Let us eat, drink, and party, for tomorrow we die. Heaven is closed for business.

Neon Isaiah 22:13 (Unified Standard Edition)

- - -

Hitomi Hisakawa was snuggled nice and deep into the blankets atop her weird, western-style bed when she was awoken by the playful sound of young children stomping around and yelling downstairs. She hadn't really gotten used to her host family's home yet, even though she had been living with the Smith family for several months.

Mr. Smith and his wife Elizabeth were nice people, and Mr. Smith - call me Joe! - even spoke a little Japanese. Which was great because her English was far from fluent. The Smith's two kids, little Mary and her big brother Francis, thought she was super cool for being able to teach them another language and spent half their time with her pointing at stuff and asking her what the word was in Japanese.

"This is a pen!" she said, holding on up in front of them, and then said it in her own language.

Mr. Smith thought that one was especially funny for some reason, and one time tried to wiggle and waggle his eyeglasses at her while saying, "I'm a straaaaaaange foreigner!" like that old guy on from that old talk show host her dad used to watch on TV.

She politely smiled and giggled, hoping she wouldn't accidentally encourage his embarrassing attempts to "relate" to her and make it worse.

Well, he might be super awkward at times, but at least he wasn't a creep.

Mrs. Smith patted his head once and called him "adorkable."

She had been required to attend several hours of training on what to do about host family abuse. Like if someone tried to touch her inappropriately or to sneak a smartphone through the door into her shower or something gross like that. It turns out that non-Japanese phones didn't have that loud photo-taking "click-click" sound that the manufacturers in Japan put in theirs.

Hitomi was especially vigilant at school after gym class in the showers. Creeps could be girls too! And the shower stalls didn't have curtains!

But really all of the mandatory training boiled down to: get away from whatever's wrong, call this number (she had it on her Favorites dial list), and get in a cab that will pick you up and bring you to the embassy.

She was almost 11,000 kilometers from home and it was very reassuring to have a panic number she could call.

So far so good though!

She let out a big yawn and stretched her hands up, following her fingertips to look at the funny "popcorn" ceiling. It looked like someone had sprayed itty-bitty dots of foam on the ceiling and just rolled over it with some off-white paint in one big go.

Hitomi had touched it once, just to see what it felt like, by climbing up on the bed's headboard and standing on her tip-toes, braced against the wall with one hand and crumbling some pieces between her fingers with the other.

It felt like dehydrated cottage cheese. Blurgh.

"That's just the way the style was, back then," Mr. Smith had shrugged when she had later asked about it, vaguely waving his hand around their Colonial home just north of Washington D.C. in the state of Maryland.

Take a note: America was weird. For lots of reasons, and she liked it, but it was weird.

It had "states" instead of "provinces" or "prefectures" but they were almost like mini-countries. They even had different laws from each other, and a thing that was kosher in one state might get you arrested across the border of another.

She went to school in D.C. (which wasn't even a state at all!) but her host family lived a few miles north in a place called Chevy Chase. They were rich - even if they didn't say so. One time she had looked at a real estate website and saw that the plot of land they lived on was, just by itself, worth over 250,000,000 yen!

Hitomi pushed off the blankets and stood up in her nightie, padding over to a full-length mirror standing on top of a thick carpet. She plucked a brush off the shiny surface of a walnut dresser and started fixing the tangles in her hair.

Hmm. Was she pretty? She thought she was, although she was a little thin and didn't have much in the way of a butt. Living in America had made her more self-conscious, she knew, but she couldn't help but check herself over in the mirror. She tilted herself slightly, trying to see her profile from another angle, but the nightgown was too loose. She took it off and reflected on her body.

American boys seemed to like plumper derrieres the same way they liked bigger chests, and she wasn't particularly well gifted with either.

Well, that's fine. She didn't need an American boyfriend, she told herself.

Or a boyfriend at all.

OK, maybe she wanted a boyfriend.

Maybe she should lower her standards a little. Maybe she could settle... like, for a nerd.

They were everywhere and more than one had tried to hit on her.

Minako, the other exchange student from her class who was staying with another family nearby, had already snagged herself a hot-looking Junior year, which was the 3rd grade in American high school.

