Chapter 1. Maggie
It's morning. The left side of my face throbbed—a dull, familiar ache that
had become my alarm clock for the past three days. I was getting out of my bed,
still groggy, didn't even brush yet. But my stomach grumbled louder, drowning
out everything else.
What's in the fridge? Nothing.
"Mom???"
"Yes honey?"
"The fridge is empty!"
"Oh! Sorry, your dad isn't home yet, night shift. I'll ask him to pick
something on the way."
"Haa! I'm already hungry!!!!"
"Then, you can go yourself! Take the money on the TV stand."
The suggestion hit like a slap. Go outside. As if it were that simple. As if
I could just walk down to the corner store like I used to, like nothing had
changed, like people wouldn't stare.
"Oh.. gee thanks. But no, I'm not gonna go outside. Anymore!"
That last word slipped out before I could stop it. Anymore. It hung in the
air between us, heavy with everything I wasn't saying.
"Honey! It's already 3 days, that bruise would've healed by now."
She said it so casually, like the bruise was the problem. Like a fading
purple smudge on my cheekbone was all that stood between me and the world. She
didn't understand—couldn't understand—that the bruise wasn't what kept me
inside. It was just easier to let her think that. Easier than explaining that
every time I thought about stepping through that door, my chest tightened and
my hands started to shake. The bruise would fade. What happened to put it there
wouldn't.
I got back into bed, pulling the covers over my head.
What if I hadn't woken up?
The thought surfaced like poison, the way it had been doing lately.
Uninvited. Unwanted. But persistent, always there, waiting in the quiet
moments. Each time it came back, it felt a little less shocking, a little more
familiar. Like an old friend I never wanted to make.
Then I tried to close my eyes. Wanted to sleep again, or stay there like
that forever. Just exist in the dark behind my eyelids where nothing could
reach me.
But it doesn't work. Sleep was a luxury I'd lost somewhere along the way. My
body was exhausted, but my mind refused to shut down, replaying everything on
an endless loop.
I reached under my pillow and took out my diary. It was a thin notebook, its
corners worn soft from being gripped too tightly. It wasn't filled with
memories—not the kind other girls wrote about, anyway. No crushes, no inside
jokes, no excitement about dances or college parties. Just my life struggling.
What I went through these past three years since I came here for college.
I flipped through the pages without really reading them. I already knew what
they said. The words were just evidence, proof that I wasn't imagining it all.
People around me always stared at me strangely. Every corner felt like a
nightmare waiting for me to come inside and—
I couldn't finish the thought. I slammed the diary shut.
The silence in my room was suffocating. The walls felt closer than they had
a minute ago. Staying here wasn't working. Leaving wasn't an option. But
maybe...
I stood up, my legs unsteady beneath me.
"Mom! Can I—can I go to Grandma's place?"
There was a pause from the other room. I could picture her face, the
confusion already forming.
"Haa? Why, honey?"
"What about the rest of your semester? It's just one semester
left!!"
One semester. She said it like it was nothing. Like I could just
white-knuckle my way through another few months of hell because the finish line
was visible. Like time healed anything other than bruises.
All the struggle my parents went through to get me here. The documents, the
savings account they'd bled dry, the apartment in a neighborhood they could
barely afford. My father literally slept in his workplace—a cot in the back
room of the warehouse, surrounded by boxes and fluorescent lights that buzzed
all night. Many days without proper rest, his back aching, his hands calloused,
all so I could have what they never did. Opportunity. A future. A better life,
or whatever hollow promise they'd been sold.
But all in vain.
The thought sat in my chest like a stone. All of it—every sacrifice, every
extra shift, every time my mother stretched a meal to feed three when it
should've fed two—all of it for nothing. Because their daughter couldn't even
make it to the end. Couldn't even last one more semester.
And it wasn't even one thing I could fight. Class bullies? I could've
knocked their teeth out. I'd done it before, almost—came close enough to taste
the satisfaction of it. But an entire campus? An entire country? What could I
do against that?
