Love Story

1: "Stay Away from Juliet"

It began when she turned 16. Juliet Summers had dreaded the day. Other girls had parties: frilly, beautiful affairs, with ball gowns trailing off their legs, and men crowded around them with the efficiency of packed sardines. Other girls would be the talk of the town for weeks, their every fluttered eyelash and turned ankle whispered about in the cups of likely suitors. Other girls would be beautiful and perfect, if only for one night.

But not Juliet. Juliet would never be beautiful, and could never be perfect. Though certainly, she made up for it by being talk of the town. From the moment she was born, the midwives had spread gossip about the baby that had made Mean Old Man Summers a widower. That is, when they called her a baby at all: the more common words were too awful for Juliet to think about, and they only got worse as she got older. As soon as she could walk, or at least, attempt to walk, word got around from the armies of servants her father hired to care for her: the oversized, misshapen lump that passed for a baby had grown into a deathly looking gargoyle, with a body quite literally too tall and stretched for her bones to support it. One of Juliet's first memories was of the cold steel of braces attached to her limbs to allow her the illusion of supporting her massive frame. It was a sensation she would never lose. Now that she was 16, the kiss of the metal was a more constant companion than her own father, who could barely stand to look at the almost seven foot tall, angular and grinning fiend that fate had given him instead of a child. There would be no ball gowns, no parties, no men crowded around a thing like her. Her father never let her out of the house, let alone invited others in. To even make the suggestion was offensive. And so was the fact that she had reached maturity. Juliet knew he felt these things because she could see them in his eyes in the rare moments when he could stand to acknowledge her.

Secretly, Juliet almost agreed with her father. She would rather not have been born than brave the constant isolation punctuated by staring and carefully hidden horror from legions of carers that characterized her early life. When the carers dried up after the dreadful incident that marked her 13th year, it only got worse. She wished she could die rather than be forced to watch the occasional flashes of merriment and human kindness that she saw from her window whenever one of the neighboring daughters of privilege attained the flower of womanhood.

To escape it, Juliet ran into her mind. In her dreams, waking and asleep, she conjured visions from the few moments of beauty she stole while looking out her window. A ball gown of the most lavish silk; an army of suitors falling at her feet, their flowers and rings forgotten on the floor like so many tributes; and above all, light -- endless light, to make up for the darkness and shadows where the waking world obliged her to hide.

Juliet spent practically all of her sixteenth birthday in one of these reveries, and would have probably never come out, had it not been for the crack at her window. At first, she thought it was a branch. However, when the sound came again, she realized it was too sharp, too quick, and too insistent for that. She crept to her window and looked out, only for something small to sail up from the street below and snap against the glass again. Hesitantly, she undid the window and crept out onto the disused balcony. Her father normally forbade her from using it, but in that moment, her curiosity was too strong for her fear. As she reached the railing and used her metal braces to pull herself up and stare into the street, her eyes roved for a moment before the sound of gasps and stifled shrieks gave her a clue. She looked down.

And she saw him. A boy, no more than a few years older than her at most, with a tough, wiry frame wrapped in corded muscle. His hair was dark and his face seemed to have been carved from marble, or would have been if marble could flash a dazzling, dimpled smile. He was looking up at her in surprise, even as a group of other boys around him tugged at his arms, pointing at her emphatically. As Juliet stared down at him, their eyes met -- her dull, almost brackish brown stare suddenly arrested by the soft, intelligent pools of aquamarine gazing up. For a moment, neither could look away.