Her question went unanswered. The next photo was of a street musician at Harvard Square that she’d taken on a rare weekend off.

Since Vanessa’s first contact a few weeks ago, Allison became increasingly excited about her obligatory trips to the photo lab at night. She told Vanessa about her life. Her mother who proclaimed that she was as hard and cold as meat from the freezer. Her father who mirthlessly kidded her about her height and how she was the son he’d never wanted. Vanessa responded by showing her images of her face in various looks of understanding and acceptance. Allison then took a chance and told her a secret that she struggled to hide from everyone. Vanessa responded by showing herself in an unbuttoned shirt starring longingly at the camera. Allison’s heart leapt. She’d known she was different from the other little girls when she was six. Other girls were so pretty. Their voices always sounded like violins in a melodic song. Her feelings made her uncomfortable. When puberty took hold, she noticed how much stronger her feelings became. It was at her parent’s church that she finally learned the words for what she felt. The God she was certain didn’t exist had destroyed two cities with fireballs from the sky for practicing what she wanted to do to other girls. And so, these feelings became her most guarded secret. She’d never allowed herself to hope for another girl to feel the same way towards her. From that moment, she decided that she loved Vanessa Peterson. Strangely, after a while, Vanessa stopped showing images of herself. Allison’s prints would show newspaper pages from the Globe or the Post. The dates on the pages were two or three days in advance. Vanessa wouldn’t respond when Allison asked her why. So, during the day, Allison would walk to a newsstand and peruse the papers on days that matched the dates in the prints. She’d search the papers and then find the stories verbatim. Though she abhorred her mother’s incessant waste of badly needed money on lottery numbers, Allison experimented with buying lottery tickets for the numbers revealed to her in the images. After winning a couple thousand dollars over the next several days, the newspaper pictures stopped. The next prints showed horrible scenes of people being shot or having their heads crushed beneath the tires of a truck. On the following day, Allison would read about the events in the newspaper. Over the course of a week, Vanessa’s images became more and more dire until Allison begged her to stop. Vanessa then imposed a series of images of a child being dragged by the arm into a white sedan. Allison studied the photo and saw the street signs in the background. With her AGFA loupe, she noted the time on the man’s wristwatch. She then understood what Vanessa wanted. Allison loved her even more knowing that, though Vanessa had been horribly wronged by her violent death, she wanted Allison to save others. It made sense. Never in her life had Allison ever cut a class, but she was determined to save the child. After surveilling the corner, she waited until she saw the little girl. As she stepped towards her to take her hand, the white sedan cut the corner almost jumping the curb. He moved so fast that Allison was hypnotized and stood motionless for several moments. When the exact scene from the print played out before her, her mind promptly cleared. A long-time student of the martial arts, Allison acted on muscle memory as she incapacitated the would-be abductor. By then, the little girl’s screams had drawn a small crowd to the scene of Allison putting a kneeling man in a sleeper hold in front of his opened car door. She hadn’t noticed the police officer until the man crumpled to the ground in a dead faint. After she had answered all the officer’s questions and the man was loaded into an ambulance, Allison was finally allowed to return home. She smiled, but it felt more like a grimace. ‘What the hell did I just do?’ She asked herself after hanging up the receiver from calling off her shift. Allison slept heavily that night, but she remembered each of her dreams.  They were all of Vanessa. In the morning she felt tired but happy. On the way to class, she stopped at the newsstand. In the Metro section of the Post was an article about how a child abduction was thwarted yesterday by Allison Winn. She smiled at seeing her name spelled correctly. Police had been after the serial abductor, Joe Francis, for years. He’d consistently avoided their traps, however. But now he was in custody. Allison wasn’t thrilled about the idea of testifying in court, but she allowed herself to feel good. The constant din of her parent’s insults in her head finally were quiet. She couldn’t wait to tell Vanessa. But then again, she probably already knew.