Whenever I went outside, people would stare at me like dirt. Like I was
something they'd stepped in and couldn't scrape off their shoe. Some looked at
me like I wasn't even human, even though we had the same facial structure, the
same body, the same two arms and two legs. But somehow, in their eyes, I was
fundamentally other. Less than. Wrong in a way that went deeper than
appearance, in a way I couldn't fix no matter how much I changed myself.
A face pale as paper. Red eyes like a demon—that's what one kid called me
once, and the name stuck, whispered behind hands and snickered across hallways.
A little bit of sunlight could give me burn marks, angry red welts that would
throb for days. I am albino.
Three words that explained everything and nothing. A medical condition, my
parents called it. A curse, others implied. A joke. A monster. A ghost.
Something to be feared or pitied or studied from a safe distance.
What can I say? I was born ugly. Not an idol. Not even close to whatever
standard they worshipped here. Even back home, what I got was pity. At least
there, people had the decency to look away. Here, they looked too long, too
hard, measuring me against something I could never be.
I was supposed to be worth it. Their investment. Their hope.
Instead, I was this: a girl who couldn't leave her bedroom, who flinched at
sounds, who wanted to disappear. A failed experiment in a better life.
My only dream—I pressed my palm against my chest, feeling my heart beat
beneath my ribs—was to experience life with joy. That's all. Not success, not
wealth, not even love. Just joy. The simple, uncomplicated kind. The kind other
people seemed to stumble into without even trying.
So my lifetime goal became to go somewhere far away. Like far, far away.
Somewhere no one knew me, somewhere I could start over completely. Even if I
wouldn't be able to come back. Even if it meant never seeing them again. Maybe
especially then. So my mom and dad wouldn't have to suffer because of me
anymore.
They talked cheerfully every day in front of me, voices bright and
determined, like if they just said the right words, believed hard enough, I
could be fixed. Motivated. Saved. But I saw them cry. Many times. Late at night
when they thought I was asleep. In the morning before I woke up, red-eyed and
pretending they weren't. In the hallway, holding each other, silent tears
streaming down faces they tried to hide from me.
For me! Because of me!
Why? Why did I have to be the weight they carried? Why couldn't I just be
normal, easy, happy? Why did my existence have to be the thing that broke them?
"Mom, I—" My voice came out apologetic, dropped like flowing water
on plants, gentle and desperate. "I can't anymore!"
I broke down. Not crying—no tears came, they'd dried up somewhere along the
way—but my voice carried the sadness, heavy and cracked and full of everything
I'd been holding in. I couldn't stay in that room anymore, couldn't be alone
with those thoughts. I hid my face and moved to the next room where my mom was.
She was crying.
The moment she saw me, she opened her arms and I fell into them. She hugged
me tight, like she could hold all my broken pieces together through sheer force
of will.
I sobbed.
"Please, don't cry, honey!" Her voice shook even as she said it.
"Let's talk things through. Father will come home soon. Let's eat and talk
it out. Please—" She pulled back just enough to look at my face, her hands
on my shoulders.
"Please, don't hide things from me. I know all along, you have pain in
your heart."
We hugged each other and cried. Real crying this time, the kind that came
from somewhere deep and necessary. Her tears soaked my hair. Mine disappeared
into her shoulder. For a moment, we were just two people who loved each other
and didn't know how to fix anything.
The doorbell rang.
We both froze, pulling apart and wiping at our faces.
"Father?" I asked, hope flickering despite everything.
Mom went to check, then called back, "Courier!"
"Courier??" I echoed. We weren't expecting anything.
"Who's it from?"
"Wait here, I'll pick it up, honey."
"Okay."
I thought my tears had long dried up, wrung out from years of crying into
pillows and shower water and the silent darkness of 3 AM. But when I saw my
mom's crying face—the redness around her eyes, the wet trails on her cheeks,
the way she tried to smile through it all—they flowed again. Like God had given
me secret reservoirs for each type of sadness. One for my own pain. Another,
deeper one, for watching the people I loved hurt because of me.
I wiped at my face with my sleeve, listening to her footsteps padding toward
the door, the click of the lock, the muffled exchange of voices.
"It's for you, honey!" Mom came back holding a package, her
tear-stained face now confused. "Do you have any friends?"
