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. Not the gentle kind of pain that fades when you wake up fully, but the persistent kind that follows you into consciousness like an unwanted companion.
A reminder. A brand.
I hadn't even brushed yet—but my stomach grumbled, loud and insistent, drowning out everything else. The sound was almost offensive in the quiet of my room, a biological demand that didn't care about my desire to simply cease existing.
"Fine. Food, then."
What was the point? It wasn't like I was going anywhere. It wasn't like anyone would see me.
I dragged myself out of bed, still groggy, movements slow and uncoordinated. My limbs felt heavy, weighted down by exhaustion that sleep never seemed to cure anymore.
I shuffled to my door, bare feet silent on the worn carpet.
What's in the fridge? Nothing. Great.
"Mom???"
"Yes, honey?" Even through the wall, I could hear the hope in her voice. Hope that today might be different. That I might be different.
"The fridge is empty!"
A pause. I could picture her face—the guilt, the apology already forming.
"Oh! Sorry, your dad isn't home yet, night shift. I'll ask him to pick something on the way."
Night shift. Always the night shift.
"Haa! I'm already hungry!!!!!" The whine in my voice made me cringe. Like a child. Like someone who had the right to demand things.
"Then, you can go yourself! Take the money on the TV stand."
The words hit like a physical blow.
Go outside.
Go. Outside?
As if it were that simple. As if I could just walk out that door, down those stairs, onto those streets. Like it all had changed. Like the past three days—the past three years—hadn't happened.
As if people wouldn't stare.
My chest tightened. My hands started to shake. The familiar panic rising like water filling my lungs, slow and suffocating.
"Oh... gee thanks." The sarcasm came out sharper than I intended, bitter and defensive. "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, even with the wall separating us. Heavy with everything I wasn't saying. Heavy with finality.
Not "today." Not "right now." "Anymore." Ever again.
"Honey!" Mom's voice carried a desperate edge now, that tone she got when she was trying to sound cheerful but couldn't quite pull it off. "It's already 3 days, that bruise would've healed by now."
She said it so casually. So matter-of-factly.
Like the bruise was the problem. Like this fading purple smudge on my cheekbone was all that stood between me and the world. Like if I just waited long enough for the discoloration to fade, everything would be fine. Normal. Fixed.
She didn't understand. Couldn't understand.
The bruise wasn't what kept me inside.
The bruise was just the latest excuse, the most recent justification for something that had been building for three years. Three years of stares and whispers. Three years of being looked at like I was something other. Something wrong. Something that didn't belong in the sunlight.
It was easier to let her think it was about the bruise. Easier than explaining that every time I thought about stepping through that door, my chest tightened until I couldn't breathe. That my hands started to shake. That my vision would narrow and darken at the edges.
That my body physically rejected the idea of going back out there, into that world full of eyes that saw me as a monster.
The bruise would fade. It was already fading, yellowing at the edges, barely visible unless you knew where to look.
What happened to put it there wouldn't fade. Would never fade.
I turned away from my door, letting it stay closed. The light disappeared, leaving me in the gray dimness again.
Good. Better.
I got back into bed, pulling the covers over my head. The fabric blocked out what little light filtered through the curtains, creating a small dark cave.
Safe. Hidden. Alone.
"What if I hadn't woken up?"
The thought surfaced like poison bubbling up from somewhere deep and dark inside me. Unwelcome. Uninvited. But persistent, always there, waiting in the quiet moments when I couldn't distract myself.
What if this morning, I just... hadn't? What if my body had finally gotten the message that I didn't want to keep doing this anymore? What if I could just stop, quietly, without making a fuss, without adding one more burden to my parents' already crushing load?
The thought felt a little less shocking each time it came. A little more familiar. Like an old friend I never wanted to make but who kept showing up anyway, patient and persistent.
Like a comfortable lie I was starting to believe.
