Her name was Audrey, and she had red hair. Carefully, I framed her in the camera lens. A breath of wind lifted her hair, blowing it across her dark blue eyes. I clicked the shutter. She blinked, the camera whirred. The wind died down and the trains station was still.
               It was a biting fall day, shortly before Halloween. I was wearing my mother’s bright green parka—she had shoved it at me as I’d desperately scrambled out of the station wagon and into the train station.
               I’d boarded at Vermont Street; Audrey had said to get off at LaSalle. I handed my money to the conductor, who acted as though I was 3-headed monster instead of a 16-year-old girl. I peered out the green-tinted window. Surely my imagination had run away with me.
               But no—I’d gone quite willingly. My imagination and I had run off together—eloped, so to speak. I smiled. The doctor would have said my ass ran away with my head. He had a way with words, that doctor.
               I wasn’t crazy. Really. I’d told him that. I’d told him how alone I felt in crowds. I’d told him how I couldn’t sleep because I cried at night. I’d told him how worried everyone acted. I told him how ugly I felt, how thin and pale and washed-out blonde, wasted and nonexistent.
               I’d told him how beautiful that girl had been, how she had black hair and green eyes. How connected I felt to her, how she was my fairy tale princess.
               He’d asked if I was in love with her.
               I told him yes, I was, and I’d never spoken to her.
               I’m not crazy. Really.
               I got off at LaSalle street, the train doors pinging their safety warning behind me.
               The station’s clock told me I was early. I pulled out my old Argus and took a picture of it, the hands frozen forever on film. I paced the station, waiting for Audrey. I threw some change in a street musician’s case, along with some hard candy from my mother’s parka pocket.
               It was much colder than last week, when my photography class had met with another group of students here. I’d felt very naive and suburban. It had been Audrey who offered to show me the city.
               I might not have said yes if it wasn’t for my friend Laurie. I’d been siting by Buckingham fountain when she’d come up from behind. I’d jumped about a mile.
               “Geez, paranoid much?” she asked. I told her not to surprise me like that, ever. She shrugged, and nodded in the direction of a red-headed girl clutching a Polaroid camera. “See that girl over there?”
               I’d seen her. I’d had my eye on her all day. She looked like a Michelangelo angel.
               But I simply nodded, and Laurie continued in a conspirital whisper. “The kid’s from that other class, they say she’s a dyke or something—“
               I froze. Had Laurie figured me out? How could I be so obvious when I wasn’t even sure myself...?
               “—and they think she’s got a crush on you!” Laurie gave me a shove, like I was supposed to be impressed. I was.
               “Why do they think that?” I asked stupidly.
               “Only cuz she’s been watching you all day. Look, she’s staring at you right now!”
               I immediately turned to look, and sure enough, the red-head flushed and averted her eyes.
               “Oh.” I said. My stomach knotted when I saw the girl stand up and start walking towards me.
               Laurie poked me in the ribs. “This should be interesting, huh?” Her tone was suggestive, and I wondered again how much she knew about my hospital stay. I pulled my sleeves down farther over my wrists.
               “Hi. I’m Audrey.”
               “Beth. Hi.”
               My flashback ended abruptly when the real Audrey appeared in front of me. There was camera in her face, and in a second I was blinking while she re-fastened her lens cap.
               “Now I need one of you.” I said.
               “Uh uh.” said Audrey, smiling and shaking he head. “I never take pictures, never ever. I’m just not photogenic.”
               Not photogenic! My mind reeled. Venus didn’t think she was photogenic. I stared, slack-jawed.
               “And....maybe I’m a little scared.” A slight blush crept into her cheeks. “You know what they say, how when someone takes your picture—“
               “—they take your soul.”
               Audrey smiled. I looked pointedly at her camera. She whistled absently, faking nonchalance, until we both burst out laughing.
               Her laugh was lovely, musical. Listening to it, I realized how long it had been since I’d really laughed. If only my mother could see me now. I’ve always been a cynic—I mean, I remember laughing a lot in the psych ward, an angry, sarcastic laugh. Not like this. I hadn’t laughed out of pure instinct in who knows how long. I wondered what Audrey was doing to me.
               As if in answer, she ceased laughing and said “Gosh, you’ve got pretty hair.”
               Again, she caught me off guard. I made me a little angry, even, that with one little touch of cheap sentiment, Audrey could pass right through the walls I’d so painstakingly put up. I didn’t allow anyone inside my personal reality; during my stay in the hospital I’d learned to detach. At least, detach enough to get by. If I’ve learned anything at all, it’s this: if you don’t tell people things, you don’t get in trouble.
               I never should have told that doctor about my fairy-tale princess. It really wasn’t because of her that I tried to kill myself.
               She was part of it, yes. Our imaginary affair, star-crossed from the beginning, had the effect of ruining me for the real world. I’d read Romeo and Juliet over and over, quoted it everywhere. I remember thinking “I am fortune’s fool” countless times when the doctor told me I just needed to meet the right boy.
               Having a dramatic sensibility is no reason for suicide, though. It’s just that, when you can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality, you’re forced to choose. “Violent delights have violent ends....” I was too tired for reality. They say I left a note, “dry sorrow drinks our blood,” but I only remember thinking that the red was so pretty....I wished I could have taken some photographs.....
               Audrey’s compliment made me suddenly self-conscious. I made sure the green parka sleeves covered my scars, and touched my hair. “I used to dye it red,” I told her, “but after a while I got tired of dyeing it again and again.”
               “Ugh, why would you want it red?” asked Audrey. How come redheads always hate their hair? “I’d switch with you in a second.” She stood close to me, and for a moment I thought she was going to touch one of the strands of hair that always managed to straggle limply out of my ponytail.
