SCHOOL’S NOT HELPING today. All morning I expect Ms. Pham to take a closer look at the form, to call me up to her desk. But the pile stays where it is and then after lunch it’s gone.

We have creative reading and writing in the afternoon. We’ve been studying genre this year. We’ve looked at comedy, adventure, mystery. Now we’re looking at ghost stories. Ms. Pham’s been reading The Turnkey, about a ghost in charge of a cemetery during the war. She reads for twenty minutes, and everyone’s quiet. I love it when she reads. It’s my favorite part of school. I like to watch her feet. When it’s scary, or tense, she curls her toes up in her shoes, and if it’s really exciting she wraps one leg around the other and squeezes her knees together. She always picks books that everyone loves, including this one. It’s a historical novel, which made some people groan, but it’s also about ghosts, which made some people a little scared, but it’s also about a twelve-year-old girl. And somehow everyone’s loving it, even the kids who don’t like ghost stories, or history, or books about girls. At the end of the twenty minutes she asks us to write something. Last week it was something set in the past. This week, she asks us to write something scary, and there’s a lot more excitement about this than there was last time. To start she asks us to think about something that scares you. I stare at the exercise book on my desk. The other kids start talking almost immediately. There’s a lot of laughter and chatter about vampires and ghosts. Ms. Pham shushes the chatter and then it’s just the whisper of pens across paper. We have twenty minutes. What scares you? I squeeze my eyes shut. What scares you? I grip my pen and open my eyes. I don’t see the page in front of me. I see shadows, the shadows running behind you. The scratch of pens becomes the scratch of small things that climb and scrabble. My guts tighten to a hard lump. I swallow, but that just pushes more of me down, making the ball in my guts heavier, weighting me, dragging at muscle and bone. Sinking me into a cold mass that used to be warm blood and breath, so heavy I should be pushing through the chair and the floor, falling to the center of everything.

“Rae?”

I’m cold stone, fingers heavy and frozen. My breath pushes inside a hard shell, moving nothing. The chair holds, supporting my impossible weight.

“Rae?”