Then I tried to close my eyes. Wanted to sleep again, or stay there like that forever. Just exist in this small dark space where nothing could reach me. Where I didn't have to be a person, didn't have to have a face or a body or expectations hanging over me like storm clouds.
Just... nothing. Just dark. Just quiet.
But it doesn't work.
Sleep was a luxury I'd lost somewhere along the way, traded for sleepless nights filled with spiraling thoughts and what-ifs and replays of every terrible moment. My body was exhausted—bone-deep, soul-deep exhausted. But my mind refused to shut down, refused to grant me even a few hours of unconsciousness.
It just kept going. Replaying. Analyzing. Tormenting.
I reached under my pillow with one hand, fingers searching until they found the familiar shape. My diary. I pulled it out, still hidden under the covers, and held it against my chest.
It was a thin notebook. Nothing special. The kind you could buy for cheap at any store. Its corners were worn soft from being gripped too tightly, from being held like a lifeline in the dark. The cover was creased and bent, the spine cracked from being opened and closed too many times.
It wasn't filled with memories—not the kind other girls wrote about, anyway. I'd seen other students' journals sometimes, glimpsed pages covered in hearts and inside jokes and excitement about parties and crushes and all the normal things that normal people got excited about.
Mine wasn't like that.
Just my life struggling. What I went through these past three years since I came here for college. A catalog of cruelty. A documentation of otherness. Proof that I wasn't imagining it all, that it was really as bad as it felt.
I flipped through the pages without really reading them. I already knew what they said. I'd written every word, after all. Had poured my pain onto these pages night after night when I couldn't sleep, when the thoughts got too loud, when I needed to get them out of my head before they consumed me entirely.
The words were just evidence now. Proof that I wasn't imagining it all. That I wasn't being too sensitive or overreacting or any of the other things people implied when they wanted you to pretend everything was fine.
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. Even in my head, even alone under these covers, I couldn't finish it.
I slammed the diary shut, the sound muffled under the blankets.
The silence in my room was suffocating. Pressing down on me from all sides. The walls felt closer than they had a minute ago, like they were slowly contracting, squeezing the air out of this small dark space.
Staying here wasn't working. But leaving wasn't an option either. I was trapped between two impossibilities—couldn't stay, couldn't go. Couldn't breathe, couldn't stop breathing.
But maybe...
The thought came slowly, uncertainly. Tentative.
Maybe there was a third option. Not here. Not out there. But somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Somewhere safe.
I stood up, throwing off the covers. My legs were unsteady beneath me, weak from three days of barely moving, barely eating. The room tilted slightly and I had to grab my desk to steady myself.
"Mom!" My voice came out louder than I intended, desperate. "Can I—can I go to Grandma's place?"
The words hung in the air. I held my breath, waiting.
There was a pause from the other room. A long pause. I could picture her face—the confusion already forming, the worry lines deepening, the internal calculation of what this meant, what I was really asking for.
"Haa? Why, honey?"
Why. Such a simple question. Such an impossible one to answer truthfully.
Before I could figure out what to say, she spoke again, and her voice carried an edge of panic now.
"What about the rest of your semester? It's just one semester left!!"
One semester.
She said it like it was nothing. Like it was barely any time at all. Like I could just white-knuckle my way through another few months of hell because the finish line was visible in the distance.
Like time healed anything other than bruises.
All the struggle my parents went through to get me here. The thought crashed into me like a wave, pulling me under.
The documents. The paperwork that had taken months. The savings account they'd bled dry, watching every penny disappear into application fees and deposits and all the countless expenses of trying to give their daughter a better life.
The apartment in a neighborhood they could barely afford, in a building where the heat barely worked and the walls were thin enough to hear our neighbors' conversations. This cramped, dim space that still cost more than they should have been paying.
My father sleeping at his workplace. A cot in the back room, surrounded by humming servers and flickering monitors that cast blue light all night, never quite letting him rest. Taking every shift he could get—morning, evening, overnight—even though he had a degree in mathematics, even though he was overqualified for basic IT troubleshooting.
