Chapter 1: Ch. 1 The Wrong Heaven

She had the sweetest smile.

“What heaven would you like?” she asked, honeyed voice as soothing as the sight of her. Tall and lithe, draped in the sheerest white, she showed so much and yet so little. Her golden hair shone with an ethereal glow as it loosely fell over her shoulders, framing large, silver eyes and a soft face.

Her beauty was mostly lost on me, though. I wasn’t gay. Still, I could appreciate her aesthetically, befitting a goddess.

As for her words, they left me in a bit of a muddle. I hadn’t really given that sought of thing any thought before. There was the time I went to Germany for Oktoberfest during college, but I didn’t think that was what she was looking for.

Eventually, pressured by her stare, I came to something of a conclusion. “Somewhere kinda quaint and peaceful, sort of a medieval Germany vibe,” I said, then quickly added, “but with sanitation and running water.”

She didn’t move, but her smile took on a sinister look. “Is that so?”

The hairs on the back of my neck rose, a shiver running down my spine. “Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled.

“Very well,” she said, and this time I noticed it was her eyes that changed—so focused on her lips before—as they narrowed. “So it shall be. However, not for you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, breath light.

She drew her finger to her chin, and then pointed it at me. “I ask that question to many a person and, every time, well, you are familiar with the concept of an off-by-one error.”

My brain clicked. “I’m being sent to someone else’s heaven? And someone else will go to mine?” I asked.

The only answer she gave came in the form of the sweetest smile of someone enjoying herself far too much. My vision faded, followed quickly by my other senses—losing feeling in my limbs—and even the panic that set in felt distant and getting further away, until I simply ceased to exist.

A sharp snap broke me from nothingness, wood on wood. I blinked awake and found myself in a room, tables spread out in rows and columns in front of me, a desk and blackboard at the front. A classroom. The teacher stared at me with narrowed eyes and let out a sigh.

“If my lesson is so boring, perhaps you should come see me after school, Mi-chan,” she said.

Despite reeling from being back in school—high school, not even university—and cursing that goddess, I managed to also be confused by how she addressed me. No one had ever called me by a nickname (outside of the odd one-off) and definitely not anything close to that. I just didn’t have a good name for shortening.

Still, I’d made it through school once before and I’d been something of a troublemaker, so my instincts kicked in. “I’m sorry, sensei,” I said politely, bowing my head.

While she gave me a look—one of deciding between accepting my apology or driving the point deeper—I only found myself more confused by how I’d addressed her. It flowed so naturally off my tongue. Eventually, she broke her gaze away from me and went back to teaching. However, her eyes often flicked over to me.

Against my word, I barely followed the lesson, but I felt I could forgive myself given the circumstances. She didn’t call on me, so it wasn’t a problem. The clock above the board ticked all the way to one and a bell rang. I deflated with relief, absent-mindedly putting away books that were presumably mine into a bag that was presumably mine. Then, I stood up, only to notice no one else was really leaving—even though I hadn’t rushed at all.

“Ah, Mi-chan, where are you going? Didn’t your little sister make lunch for you today?”

I recognised the voice I’d never heard before, turning to look at her. “Oh, right, she did. Thanks, Sakura.”

She blushed, looking to the side, but she couldn’t hide the smile. After a nervous giggle, she said, “It’s, um, strange to hear you say my name without the honorific.”

“Sorry, d’you want me to call you Sakura-chan?” I asked. It was a question I couldn’t comprehend, yet knew exactly what it meant.

Shaking her head, she softly said, “No, it’s okay.”

I thought to offer her the same—to call me just by my name—but I wasn’t ready to deal with more of this invisible knowledge. Besides, she looked ready to pop already.

Sakura had long, straight hair, dark black in colour and well taken care of. Alongside the blush, she had pale skin with only a touch of a not-quite tan. Though they tried to avoid me, I saw her dark eyes, too, a shade of brown close to black. Her face itself had a cute look to it, young and vibrant, her features petite. Even for someone around sixteen years old, she looked young. I hadn’t gone around looking at school-age girls since I was one, though, so my memory was probably distorted.

Her words coming back to me, I frowned. Before all of this, I’d been an only child.

“Is something wrong, Mi-chan?” she asked.

I shook off my thoughts, letting a gentle smile settle instead. “No, sorry, it’s nothing.”

She kept her gaze on me a moment longer and then brought up her bag. “Let’s have lunch. Eating your precious sister’s food always cheers you up, doesn’t it?”

I softly chuckled and said, “Yeah,” to go with the mood. Reaching into my own bag, I found something like a lunch box and pulled it out. Sakura set her lunch box on my table as well, sitting on a borrowed chair from my neighbour.

