Ilse is kind of a train wreck sometimes. But she's like, a really alluring, beautiful train wreck that sort of convinces you to hop on and join the party even though you're speeding down a mountain and the tracks are about to end. She's got six piercings- two in each ear, one in her navel, and one in her collarbone, the latter of which tends to get infected. She's got a cat and a parakeet, though they're only alive because Martha feeds them when Ilse inevitably forgets. She smokes cloves, even though the rest of them outgrew that years ago.
She has the messiest bedroom of anyone Moritz knows. It's covered in clothes and photographs and different mementos from their shared childhood. She keeps something from the outdoors in a vase on the counter of her loft at all times. She's a morning person and a night owl. She's allergic to oranges. She loves word games and psychoanalysis ("Who do you think would win if we were all in the Hunger Games?") She's ridiculously tall. When asked to describe herself in one word during tenth grade Honors English, she wrote "off" on a slip of paper and walked out of the room for a smoke.
She is the inventor of the Oprah Game, wherein one character is Oprah and gets to ask the other player all the nosy, violating questions they want. One night Moritz asked her when she'd had her first kiss. She was eleven, she said. Her father took her to meet a "friend" of his. Her favorite flower is the sunflower. She would only wear sarongs for the rest of her life if given the option. She pretends that she does yoga, but she really just wears yoga pants and stretches her hamstrings once a week. She's quit smoking twenty-three different times.
She's very sensitive about dropping out of college- Moritz supposes it's a social thing, when one of them starts talking about that incident in junior year and she has to remind them that she was doing a photo shoot for a McCall's catalog that weekend, that she lived off-campus. Once, he gave her a pamphlet for a radio management course at uni with her Christmas present, and she didn't speak to him for a month. She can make friends with nearly anyone anywhere. She hates planning vacations ahead of time.
She kept his sweater the night she took his virginity, the one his Nonny knitted for him that Christmas. She knows he knows it's his, and that's okay. Sometimes it's the only hope he can hold on to that involves an Ilse Stiefel. Her phone background is the face Hanschen made when they forced him to try pad thai for the first time. Her middle name is Julia. She has a devotion to the Bulgarian football league that no one can explain. She idolized Princess Diana as a child. Her favorite color is purple.
The pieces of Ilse are scattered all over. They are everywhere she is.
All Moritz has ever wanted to do is catch a few and keep them.