Chad was a sports jock and Hitomi couldn't believe he was going out with Minako instead of the bevy of beautiful girls who seemed to orbit him after his football games. He was an outside linebacker and one time she had watched him blitz the other team's quarterback so fast and so hard the other guy flew off his feet. After that his popularity with the ladies skyrocketed. He had his choice of every kind of girl: White, Black, Latina, rich, poor, slutty, shy - the local girl population was super diverse!

American high school football was crazy, but the boys were huge and muscled and - how would she put it - frankly outclassed the "herbivores" that had plagued class 2-B back home. That wasn't really fair to the boys in Japan, she knew, but she couldn't help herself. These football players literally gleamed in the stadium lights like action movie stars.

So yeah, Minako scored big.

Then again, Chad's interest in her was pretty understandable. Minako had huge boobs and bright purple highlights in her hair - she looked like a living anime girl. One of her American friends had told Hitomi that her fellow exchange student was getting a reputation for being "easy" and it had taken an embarrassing half English/half Japanese-with-a-dictionary conversation to explain what it meant to a scandalized Hitomi.

Not that Hitomi was a stranger to sex! She wasn't a prude. She was just... careful. Yeah, that's it, she told herself, she was a careful, considerate girl.

She had had a few dates back in Takasaki, and even kinda had a boyfriend. Kinda, sorta.

They broke up before she left.

Meh! It didn't matter anyways. Hitomi's family had told her they'd ship her straight home if she got caught doing anything close to what Minako had been up to. And wow. Minako loved to over-share.

Hitomi ate up the stories like a girl with a bowl of popcorn in her lap.

The Smiths were super nice but very straitlaced religious people: she would NEVER get away with the stuff Minako was. Especially sneaking a boy into her room at night.

Honestly? At 17 years old and operating under a very strict set of "foreign exchange student" rules just about the bravest thing Hitomi felt comfortable doing was wearing shiny black nylons under her skirt.

She liked to think she was a fashionable young woman and those black nylons really gave her a confidence boost.

Mrs. Smith had eyed them suspiciously the first time Hitomi had worn them under what must've been a slightly too short of a skirt, but chose not to say anything about it, instead choosing to compliment the barrettes in Hitomi's hair that looked like two flower petals.

Although, to be fair, Mrs. Smith was one of those women who were pretty but dressed so dowdily you'd never guess she was drop-dead gorgeous underneath. The same went for her husband Joe. He constantly had a tie and button-down shirt on. But Hitomi had seen them both at the public pool: they were super fit and classically good-looking.

They were almost so outwardly conservative and socially perfect that they seemed unnatural.

Actually, Hitomi had compared notes with Minako about their host families and gotten just the littlest bit jealous.

Minako's host mother was the exact opposite of Mrs. Smith, and had even taken Minako lingerie shopping for sexy bras!

Argh! Totally not fair.

Not that she would trade the Smiths for anyone. They had been the best host family she could've asked for.

But living away from home was hard.

Sometimes Hitomi wished she could just disappear into her laptop - maybe into one of the reverse harem games she loved so much. Oh well. At least the English education she was getting was super useful: the C and C++ programming languages were making a lot more sense to her now. She had mastered their keyword and syntax now and the documentation actually made sense!

Oh god. Wait.

Was SHE a nerd?

No, that couldn't be. She didn't have glasses! She was meticulous with her daily beauty routine! She even wore perfume and smelled nice, dammit!

She spun around in the mirror, flaring out her nightie. There! Look at that! Firm! Tone! She looked at her nails: perfectly trimmed and glossed pink!

Who cared if she loved computers? That didn't make her a-a-a nerd. She wasn't into One-Piece or Attack on Titan or any of those stupid cartoons.

No, no way! She had come to America because she had a dream!

Hitomi Hisakawa was going to be the greatest computer programmer the world had ever seen: the next Bill Gates, the future Steve Jobs - hey, where were all the famous female programmers?

She would be Ada Lovelace! The next Hamilton! She would send astronauts to Mars!

YEAH! She psyched herself up.

That's right, she was going to invent the Next. Big. Thing!

And she was going to land a great guy! With a strong chest, and kind eyes, and nice, straight, whitened teeth...

Whoooooo. OK.

Hitomi was awake for real now. She turned on her best, friendly, "I'm-smiling-all-the-time-like-an-American" smile so she'd be ready to face the world outside.

That's right! Show those teeth! She had her mouth open wide as attacked any rogue plaque on her teeth. Massage those cheeks, there we go, just a smidge of blush! She put away her compact makeup container.

