They bought her the camera when she was twelve, the afternoon that her therapist diagnosed her with depression. When they refused to give her pills, despite her behavior having been a problem since she was learning to speak, he told them that if she had something to focus on, something to keep her busy and keep her from dwelling on negative thoughts, she would have an easier time handling the condition. They stopped on the way home, her mother glancing into the rear-view mirror too many times, her father too silent, and she with her forehead pressed against the glass, not even moving to brush her long black hair out of her eyes. It grew unbearable, as it had every day in the past, and on South Oak Street her mother took a U-turn into the parking lot of Mike’s Camera Outlet.

Her mother went straight to the counter, speaking with a young man about prices and sizes, while she herself wandered aisles that reeked of film and cleaning fluid, her father always a few paces behind her. Her mother was about to settle on a small, bright red thing—the sort tourists carry around, the girl would say later—when she wordlessly handed to her mother a big, heavy machine. A Canon Rebel XTi, the employee observed with a nod and a smile, and when he complimented her eye for cameras and made her look up from her shoes for once, her parents hardly questioned shelling out the $700 for it. As long as she promised to use it, of course, but on that day she could have smashed it at their feet and they wouldn’t have felt any anger towards her.

They drove her to the coast that weekend, and as they sat in the dunes with their jackets and coffee, squinting against wind too strong for surfers, she wandered alone down the empty beach, kicking up sand with her yellow flip-flops, eyes cast down from the grey March sky. It took her two hours to return, but when she did, she came running, camera tightly grasped in hand, and even though she had no smile on her face, she met their gazes and nodded when they asked if she’d enjoyed herself.
When they arrived home she went to her room and shut the door as she had every day before, and again, as every day before, emerged for dinner. They spoke to her, tentatively, asking her if she wanted to show them any of the photos she’d taken. She shrugged, which before had always been a clear no, but when she returned to her room, she did not stay there, instead carrying her computer out into the living room. Just one, she told them as she slid into the gap between them on the couch, a gap they had never before expected she would fill.

They leaned over her shoulders simultaneously, watching as she scrolled through what looked like a few hundred files. Her father asked if she took all of them that day, to which she nodded before finally choosing one.

When it appeared on the screen, both her parents fell speechless, though it was a simple image: an infant sea turtle, half-crushed into a boot print, the tracks of its siblings scattered in the sand around it. Her mother let out a sob and fled the room, and her father, never in her memory a man to show much emotion, began to turn red as tears streamed down his face into his dark, bushy moustache. The girl looked at him, and at the closed bedroom door, and back at him, and all the while, both her parents were speaking, saying, It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.



She began staying out late every weekday, walking home after school instead of taking the bus and wandering the streets, camera in hand, and on weekends she left before the sun rose and only came home for dinner with her parents. They told her they worried, but wanted to see her happy for once, and as long as she was careful and watched for anyone suspicious she could keep going out and taking photos. They would ask, sometimes, if she would show them any of the pictures she had taken, but she shook her head most nights and told them not this time.

A few months passed and summer arrived, and now every day was like the weekends had been during the school year. She began taking buses, traveling further and further away, all the way across town. When they began to scold her, she told her parents she wouldn’t go if they came with her, and they relented, for these days she spoke more than three words to them at a time, and didn’t need to be led by the hand to go anywhere, and even smiled sometimes. They remembered too well the little shell that rarely moved and never met their gaze. She came back for dinner every night, sitting and eating quietly as her parents spoke at her and with each other, going into her room afterwards and shutting the door to upload all the photos she’d taken that day.

One evening in June she came into the living room after dinner and told her parents she wanted them to see another picture, and they eagerly made room on the couch between them. She sat down and scrolled through what now consisted of hundreds of folders, choosing just one image and opening it for them. This one was of a small boy grasping a bubble wand in his tiny hand, lips puckered and eyes wide open, enamored of the iridescent soap bubbles floating into the cloudless blue sky.

Her father began to chuckle, and her mother promptly joined in, giggling in that high, awkward way that she did, and in response her father grew louder, until both her parents were roaring with laughter and leaning on her, trying to catch their breath and saying over and over, voices filled with joy, It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, oblivious to the confusion and fear in her eyes, until she stood up and ran to her room, and it took hours until she could no longer hear their mirth through her door and the pillow she clamped over her head.



