EVERY MINUTE JOSIE SPENT IN THE HOUSE, SHE FELT MORE AND more smothered. Her father so badly wanted her close to him, and the air in the house seemed to deplete every time he mentioned how much Josie’s mother had loved her. This morning he had tried to get her to look through the many photo albums her mother kept in the upstairs sitting room, but she had refused. It wasn’t so much the pictures as the room itself. It was bright and small, and she was sure it would still smell of her mother’s lavender hand lotion. Her mother would often sit there and knit, the one remnant of her Midwestern upbringing. Josie had liked to lie at her feet and unwind the yarn from its skein as her mother needed it. Sometimes her mother would tell her stories about when she was young, about the flounced dresses and stiff hats she wore to church, the award-winning rabbit she raised for 4H, the basement that her parents had turned into a ballet studio for her and her sister. Josie would wind the yarn around her fingers and try and imagine her mother small. She loved that room when her mother was in it, the way it hugged the two of them close, but without her, it made Josie uneasy precisely because of its size—one wall was two body lengths, another four, and if she stood on a chair she could graze the slant of the ceiling with her fingertips. It made her feel giant, capable of smashing entire towns with her big toe.

She discovered this by accident during a game of hide-and-seek. She had hidden in the sitting room many times before—behind the dark wood chest, the yellow gauzy curtains—but this particular time, she realized she was tiny enough to wedge herself beneath the large white armchair and be unseen. Once there, protected by the skirt of the chair, she was a squirrel in its den. She went a whole half hour before she was found, and only then because Natalie recruited Alba to help. But one summer afternoon when Natalie and her brother were playing, everything changed. Josie ran immediately to the room, but when she tried to push herself under the seat of the chair, she found her chest too big, her shoulders too broad. She tried again, this time feet first, but with the same results, and eventually she lay flat on her back, her legs squeezed, her hips scrunched to one side, and cried, not because she had lost her favorite hiding spot, but because she had grown too big, swelled like a twisted ankle. The pencil markings her father drew on her doorframe may have measured how tall she was, but the kind of growing that made her too big to fit under the chair was the inside-out kind. She was huge and this was bad.