His back aching from the uncomfortable mattress, his eyes strained from staring at screens for twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours at a time.
All so I could have what they never did.
Opportunity. A future. A better life.
Or whatever hollow promise they'd been sold when they decided to uproot everything and move here. When they decided their daughter's education was worth any sacrifice, any hardship, any amount of suffering.
But all in vain.
The thought sat in my chest like a stone. Heavy and cold and undeniable.
All of it—every sacrifice, every extra shift, every time my mother stretched a meal meant for two to somehow feed three. Every time my father came home too exhausted to speak, collapsing into sleep still wearing his work clothes. Every worry line that had appeared on their faces, every grey hair, every year they'd aged too quickly from stress and lack of sleep.
All of it for nothing.
Because their daughter couldn't even make it to the end. Couldn't even last one more semester. Couldn't even fulfill the one thing they'd asked of her—to finish. To graduate. To make it all mean something.
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. Close enough to feel my knuckles connect with someone's jaw, to see shock replace cruelty in their eyes for one beautiful moment.
I could fight individuals. Could stand up to isolated acts of cruelty. Could defend myself when the threat had a face and a name.
But an entire campus? An entire world? What could I do against that?
How do you fight when the problem isn't a few cruel people but everyone? When the stares come from strangers on every corner? When the disgust is ambient, atmospheric, as much a part of the environment as air?
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. Something offensive. Something that didn't belong on their streets, in their nice neighborhoods, in their line of sight.
Some looked at me like I wasn't even human.
That was worse, somehow. Not the disgust—I could handle disgust. But the confusion. The way some people looked at me like they were trying to solve a puzzle that didn't make sense. Like they couldn't quite reconcile what they were seeing with their understanding of how people should look.
Even though we had the same facial structure. The same body. The same two arms and two legs. The same basic human anatomy.
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.
I'd heard that one early on, whispered behind hands but loud enough for me to hear. Loud enough that they wanted me to hear.
Red eyes like a demon.
That's what one kid had called me once, and the name had stuck. Spread through my classes like a virus. Whispered behind hands and snickered across hallways. Demon. Monster. Ghost. Freak.
A little bit of sunlight could give me burn marks. Angry red welts that would throb for days, that would make my already pale skin look mottled and wrong. So I avoided the sun. Wore long sleeves even in summer. Kept to the shade. Made myself smaller, dimmer, trying to blend into the shadows where maybe people wouldn't notice.
But they always noticed.
I am albino.
Three words that explained everything and nothing.
A medical condition, my parents called it. Tried to make it sound clinical, scientific, neutral. Just a quirk of genetics, just an absence of melanin, just a thing that happened sometimes.
A curse, others implied. Or said outright when they thought I couldn't hear. Bad luck. Poor thing. What a shame.
A joke to the ones who found cruelty entertaining. The ones who made demon sounds when I walked past. Who put mirrors in front of me and asked if I could see my reflection. Who asked if I sparkled in sunlight like those vampire movies.
A monster to the ones who stared too long, who looked at me like I was something that had crawled out from under a rock. Something that shouldn't be allowed in public. Something that disrupted their aesthetic, ruined their day, offended their sense of how the world should look.
A ghost to the ones who tried to ignore me entirely, who looked through me like I was transparent. Who moved their bags when I sat down, who found excuses to leave when I arrived, who made it clear that my presence was unwanted without ever saying a word.
Something to be feared or pitied or studied from a safe distance.
Never just a person. Never just Maggie.
What can I say? I was born ugly.
The words tasted bitter in my mind, but they had the weight of truth. Or at least, the weight of what everyone else seemed to believe was true.
Not an idol. Not even close to whatever standard they worshiped here. Whatever impossible combination of features and proportions and coloring that made someone acceptable to look at, desirable, normal—I was the opposite of that.