At fourteen, when she began abandoning school to take the hour-long bus trip up the coast to Virginia, they started to hound her to send her photos to competitions, to National Geographic, to anything, anything at all, even though they had seen only a small handful of the thousands and thousands of images she had taken. Each time, they told her the same thing, It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, either through hysterics of mirth or mourning or through love-glazed glows. Never anything else.

She finally gave in when they told her to take either school or photography seriously, settling on the most local competition she could find. When she won first place for a shot of the dawn sky through the branches of a dead tree in a cemetery, however, the judge pleaded with her that she send the photo to the Soho National Photography competition, telling her it was beautiful. She refused, nervous but vehement, both about the photo and the competition, only willing to apply as high as a North Carolina competition and only willing to apply with a new photo.

It made no difference. At fifteen—gangly, thin, hair still long and always in her face—she took the first prize for that contest, too, because it was beautiful, and only then did she agree to go national, though she yelled at her parents for the first time in her life and locked herself in her room the second they suggested getting her a new camera. Sixteen led her out of school, with her failing grades, and into a museum, her photos printed huge and framed and hung on the walls. Her first exhibit had people leaving completely hysterical, either with grief or with happiness, and she begged her mother to tell her what was happening, but her mother just kept shaking her head, vision clouded and hands clutched to her breast, gazing at the picture the girl had taken of the robin hatchlings on their roof, saying over and over again, It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.

When the curator demanded that she prepare another exhibit for him, she ran from the room and down to their car and wouldn’t go back into the museum.
Her parents took her home and told her gently that they didn’t understand how she could have possibly gotten so upset, speculating that maybe seeing her work in such a public place was too nerve-wracking, just made her uncomfortable, that they had pushed her too hard, and all the while she sat silent, forehead against the window, knuckles going white around her camera. When they got home, she went to her room and shut the door and didn’t come out, not even for dinner, and her parents spoke quietly with each other and said only that she was a teenager and it was natural. When they asked her later if she wanted the thousands of dollars of prize money she’d won, she told them she’d tear the check up if she got her hands on it.



After a year of letting her run wild, driving as far as D.C. and West Virginia and South Carolina, her parents tentatively asked if she would try the museum again, telling her that they were sure no one’s very first showing went spectacularly and that she oughtn’t judge all of them by the way just one had gone. She consented, quiet and resigned, and sent a single photo away to the Soho competition.

In the weeks following she was almost never in the house or the car, content to trek through piles of autumn leaves as they blew into gutters and collected in parks, spending most of her time in their neighborhood, much as she had in the very beginning. They called her months before they were supposed to judge the entries, telling her that she would get the first room of the showing when the spring exhibit came. She never once left the city as it rained and snowed and winter came and passed so fast she felt like it had never even happened, despite the hours every day she spent wandering the same streets over and over and over.

When the exhibit opened her parents finally saw photos from those she had taken in the year since the first showing: a terrier baring its fangs behind a Beware of Dog sign; an old man frowning and flicking his cigarette into the street; a sea of pigeons surrounding two fighting males. As her parents walked through the display, they began to argue, then fight, then scream at each other, and as she tried desperately to calm them down she sought the patrons that were just arriving, beseeching them for help. They barely glanced her way, and all began to frown, began to snap at each other, began to yell as they walked between the photos. A fist fight broke out and the girl retreated to a corner of the room, clutching her camera to her chest and whispering hopelessly. A pair of security guards, wandering the exhibit, began with the intent of breaking up the fight, but it wasn’t long before they joined in. The hall echoed deafeningly with the sound of people screaming at each other, hardly even speaking real words anymore, the sound of fists hitting faces and shoes hitting ribs, and finally with the sound of a single gunshot, loosed from a gun picked up by a stranger after one of the guards lost it in the fray.

Silence fell as all eyes, bewildered and shocked, turned to the corner of the room, following the smear of blood down to the girl, her eyes closed, a frown between her brows, her black hair covering most of her face. Further down, at her chest, her hands still clutched the camera, its lens shattered, the bullet hole beginning to pool with her blood. And as gazes drifted, as people tried to reorient themselves and remind themselves where they were, no one could understand why the walls were covered with frames, frames that held within them only blank, white photo paper.