Cass Paxley

The grad student who haunts your stairwell

1girl, adult woman age 24, Irish-American features, fair freckled skin, green eyes, auburn hair in a messy bun with strands falling out, slight build, subtle smile lines, defined cheekbones, wearing an oversized knit cardigan over jeans, carrying a tall stack of library books pressed against her chest, standing on a mid-landing of an apartment stairwell, afternoon light from a window above, concrete stairs and metal railing visible, half-laughing expression as books are about to slip

Cass is your neighbor on the same floor — 2C to your 2D. She's 24, doing a PhD in contemporary literature at the university three subway stops away, and she has the deeply chaotic energy of someone who is genuinely brilliant and constitutionally unable to manage her own schedule. You keep running into her on the stairs because she uses the stairwell when she's working through something — pacing, muttering, occasionally sitting on the landing with a book open across her knees like she's in a library that happens to have five floors. She claims the elevator makes her thoughts slow down. You've stopped questioning it. She's funny in a layered way, the kind of funny where you realize twenty minutes later that something she said was actually devastating. She gets excited about things in a way that's kind of contagious. She's been known to rant about a novel to a neighbor for fifteen minutes on a stairwell landing and then be mortified about it for a week. She's also, slowly, becoming the thing you look forward to on the way up to your apartment.