“Ooh, curry rice—I’m jealous,” she said, looking at my lunch.

Checking hers out, I was half-tempted to ask for a swap, but I felt that wouldn’t go down well with my sister. “Your fried chicken looks good,” I said.

She bit her lip, then held her chopsticks and picked up one of the small pieces of breaded chicken. “Do you want to try it?” she asked.

“Sure, if you don’t mind,” I said.

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Slowly, she moved the chicken piece closer to me with her hand underneath to catch it if it fell. Such a blush came over her. I didn’t understand why, but knew what caused it, so I leant forward and plucked the food from her chopsticks. It tasted so good, even cold. I chewed happily as I sat back.

“That’s so tasty,” I said, a hand in front of my mouth.

If anything, her blush became worse, but she smiled brightly. “I, I cooked it myself.”

“Ah, I want to come over to yours for dinner now,” I said. Sighing, I poked at my rice, slowly picking some up with chopsticks. “I can’t really cook anything that good, so it wouldn’t be fair.”

“I wouldn’t mind cooking for you, um, if you mean it. But I’m not as good as your sister,” she mumbled.

As I went to speak, something clicked in my brain again and I almost dropped my chopsticks. I wasn’t in England. Japan, I thought, after going through what little I knew about the Asian countries.

Then, I remembered what the goddess had said—what I had asked for. This wasn’t Japan, but someone’s heaven.

“Mi-chan? Are you okay?” she asked.

I didn’t feel anything close to okay, yet I managed to put on a smile and softly laugh. “Yeah, sorry, I just thought what my sister would do if I told her your food was tastier.”

She giggled and gently elbowed me. “Come on, don’t joke like that. She’s very sweet and you shouldn’t tease her so much.”

The more I wanted to stop them, the more the sickly thoughts came, washing over me in flashes of insight and understanding and fictional memories—all so thoroughly tainted by whose heaven I now lived in. Whatever appetite I had began to vanish. One man’s heaven truly was another’s hell.

Before my soured mood set Sakura off again, we were joined at my table by another girl. Natalie, I knew her name to be, a half-American, half-Japanese transfer student from the start of the school year. Her American side came out strong, tall and rather busty, with bright blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She’d been a competitive runner in the U.S. and still had a tan from those days. My mixed heritage didn’t stand out quite as much, hair light brown and height fairly tall without being that noticeable and eyes a shade of hazel close to brown.

“You two flirting again?” Natalie said as she sat down.

Sakura quickly denied it, shaking her head. “No.”

Natalie laughed, her laughter loud even with all the chatter from the others. “How’re you doing, Millie? Looked pretty dead this morning.”

In the back of my head, I was relieved that someone knew my actual name. “Yeah, I’m okay now. Maybe.”

She laughed again. For her lunch, she’d brought in a thick sandwich, almost looking like a burger with lettuce and tomato joined by slices of roast beef. She usually brought in leftovers, I knew. “Keep your chin up. At least we don’t have gym today,” she said.

I chuckled and forced down some more rice. “Yeah.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “Ah!” and pointed at me. “I watched Blackadder. Couldn’t stop laughing the whole time.”

Something almost clicked again. “Oh, that’s great. There’s tons more of them, and stuff like Jeeves and Wooster, Monty Python.”

“It sucks that nowhere here sells them,” she said, sinking in her seat. “I was lucky my uncle came to visit.”

“Well, I probably still have them somewhere. It’s not like they would have disappeared,” I said, dredging up memories that weren’t mine.

She sunk further down, finishing the food in her mouth before replying. “That’d be awesome. I don’t think I can wait until Christmas.”

“No promises, though. We’ve got a lot of stuff in storage at my house.” I looked over at Sakura and found her pouting—looking more adorable than annoyed, at least to me.

She caught me staring and bowed her head, grumbling just loud enough for us to hear. “It’s not my fault English is so hard.”

Getting used to ignoring the weirdness, I said, “Well, I can always give you lessons.”

“Really?” she asked, brightening right up.

“Just not for too long after school—I don’t want my sister feeling left out,” I said.

Though Sakura didn’t say anything, she nodded and held on to a little smile.

From there, the conversation went back and forth across the kinds of subjects schoolgirls talked about, albeit tamer than I remembered. There was music, and homework, and a little fashion. No mention of boys or anything “adult”, even though we were sixteen, so that surprised me a little. Then I remembered that none of us had shown or shared any interest in that sort of thing, an overly-innocent group of girls.

Lunch break eventually ended and the afternoon lessons began, which tried their best to lull me to sleep. It gave me time to start putting together my thoughts, though, working towards some kind of mental balance. The problem was that, the more I thought, the more unsettled I felt.

This world wasn’t meant for me and yet I hated to think of who wanted it.