"No?" The word came out uncertain, almost a question itself. I
wasn't close enough with anyone to send me letters. Not here. Not anywhere,
really.
"Then, let's see what it is."
My hands trembled as I took it from her. The weight of it felt important
somehow, official. I tore open the packaging and found an envelope inside.
Plain, unmarked except for my name printed across the front.
I opened it and saw two things.
One was a graduation certificate from my college. My name printed in formal
script, the seal embossed and official-looking. I stared at it, numb. They were
letting me graduate? Just like that? Without the final semester? Or maybe this
was some kind of early certificate, though that didn't make sense.
The other was an acceptance certificate for a new project related to my
studies.
Project Sky.
The name alone made my heart skip. I read it twice. Three times. The words
swam in front of my eyes but stayed the same each time.
I'd always had high scores. Perfect grades, actually. Not because I was
brilliant or passionate or any of the things professors liked to praise. But
because my situation never left me free. Idle hands, idle mind—that's when the
darkness crept in. Always, bad thoughts came whenever I was doing nothing. So I
studied. I worked. I filled every empty moment with equations and essays and
research, anything to keep my brain too busy to turn against itself.
But I studied other things too. Things that weren't assigned. Parallel
universes. Time travel. Space research. All as a hobby—if you could call an
obsession a hobby. The library became my sanctuary, those dusty corners where
the theoretical physics books lived. Empty study rooms after lectures,
scribbling calculations on whiteboards that no one else would see. My room at
home whenever I couldn't sleep or had nothing else to do, which was most
nights. Pages and pages of notes.
Is it related to this?
My fingers tightened on the certificate. Project Sky.
"What is it?" Mom leaned over my shoulder, trying to read.
"Project Sky? What is it?"
"Don't know, Mom!"
I dug deeper into the envelope. There was something else—another paper
folded three times, tucked so neatly against the side that I hadn't found it at
first. I unfolded it carefully.
"It says… it's from Professor Laura."
"Professor Laura?"
"She's my physics professor."
The only person kind enough to at least recommend me research materials
outside the syllabus because she liked space and stuff just like me.
We didn't talk much. Couldn't, really—I was too awkward, too aware of how
people looked at me even in the relative safety of the library. But we bumped
into each other many times there, both of us gravitating toward the same dusty
sections. She never stared. Never asked questions. Just nodded sometimes, like
we shared a secret understanding.
Then suddenly one day, she came to me and put a big book down on my desk
with a loud thud and just left. No explanation. No greeting. Just the book.
There it was. It had some basic theories to feed our curiosity. Not the dry
textbook stuff they made us memorize for exams, but the real questions. The big
ones. It linked theory and actually proven stuff. Like parallel universes and
time travel—that's how I got interested in those topics too. Before that, I'd
only read about space, the Big Bang, black holes, the observable universe. Long
ago, these were just theories as well, wild ideas that people dismissed. But
now, these are proven. Real. Possible.
Professor Laura knew that's what I needed. Not just facts, but
possibilities.
"What does it say?" Mom asked, leaning closer.
I smoothed out the letter and began to read aloud, my voice shaking.
Dear Maggie,
I'm happy to have you on board. It's a secret mission to find other
worlds. It's not our government providing funds, but my company. Yes, I'm not
only a physics professor, but also a scientist. The book I gave you was written
by my own father. I'm going to follow his dreams and find clues about parallel
universes, other worlds, any proof they exist.
If you want to disappear like you wrote in your diary, why don't you
come with me? Hahaha.
My breath caught. She'd read my diary? When? How?
I always thought you were beautiful. Now, I'm going to have you as my
assistant. Please, won't you come?
Thank you for wasting your time on reading this. Don't cry alone—I am
here with you!
Your young and lovely teacher,Laura
P.S. Please call me Sissy!
The letter ended, but I kept staring at it. My hands were trembling so badly
the paper rustled.
She'd read my diary. She knew everything—about wanting to disappear, about
the pain, about all of it. And instead of pity, instead of the sad looks
everyone else gave me, she was offering me exactly what I'd been dreaming of.
A way out. Far, far away.
"Maggie?" Mom's voice was uncertain. "What does it mean? What
mission?"
The question hung in the air.