Even back home, what I got was pity.
At least there, people had the decency to look away. To pretend I wasn't there. To let me exist in peace, if not in acceptance.
Here, they looked too long. Too hard. Measuring me against something I could never be. Finding me lacking in every possible way.
I was supposed to be worth it.
The thought was a knife twisting in my chest.
Their investment. Their hope. Their reason for every sacrifice they'd made.
And instead, I was this: a girl who couldn't leave her bedroom. Who flinched at unexpected sounds. Who wanted to disappear—really disappear, permanently, completely.
A failed experiment in a better life.
My only dream—I pressed my palm against my chest, feeling my heart beat beneath my ribs, fast and irregular—was to experience life with joy.
That's all.
Not success. Not wealth. Not fame or beauty or love or any of the things other people seemed to want. Just joy. The simple, uncomplicated kind. The kind other people seemed to stumble into without even trying. The kind that came from existing without pain, without fear, without constantly calculating whether it was safe to be seen.
So my lifetime goal became to go somewhere far away.
Like far, far away.
Not just another city or another country. Somewhere completely different. Somewhere no one knew me, somewhere I could start over completely. Somewhere I could be anyone—or no one. Somewhere the stares couldn't follow.
Even if I wouldn't be able to come back. Even if it meant never seeing my parents again. Even if it was one-way, permanent, irreversible.
Maybe especially then.
So my mom and dad wouldn't have to suffer because of me anymore.
So they could finally be free of the burden I'd become. Could stop worrying, stop crying, stop sacrificing. Could live their own lives instead of constantly trying to fix mine.
They talked cheerfully every day in front of me. Voices bright and determined, smiles painted on like armor. Like if they just said the right words, believed hard enough, I could be fixed. Motivated. Saved.
Like positivity was a cure for being fundamentally unwanted by the world.
But I saw them cry.
Many times. More times than they thought. Because I'd gotten good at being quiet, at moving through the apartment like a ghost, at hearing things I wasn't supposed to hear.
Late at night when they thought I was asleep, I'd hear Mom's muffled sobs through the thin walls. The way she'd try to stay quiet, to swallow the sound, but couldn't quite manage it.
In the morning before I woke up—or before they thought I'd woken up—I'd emerge from my room to find them red-eyed and pretending they weren't. Dad washing his face in the kitchen sink, Mom suddenly very interested in breakfast preparations, both of them startled by my appearance like they'd been caught doing something wrong.
In the hallway sometimes, when they thought I was in my room with the door closed. I'd hear their footsteps pause, hear the soft sound of fabric as they held each other. Silence, but the heavy kind. The kind that's full of unspoken pain. And then soft, almost silent tears streaming down faces they tried to hide from me.
For me. Because of me.
The knowledge was unbearable.
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?
They'd done nothing wrong. They'd been kind parents, loving parents. They'd given everything they had and more. Worked themselves to the bone, aged before their time, sacrificed their own dreams so I could chase mine.
And what had they gotten in return? A daughter who couldn't even manage to exist in public without falling apart. A daughter who hid in her room for days, who flinched at doorbells, who woke up every morning wishing she hadn't.
A daughter who was supposed to be their pride and joy but had become their greatest source of pain.
The guilt was crushing. Suffocating. It sat on my chest like a physical weight, making it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to see any way forward that didn't involve causing them more suffering.
"Mom, I—" My voice came out apologetic before I'd even formed the words. Dropped like flowing water on plants—gentle, desperate, trying not to cause more damage even as it overflowed.
"I can't anymore!"
The words burst out of me, raw and broken.
I broke down.
Not crying—no tears came. They'd dried up somewhere along the way, used up months ago, maybe years ago. My body had decided it wasn't worth the effort anymore, that tears changed nothing.
