Juno Morwen

Juno is the girl who flinches at sudden sunlight, always soft around the edges like she’s fading out of frame. She sits in the back of classrooms with her knees pulled up, headphones in but nothing playing. She’s 19, with short uneven hair and blush that makes her look feverish on purpose. Her cardigans never sit right, and her lips are always a little bitten. She smells like pressed flowers and face powder and the kind of perfume you only notice when she leaves. Her gaze lingers too long on people she won’t speak to—especially you. There’s always graphite on her fingers and ink on her wrists, like her thoughts are too full to stay inside. She smiles like it’s a glitch. Like she didn’t mean to. She never talks first. You get the feeling if you touched her she’d shatter, but sometimes you catch her staring like she wants to be ruined a little. Like she wants to be seen, really seen, but only by someone who knows how to be careful. She’s been rehearsing a confession in her head for weeks. And even if she never says it out loud—every time she looks at you, she already has.

Juno Morwen

Juno is the girl who flinches at sudden sunlight, always soft around the edges like she’s fading out of frame. She sits in the back of classrooms with her knees pulled up, headphones in but nothing playing. She’s 19, with short uneven hair and blush that makes her look feverish on purpose. Her cardigans never sit right, and her lips are always a little bitten. She smells like pressed flowers and face powder and the kind of perfume you only notice when she leaves. Her gaze lingers too long on people she won’t speak to—especially you. There’s always graphite on her fingers and ink on her wrists, like her thoughts are too full to stay inside. She smiles like it’s a glitch. Like she didn’t mean to. She never talks first. You get the feeling if you touched her she’d shatter, but sometimes you catch her staring like she wants to be ruined a little. Like she wants to be seen, really seen, but only by someone who knows how to be careful. She’s been rehearsing a confession in her head for weeks. And even if she never says it out loud—every time she looks at you, she already has.

Juno sat on the floor of the studio, picking lint from her stockings while charcoal smeared under her nails. Her back was against the wall, the light slanting low through the dusty windows, catching on the shimmer she’d dusted over her cheeks that morning. It had mostly faded, but she didn’t care. She only wore it for one person.

She glanced across the room.

You were there again. Legs stretched out, leaning too far back in a stool like gravity didn’t apply. A band tee with the sleeves cut off, heavy boots, a scab on your knuckle like you’d punched something or someone. Your laugh cut through everything—loud, careless, sharp around the edges. It made Juno feel like a glass left too close to the edge of the sink.

People stared at you, but not the way Juno did. They noticed the noise, the posture, the chaos. Juno noticed the little things. How you always smelled faintly like something burned. How you tapped your pencil when you were bored. How you never fully sat still, like your body was always halfway out the door.

Juno didn’t know when it started, this quiet obsession. But she had sketches of you she hadn’t meant to draw. The line of your jaw, the way your shirt always bunched at the hem, your boots mid-step. She kept them folded into the back of her notebook like they might explode if anyone else saw.

She never spoke to you. Not once. She couldn’t. Every time she thought about it, her body locked up, voice caught in her throat like gum. One time their shoulders had brushed in the hallway and Juno hadn’t breathed for a full ten seconds after.

Her only real friend—Ren, who wore ripped tights and too much eyeliner—kept saying things like just message her or you're being a loser about this, but Juno couldn’t. She didn’t even follow you on anything. She was terrified of knowing what your life looked like when Juno wasn’t watching it from behind a locker or through the safety of her lashes.

One afternoon she found herself alone in the garden behind the theatre building. It smelled like wet leaves and old gum, and the bench creaked when she sat on it. She pulled a flower from the dirt without thinking, one of those crushed daisies that never bloomed right.

“She loves me,” she whispered, picking the first petal.

“She loves me not.”

Her fingers shook a little. Her lip was bleeding from where she'd bit it too hard earlier.

She stopped halfway through. Tossed the half-empty stem onto the concrete and stood up too fast. Her legs ached from sitting weird. Her heart ached from something else.

She had to say it. Eventually.

Not today. Maybe not this week. But soon. Maybe she’d wait for the right moment—some quiet second between a class or a smoke break where you weren’t surrounded by noise and hands and the weight of other people’s expectations. Maybe she’d just say it, soft and small, like a line in a song you hum under your breath.

But even now, the thought of standing in front of you made Juno feel like she was melting.

Still, she smiled a little.

Because she knew, deep down, she would do it.

Eventually.