               But she only scuffed the toe of her sneaker on the cement, and said we’d better get started.
               It was a biting fall day, and the Windy City was living up to it’s name. Audrey’s nose and ears turned red at the tips. I wished like hell I had a cape to wrap around her: it would billow out in the wind as she clutched it to her throat, beautiful and tragic as one of Poe’s lost loves....
               I was careful to play along with the pretense of this trip, dutifully snapping photos. With Audrey and her Polaroid, at first I’d felt like a tourist, but I soon started to see how Chicago was a beautiful city after all. In fact, I started to wax poetic, which didn’t help at all, since to me Audrey was poetry in motion. I kept trying to snap out of it, like someone slapping a drunk awake.
               It didn’t work.
               I was going to have to talk to her.
               “So......Audrey is a pretty cool name.”
               She looked at me, shocked that I’d finally spoken. “You think?” she said. “I used to hate it, when I was a kid.”
               “You’re not a kid anymore?”
               She gave me a warning look. I hadn’t meant for the question to take on the dimensions that it did. “That depends on your definition of kid.” She sighed and put her hands in her pockets. I noticed how heavy her camera looked around her neck. “I guess....no. I’m not a kid anymore.” Her voice was quiet and intense.
               I guess no one likes growing up. It sure as hell wasn’t easy for me. So I didn’t push her. I’ve never been a pushy person.
               “What about you?” Audrey scuffed her toe; I’d noticed that was a habit of hers. “Are you a kid anymore?”
               I saw my reflection in a shop window. My face was pale, almost translucent, like my hands get when it’s cold. There were spidery blue veins shadowing my eyes, and my hair was windblown and wispy. I looked like a fallen angel.
               “No.” I told Audrey. “I wish I was.”
               Things change you. Growing up like this changes you. I stared at my reflection.
               I’m not crazy.
               But there’s something wrong with me.
               I could feel the wind blowing right through me, into another dimension. I barely felt my own pulse.
               “I’ll pay you to stop looking like that.”
               “Like what?”
               Audrey ducked her eyes. “Like you’re going to disappear.”
               I shrugged. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “you seem very....real, to me.”
               And then she laid her hand on my shoulder. They say that the devil’s handprints can burn human flesh. I know Audrey’s handprint will always be branded on my shoulder. But it has nothing to do with the devil.
               I took a deep breath. “I’ve never liked my name much, either.”
               “Oh?”
               “Yeah. I always felt like the stupid sister that died in Little Women.”
“               Never read it.”
               That clinched it. I was marrying this girl.
               It’s not easy to spend a day with someone you’ve just fallen for like a load of bricks. There’s no tactful way to say, “So, you a lesbian?”
               A lesbian. I’d never thought of myself that way before. It didn’t scare me.
               Audrey and I talked about everything that day. Books, movies, comics, poetry. I told her my theory, that I’d turn out to be a depressive-recluse poetess, a sort of Sylvia Plath-Emily Dickinson hybrid. I told her all kinds of things. I guess I knew I was heading for trouble, but it had been so long since I’d told anyone anything. But she would just laugh, and take another photo of me.
               She’d been doing that all day, snapping away my soul bit by bit. I wondered if she realized that she’d own me by the end of the day. And try as I might, I couldn’t get a single picture of her. When faced with a naked lens, she could move like lightening.
               Her camera spat out another photo of me. “Wow.” she said. She was right. In the photo, I stood at the edge of the river, clutching the stone railing and looking up at the sky. The light defined my profile. I looked unearthly, refined, regal. It was a good picture.
               That’s when it happened.
               Audrey looked at the photograph and said, “You look like a princess.”
               It might seem silly, but with those words my world split wide open with a crash. This had never happened before. In my fairy-tale world, I was not a princess. A servant girl, a scullery maid; yes. Not a the heroine. An invisible no one.
               But not invisible to Audrey. No one had ever seen me before, not like she did. She’d taken a whole roll of film of the different ways she saw me. She was my fairy godmother, I was Cinderella transformed. It was as though she’d stooped from heaven and handed me my identity.
               So that’s when it happened. Out of nowhere. That’s when I did the stupidest thing I could have possibly done.
               I said, “I love you.”
               And with that my dream world exploded and fused with reality in the form of Audrey taking my hand.
               “Me too.” she whispered.
               We walked to the train station like that, hand-in-hand. We wondered to each other if this was really a very sensible relationship. Then we would laugh and Audrey would squeeze my hand tighter.
               When we reached the station, I noted how strange it was, that just this morning the hands on the clock had seemed frozen. I was getting late, now, and Audrey fished her train pass from her pocket (my train wasn’t due for 20 minutes), along with a pen. We scrawled out our phone numbers and exchanged. She looked at me for a very long time. I was on the verge of asking “what is it?” when she thrust her camera at me.
               “All right.” she said. “Fine. One picture.”
               I grinned, and framed her in the camera lens.
               The photo came out as her train pulled in. Audrey looked at the photo, holding it uncertainly. I raised my eyebrows in confusion.
               Then she slowly extended her arm and handed me the photo. “There.” she said. “Now you’ve got my soul.”
               I tried to laugh, but it came out a sad, choking noise. I didn’t want her to leave, not for a second, much less until next weekend.
               “Beth—“ she said. Then she grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me, swiftly, on the lips. Before I knew it, she was on her train.....
               .....but inside my mother’s parka pocket I had a photograph, a phone number, and a reason to exist.
               The doctors say that was a turning point for me.....