But my voice carried the sadness anyway. Heavy and cracked and full of everything I'd been holding in. Three days. Three years. A lifetime of trying to be okay when I wasn't, trying to be brave when I was terrified, trying to keep going when every cell in my body was screaming to stop.
I couldn't stay in that room anymore. Couldn't be alone with those thoughts, with that poisonous question about whether waking up was even worth it. Couldn't hide behind my closed door and pretend everything was fine when it so clearly wasn't.
I hid my face and moved to the next room where my mom was.
The distance was only a few steps, but it felt like miles. My legs barely held me. My vision was blurry even without tears, the world reduced to shapes and shadows.
She was crying.
I saw it the moment I entered. She wasn't hiding it, wasn't trying to be strong anymore. She was just sitting there on the couch, her face in her hands, shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
Crying for me. Always for me.
The moment she saw me, she opened her arms.
No words. No questions. Just open arms and a face full of pain and love and desperation.
I fell into them.
Let myself collapse into her embrace like a building finally giving up its fight against gravity. She hugged me tight, her arms wrapping around me like she could hold all my broken pieces together through sheer force of will.
Like love could be glue. Like if she just held on hard enough, I wouldn't shatter completely.
I sobbed.
Dry sobs, airless and painful, my body going through the motions of crying without any tears to show for it. My chest heaving, my throat closing, gasping for breath between the waves of grief that crashed over me.
"Please, don't cry, honey!"
Her voice shook even as she said it, contradicting her own words with her tears that were soaking into my hair.
"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. Her eyes were red and swollen, searching mine for something. Understanding. Hope. A way to fix this.
"Please, don't hide things from me. I've known all along—you've been carrying so much pain in your heart."
The words broke something in me.
She knew. Of course she knew. How could she not? I'd been walking around like a ghost for three years, and she was my mother. She saw everything, even the things I tried to hide.
We hugged each other and cried.
Real crying this time, the kind that came from somewhere deep and necessary. The kind that couldn't be stopped or controlled or prettied up. Just raw, ugly, honest grief.
Her tears soaked into my hair. Mine disappeared into her shoulder as I shook with silent sobs.
For a moment, we were just two people who loved each other and didn't know how to fix anything. Didn't have answers. Didn't have solutions. Just had each other and this terrible, beautiful shared pain.
The doorbell rang.
The sound cut through the moment like a knife.
We both froze, pulling apart slowly. Mom wiped at her face with her sleeve, trying to compose herself.
"Father?" I asked, hope flickering despite everything.
Maybe he'd come home early. Maybe he'd heard somehow that we needed him. Maybe—
Mom went to check, her footsteps hesitant. I heard the door open, heard her exchange quiet words with someone.
Then she called back, voice confused: "Courier!"
"Courier??"
I echoed her confusion. We weren't expecting anything. We never got packages. Who would send us anything?
"Who's it from?"
"Wait here, I'll pick it up, honey."
"Okay."
I stayed on the couch, my body feeling hollowed out, exhausted from the breakdown. My face felt hot and swollen. My throat was raw.
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. Used up and gone, my body's well finally running empty.
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, tried to be strong even though she was breaking—they flowed again.
Like God had given me secret reservoirs for each type of sadness.
One for my own pain—that one had been drained long ago.
But another, deeper one, for watching the people I loved hurt because of me. That one was bottomless, infinite, always ready to overflow.
I wiped at my face with my sleeve, surprised by the wetness. So I could still cry. Just not for myself anymore.
I listened to her footsteps padding toward the door. The click of the lock. The muffled exchange of voices—hers uncertain, the courier's professional and polite.
"It's for you, honey!" Mom came back holding a package, her tear-stained face now confused. "Do you have any friends?"
The question shouldn't have hurt, but it did. A small, sharp pain among all the larger ones.
"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. Heavy not just with physical mass but with possibility—the kind that made my chest tight and my breath shallow.
