is a Cancer, but Cecilia doesn’t know the rest of her chart because she doesn’t talk about it. She likes Latin, psychology, and classics.

As I took notes, Cecilia leaned over my notebook and made fun of my handwriting. “You write like the girl in that movie who capitalizes everything because it’s unfair to the other letters. You’re such a Marxist.”

I protest that I am nothing like the girl in Paper Towns, who capitalizes random words in a sentence, while I capitalize every single letter. I am a Marxist, though, but I muse that it would make more sense for someone who capitalizes everything to be a capitalist.

Cecilia asks me if I have an inner monologue. I tell her that I do, that my brain is always talking. Cecilia’s not sure if she does. She says that she has to always vocalize her thoughts, that even if she’s alone, she’ll talk to herself. We’re really different in that way. I think that there’s a lot that I think but don’t say.

When I asked Cecilia if I could interview her, she asked me if she could lie about her answers. I told her that was okay, and that maybe I would learn more from the lies she chooses to tell than simply the stuff that happens to her. I can’t attest to the truth of Cecilia’s words, but I hope I’ve been true to her character.