Page 5 of Daughters of Sea and Storm

Class dismissed.

“Let the chaos commence in three, two, one...” I muttered to myself.

Right on cue, the backstage door burst open and my best friend Poe came flying into the auditorium.

“Wren, how did you get here so fast?” Poe gasped. “My final was literally next door. Did you teleport or something?”

I smiled. “Ms. Kremer let me go early because I finished my test. And Mr. Pisani asked me to come get things set up for the rehearsal. He has his end of the year faculty meeting after school, so he’s gonna be late.”

“Ooh, good, that means you have time to run lines with me, but first… TA-DA!” She flashed her million-watt smile and pulled a birthday tiara and sash out of her backpack.

“Absolutely not,” I protested, backing away from her, but she completely ignored me.

“Don’t be difficult. You know I’m going to make you wear it anyway, so you might as well bow to the inevitable,” she sang, kissing me on the cheek as she perched the tiara on my head.

Poe Reyes had been my best friend since we were the only two kids in Mrs. O’Connell’s first-grade class to wear glasses. One look at each other’s self-conscious little faces, and we were bonded for life. Of course, a few years later, Poe’s parents got her contacts, whereas I was still pushing my tortoise-shell frames up the bridge of my nose every thirty seconds.

We had also bonded over our unusual first names. My mother said that when I was born, I was scrawny, all eyes, and that I threw my head back when I cried, just like a little baby bird—hence the name. I’d seen a lot of pictures of baby birds since then, and I was pretty sure I should be offended, but my mother swears she meant it “in a cute way,” whatever that means. Poe’s mother, meanwhile, had gone through this kind of rebellious goth phase in her early twenties that she hadn’t quite gotten over when she had Poe, and decided to name her one and only daughter after the American master of Gothic fiction. Poe thought her mother probably regretted it, but also that she would basically rather die than admit it, especially in front of Poe’slola.

Poe was the kind of pretty you usually only saw in magazines—her olive skin was flawless and her long black hair shone like she was some tower-trapped princess who had nothing better to do but sigh with timeless longing while she brushed it a hundred times a day. At least seven boys at Portland High School were hopelessly in love with her—like, the kind of love that results in cringeworthy grand gestures in the middle of crowded cafeterias—but Poe could not have been less interested. She had her sights set on Broadway, and high school boyfriends were just one more distraction on her road to the Tony Awards.

I let her drape the sash over my shoulder with a long-suffering sigh.

“Are you happy now?”

“Delighted,” she said, stepping back to admire my transformation into a mortified birthday princess. “So now that I’ve tortured you appropriately… lines?”

I pulled out one of the chairs onstage and plopped myself into it, flipping open Poe’s script to her scene. She had every line highlighted, and there were several sticky tabs with notes on them stuck to every page. “Poe, why are we bothering? You’ve had this memorized for weeks.”

Poe shrugged, settling into the chair across from me. “It’s different when I’m just saying them to myself. It’s better when someone else reads with me.”

As I stumbled my way through Demetrius’s lines opposite Poe’s Helena, I could feel my cheeks burning, which was stupid, because Poe was the only other person in the room. But I couldn’t help it. I knew the script as well as she did—better, even. As the stage manager, I was constantly on-book for everyone else, feeding them their lines from the house when they flubbed them—which in Poe’s case was never, but in everyone else’s was frequent. As a result, I could likely have jumped up on stage and played any one of their parts, word-perfect. Of course, that would mean overcoming my crippling stage fright, which was definitely not in the cards. That was how I’d fallen into stage management in the first place. Poe had dragged me along to auditions for the fall play our freshman year—I mean,literallydragged me; like, I’m pretty sure there were long scuff marks on the linoleum from my shoes. I managed to stand up in front of the director with the script in my hand without passing out, but not a sound would come out of my mouth. Mr. Pisani took one look at me, legs trembling, hyperventilating, and said, “You know, we’re looking for an assistant stage manager.”

And that had been it. Now I pulled the strings from dark corners of the wings and from the safety of the tech booth where no one could see me. I made magic invisibly, and I loved it.

The rest of the cast began trickling into the theater, and I tossed Poe her script back.

“Congratulations, you’re still memorized,” I told her.

Poe snatched at the script and buried herself in it as though determined to find a spot where she might have screwed up. She wouldn’t find one.

“Mr. Pisani’s notes from the last rehearsal are on the call board!” I called over the chatter of arriving actors, and there was a general groan as people pulled out their scripts and notebooks and congregated around the neatly typed pages pinned to the corkboard. Poe scrambled over to join them and our friend Charlie took her place at the table.

“Just a heads up, Roman is not happy about his costume for the Midsummer scene,” Charlie announced in a weary sort of voice.

I groaned. “Of course he isn’t. What happened?”

Charlie sighed, running a hand through their short blue hair. “Well, he stormed out of his fitting yesterday saying he was going to quit the show if he had to wear ‘that girly ruffled blouse thing.’” Charlie made sure to add enthusiastic air quotes and imitated Roman’s deep voice for good measure.

“It’s not a girly blouse, it’s a poet’s shirt and it fits the time period!” I said.

“That’s what I told him. I even showed him the book we were using for historical accuracy. Would you like to know his thoughtful and measured reply?”

“Probably not?”

Charlie pressed their mouth against their palm and made a long, loud fart noise that echoed across the theater and made several people giggle.

“That, of course, is an approximation,” Charlie said, rolling their eyes.

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