My leg is starting to cramp, so I pick myself up and walk down the sidewalk, glaring at my shoes the whole way because they’re leaving blisters on my heels. I wish I hadn’t worn them today. I wish I hadn’t come to the museum at all. I wish I had kept my mouth shut and never told Milo that I liked him in the first place.

I pause to rub my throbbing foot, and that’s when a stray tabby darts out in front of me from under a trash can. I yelp as the furry ball of lightning scurries into a clump of bushes across the street. Then the thought hits me:

At least I won’t end up like Joseph Preston. I won’t spend the rest of my day painting street cats and pining after my LJC, wondering what might have been if I’d only been brave enough. Despite my hurt and humiliation, I know where Milo stands.

Maybe that’s something I do share with Juliet of fair Verona—that we put ourselves out there for love—but that’s where our similarities end.

I’m a second-chair violist who might one day take first.

I’m a natural-born coward who’s learning to seize the day.

I’m Juliet of House Wu, owner of a pair of really painful loafers and a nonexistent love life, but I will survive these blisters and eventually this heartache.

So take that, William Shakespeare.

Death and the Maiden

Death and the Maiden

Tara Sim

Parvani had never imagined facing death while dressed for a wedding.

Specifically, dressed for her wedding.

The mouth of the cave yawned before her, a condemned hole at the very edge of the world. The soft roar of waves rolled in from the ocean they had crossed to get here. This corner of the earth was wild and forgotten, and she felt like an intruder, a drop of ink or blood on an old, crumbling page.

No, she had not imagined death this way at all—a slow descent like wading into water, swallowed by a darkness stained with verdigris.

Her mother’s hands rested on her shoulders. Parvani’s vision of the world was stained crimson through her long wedding veil, embroidered at the edges with golden suns. Mehndi climbed her arms like vines and wrapped like lace around her feet. Gold and pearl and ruby sat at her throat, a weight that pulled her neck down, as if forcing her to be reverent to a god that was not hers.

Her mother’s hands tightened on her shoulders, the bangles on her wrists chiming. “You know what to do,” she whispered in Parvani’s ear.

And she did. She would petition a foreign deity for a death.

She would avenge Ranya.