She had her morning routine down pat. She could even face the oversized American toilet with no fear!

Back to the mirror, alright, anything left? Eyelashes! OK, smile again, testing, testing, 1-2-3...

This was the most important step of her morning. She'd been (lovingly?) teased by one of her Black friends about her previous "RBF" problem, which in English meant "Resting Bitch Face."

Apparently Diamond had thought Hitomi just had really long periods, and she'd had no idea about the misconception until one of her Korean-American classmates (there was SO many Korean girls in D.C.) straight up told her she constantly looked pissed off and the guys thought she wasn't interested in them.

Now she smiled a lot.

She left the bathroom behind and fished around in the closet (it was huge!) for a blouse and sweater combo to wear. Turtlenecks rocked. And they looked good on her with a skirt, which she tied around her waist after pulling up her leggings just as she heard twin footsteps pounding up the staircase.

"Hitomi!" (correct)

"Heetomi!" (almost)

The two kids burst through the door, pushing on each other comically, with Francis pulling back Mary and Mary trying to use her negligible weight to hold her big brother behind her.

"Come on!" the little girl said, "Urgh - stop it FRAN-CIEEE!" He didn't like it when she said his name like that. "Stop PUSHING! MOOOOMMMMMYY!"

"No, YOU stop! MOOMMMM! Mary is kicking me again!"

"I wanna tell her!"

"No! I'M gonna tell her!"

Hitomi, thankfully fully dressed, chided herself for forgetting to lock the door with that little button it had on the doorknob.

She knelt down to their eye level to ask them what they were talking about just as Mrs. Smith yelled up from downstairs: "Leave Hitomi alone, she's still sleeping!"

"No she's not!" retorted Mary.

"Breakfast is ready!" Francis said proudly, finally getting to say what he wanted to say, and sure enough she could smell the pungent scent of fried bacon from downstairs.

"OK, OK, thank youuuu," Hitomi managed to spin the kids around, herding them in front of her as she made her way downstairs to the kitchen table.

Breakfast with the Smiths was a unique, cultural adventure.

First off, and again, she double-checked with Minako that this wasn't entirely normal, their breakfast table and its associated meal-set looked exactly like commercials on TV.

Minako made her take a picture once and sent it out on Instagram captioned: "When Balanced Breakfast Attacks!"

The table looked as follows:

A plastic placemat for everyone (the little kids had a pink and a green one with cartoons drawn on them).

On which rested a porcelain plate, which today had: scrambled eggs (no cheese for her, please), two slices of bacon, a sausage (not fish, it was pork), and two slices of honey wheat toast with butter.

Next to it there was a bowl of Cheerios, which were little o-shaped rings of cardboard-like something-or-other that was swallowable if you dunked them in enough milk.

But wait, no! The milk was also available in a separate glass, which was next to yet ANOTHER glass of water.

Coffee was nowhere to be found: the Smith family abstained from coffee drinking and Hitomi felt it would be rude to ask them to make an exception for her.

But the weirdest thing of all? Besides the insanely high calorie, high fat breakfast smorgasbord?

They prayed at every meal.

Every. Meal.

The two little kids bowed their heads just as she sat down, and she awkwardly kept her head down too as Mr. Smith led the table in a short prayer thanking their "Heavenly Father" for all the "blessings" they had.

It was always so weird to her, but, again, she didn't want to be rude.

Hitomi tended to keep her eyes open during the prayers. Sometimes Francis or Mary would too and they'd wink (or try to wink, they weren't very good at winking) at her.

"Amen!" they all chorused at the end. Her too.

Then the whole family plus Hitomi clapped their hands and said "Itadakimasu!"

The Smiths loved saying the traditional pre-eating thing Japanese people did and thought it was so much fun that they could blend the two cultures/religions together like that.

She'd even gone to church with them a few times, although she had had a bad experience two weeks ago and wasn't very keen on going back. It was so embarrassing, and she had started crying, and had gone to hide in the parking lot until Sunday School was over.

Thankfully Mrs. Smith had been told something was wrong and had come to find her, and they sat in the car while she explained how the class had been talking about the "Law of Chastity" and how Hitomi had tried to explain that she had already had sex before when another girl told her she was breaking "Heavenly Father's Law" and she was suddenly the center of attention and incredibly... well, shamed, she guessed. She didn't think she should feel ashamed, but she did, and she didn't like it.

[cont'd]