Amelia Becker was seven the first time her body remembered dying, and the memory was four inches too tall for her.

Mrs. Kaminski gave the assignment twice, because second graders needed it twice.

“All right, class, take your seats and get your crayons out. We’re starting a fun project. I want you to draw a place you remember,” she said. “Your house, your backyard, your grandmother’s kitchen. Any place that is real to you. Use your colors. We’ll share them at the end.”

Chairs shifted. Crayon boxes opened. The classroom filled with the ordinary noise of children making art, and the sound of wax on paper.

It was October, the week before Halloween. Paper bats hung from the ceiling. Orange and black leaves had been taped around the windows. A row of painted pumpkins sat along the top of the bookshelf, each with a different face.

Amelia sat at the third table from the door and flattened her paper with both hands where it wanted to curl. She had already chosen the kitchen at home: the window over the sink, the blue tin where Margaret kept the pencils, the four squares of morning light on the floor.

She picked up the brown crayon and pressed it against the paper. The paper accepted it, and what came out was not a place she had ever been.

Then her hand went somewhere else.

The first line came down long and straight. A second crossed it near the top. Then a third slanted to meet it.

Glass walls. Iron frames. A stone floor.

Her hand filled the roof with panes, small and even, and drew the long, thin frames that held them. Along the top she placed a row of flat ventilation panels, the kind that opened when the room grew too hot. She put in the stone floor. Then the benches, running in ordered rows along both walls.

Green filled them: leaves, stems, the dense, wet life of growing things.

There was a gap in the left row where a pot had been lifted out and not put back.

She drew the gap.

Blue came next. One line high along the wall, with small marks beneath it where water entered through a pipe.

She did not decide how high.

Amelia did not know what she was drawing. Her hand knew. Her hand moved with a confidence that did not belong to her, the strokes sure and architectural, the spatial depth accurate in a way that Mrs. Kaminski would later describe as uncommon in her incident report. Seven-year-olds did not render architectural perspective from memory.

Amelia had seen the greenhouse all her life. It stood on the east side of the estate, attached to the old wing. From the house, she could see its glass roof through the trees.

But the greenhouse outside was broken down. Dirt filmed the glass. Vines had climbed over the iron frame, and weeds had crept up against the walls.

The greenhouse beneath her crayon was different.

Sunlight came through clean glass. Greenery filled the benches in ordered rows. The plants were kept, watered, and trained. Nothing had been left to grow wild.

She had never been inside it.

Her hand knew where everything was.

“That’s pretty,” Lucy Petersen said, trying to smile.

Amelia drew a short blade with a hook at the end.

Lucy stopped smiling.

The smell arrived before the understanding did.

Not the classroom smell of floor wax and pencil shavings and the stale warmth of small bodies in an enclosed space. Something underneath that. Something that entered through a door that was not in the room.

Wet earth, warm from a hand pushed down into a pot that had just been watered. Fertilizer. Cut stems. Green, humid air that had passed through living things and become heavy enough to press against the face.

Amelia’s shoulders rose toward her ears.

She inhaled through her nose, long and slow, scenting it the way an animal scents weather, with the whole face, with the chest, with the part of the nervous system that does not wait for permission.

The smell was still there.

Stronger.

Under the radiator, water ticked.

One small knock every few seconds, moving down the wall from the corner. Amelia knew, before it reached the third bench, that it would reach the third bench.

The brown crayon rolled from her fingers, crossed the paper, and stopped against the ruler at the edge of the table.

She reached for it.

Her hand stopped four inches short.

Her fingers closed on empty air. She looked at her own hand sitting there in the wrong place. Four marks of the ruler lay between her fingers and the crayon.

Her arm was too short.

That was the shape of the wrongness. She had no other words for it. Her hand had gone out to where her hand went, but where it went was farther than she could reach.

Four inches separated her fingers from the crayon.

Four inches that belonged to someone else.

She reached again.

Four marks.

She pressed her palm flat against the table until her fingers went white. Pressing down was something she could feel from both ends, and for as long as she pressed, the arm was hers.

Then she lifted it, and it was not.

Behind her, a chair leg scraped across the linoleum.

Another chair moved.

Someone said her name in the high, wrong voice children used when they wanted an adult and could not get one.

Amelia’s left hand went out in front of her.

She expected the wall to be there.

Her fingers stopped short.

She reached farther, and her palm found the wall, but the iron strip between the panes remained four inches beyond her fingers.

Flat. Cool along the top, warmer lower down where the sun had rested on it all morning.

She pressed.

It held.

“Glass,” she said.

A voice came from somewhere below her, close to her face.

“What glass, Amelia?”

She could not spare any of herself to answer. Her hand kept moving along the wall, feeling for the seam.

Behind her, the classroom went quiet in sections.

The quiet had a shape in it.

Something was standing where the tables should have been.

Her body knew it before she turned. It knew the size of the thing, how much floor it occupied, and that it was between her and the door.

Her chest emptied and refilled, fast and shallow, the breathing of someone trying not to be found.

Then the pressure arrived at the front of her throat.

It was thin and hard. It sat higher than her throat went.

Her hand flew up to pull it away.

Her fingers stopped beneath it.

She dragged them upward, searching for the chain, but the pressure stayed just beyond her grasp. Her nails entered the skin beneath her jaw and left red lines there.

There was nothing to take hold of.