I tore open the outer packaging with fingers that wouldn't quite cooperate, fumbling at the tape and paper. Inside was an envelope. Plain cream-colored paper, thick and expensive-feeling, unmarked except for my name printed across the front in elegant script.
My name. Just my name. Not "To whom it may concern" or some administrative label. Someone had thought enough about this to print my name like it mattered.
I slid my finger under the seal, heard the satisfying whisper of paper tearing. Inside—
I pulled out the first document slowly, reverently, like it might disintegrate if I handled it too roughly.
A graduation certificate.
My name again, this time in formal calligraphy: Maggie. The seal of my college embossed in gold at the bottom, raised and official. Awarded in recognition of completed studies... The date was today's date. Not months from now when I was supposed to finish. Today.
I stared at it, numb. The words swam in front of my eyes, refusing to arrange themselves into meaning. They were letting me graduate? Just like that? Without the final semester, without the classes I'd been dreading, without having to show my face in those halls again?
"Maggie?" Mom's voice seemed to come from very far away.
I couldn't speak. Couldn't process. My brain felt like it was moving through water, thick and slow.
There was something else in the envelope. I reached in with shaking hands and pulled out a second document.
This one was different. Crisper. More formal. At the top, simple elegant text:
"PROJECT SKY"
Below that, smaller text:
'Congratulations, Maggie'
'You have been selected.'
The name alone made something crack open in my chest. Project Sky. I read it once. Twice. Three times, tracing each letter with my eyes like I could absorb its meaning through sheer repetition.
Project Sky.
My heart was doing something strange—beating too fast and too slow at the same time, like it couldn't decide whether to race toward this or run away from it.
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 during their lectures, voices warm with approval for students who weren't me. But because my situation never left me free.
Idle hands, idle mind—that's when the darkness crept in, slow and insidious, wrapping around my thoughts until I couldn't breathe. 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. Sleep was impossible most nights anyway—might as well put the insomnia to use.
But I studied other things too. Things that weren't assigned, weren't on any syllabus, wouldn't earn me any credits. Parallel universes. Time travel. Space research. Theoretical physics that lived in the realm of "what if" rather than "what is."
All as a hobby—if you could call an obsession a hobby. If you could call the desperate search for proof that somewhere else existed—anywhere else—a hobby.
The library had become my sanctuary over these three years. Those dusty corners where the theoretical physics books lived, untouched by other students who preferred their science practical and applicable. I'd run my fingers along those spines so many times I'd memorized their positions. Third shelf from the top, four books in. Fifth shelf, by the window where the light was best.
Empty study rooms after lectures, when everyone else had fled to their social lives and parties and normal student experiences. Me alone with whiteboards, scribbling calculations that no one else would see. Working through thought experiments about worlds folded into each other, about time as a dimension you could navigate, about the sky not as a ceiling but as a doorway.
My room at home whenever I couldn't sleep or had nothing else to do—which was most nights. All nights, really. Pages and pages of notes filling cheap notebooks, my handwriting getting messier as exhaustion set in but my mind refusing to stop, always chasing the next idea, the next possibility.
Is it related to this?
The question bloomed in my mind, wild and desperate. Had someone been watching? Had someone seen all those hours in the library, all those calculations, all that desperate searching for a way out?
My fingers tightened on the certificate until the paper crinkled. Project Sky. A project about... what exactly? Space? Research? Finding something beyond this world that had been so cruel to me?
"What is it?" Mom asked, leaning over my shoulder, trying to read.
I couldn't answer. My throat had closed up, words trapped behind the lump that had formed there.
"Project Sky?" she read aloud, slowly, like the words were in a foreign language she was trying to translate. "What does it mean?"
I kept staring at those two words, elegant and mysterious on the expensive paper. Project Sky. They seemed to pulse with possibility, with promise, with something I couldn't quite name.
But what was it?
The question hung in the air between us, unanswered. Heavy with everything I didn't know, everything I desperately wanted to know, everything that might—just might—change everything.