Touch a Picture

“What are these pictures? Why do you have them? Do they mean something to you?”

There was no answer from the teen girl sitting across from her and Gina had to restrain herself from visibly gritting her teeth. Just a teen girl, Gina said to herself, You’re the therapist, you’re in charge of the situation, but that teen girl couldn’t be more than five years younger than Gina, and it was hard not to react to her as a peer instead of a patient. The girl wore dark, tight clothes ripped across the knees and arms, and a small, smug smile on her pale face.

Gina Alvarez resisted the impulse to shut her eyes and sigh heavily. She could feel her professional self fraying at the edges after six sessions with this girl. She was getting nowhere close to the breakthrough she wanted, and she had worked so hard to get assigned to this particular patient.

That smug smile, that supercilious half-lidded gaze staring right through her. She felt a wild surge of rage and turned her head away to rummage in her desk, hiding her expression from her patient. No, pull it together. Be a professional, Gina. You are in control here, not her. 

She tried again, her voice kind and calm. “I know you don’t want to be here, Allie, but it can’t hurt to chat some, can it? Whether or not you believe me when I say that your parents are worried about you, I genuinely am. That’s why I’m a therapist. I believe everybody needs a listening ear. You say these pictures go everywhere with you. Most people carry pictures because it reminds them of what they love. Are these images that call up feelings in you? Can you tell me something about them?”

The photos were spread on the desk between them, sprawled out in a half circle, laminated and held together by a binder ring in the corner. A pickpocket’s set. A sandwich. A folded pile of clothes sitting on someone’s bed. An average looking white sedan. A jacket.

Allie sighed and uncrossed her legs. Gina watched as she lazily got up, strolling to the bookcase that ran along the side of the room, her hands behind her back. It didn’t help that Allie was tall and lithe, with dark hair reaching all the way down her back, and Gina described herself in her own mind as “comfortably soft.” The neat little red pantsuit she’d put on that morning seemed to be trying too hard compared to Allie’s casually rebellious sliced jeans and ratty shirt.

“They don’t ‘call up feelings’ in me. I just think they’re useful.” Allie began pulling books off the shelf, thumbing through them, and putting them back.  “Maybe some people are so into food that they have feelings about a picture of a sandwich, but I’ve never heard of anybody being so emotional about their folded laundry that they need to carry a picture around in their pocket. They’re very boring pictures. So that makes me wonder why you are so interested in them. Shouldn’t we be talking about my avoidant attachment issues, or how my rebellious attention seeking is just a way of expressing my need for self-validation?” She cocked her head at one of the books she’d pulled off the shelf. “’America’s Serial Killers.’ Grim reading for a therapist, hmm, Gina? I see a lot of true crime books here…interesting. Oh, and lots of first editions. Very fancy. Seems you like nice things.”

“How about you come back and sit down, and we’ll talk about this.” Gina said, a sharp edge slipping into her voice. Under the desk, she balled her hands into fists, fingernails cutting into her palms. She was losing control of the session. A teenage girl should be easier to handle.

Allie didn’t stop browsing the bookshelf. “How about this. Give my pictures back to me, take my parent’s check for yet another wasted hour, and maybe this session will end better than I think it will.”

Gina cleared her throat and smoothed down her pantsuit. “I think you should have more hope about your sessions, Allie. That’s a very defeatist attitude.” Gina’s voice sounded too syrupy sweet to her. She tried for more calm and less sweetness. “I see a lot of running away in your life. You run away from home, you skip school when you feel like it. Let’s not run away from this conversation, okay? How about this. Let’s try something easier. You want to look at my books? Then bring one of those books over here and we’ll talk about it.  It’ll get the conversation going.”

Allie looked over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow, but with a smirk, she pulled a book off the shelf and sauntered over, slapping it onto the desk and sitting down to page through it. “’The History of Human Psychotherapy.’ Oo, pictures. These are interesting. Way more interesting than that sandwich you’re so curious about.” She lifted her head and gave Gina a toothy smile. But in a hard voice she said, “I’m not talking about anything you want to talk about, Ms. Alvarez, so you better get to whatever point you’re really aiming at.”

Something changed in Gina’s demeanor. Her lips clamped together, all trace of a smile gone, and her eyes glinted, hard. She opened a drawer and pulled out her phone. “I’m tired of doing the run around, Allie. I received these surveillance camera photos from a friend in the police. He thinks this is a petty criminal that’s been plaguing the city with stupid pranks. An apple tree suddenly taking root in the middle of an art gallery and vanishing twenty-four hours later.  A pack of hounds showing up in the Main Street library. A Model T parked in the mayor’s parking spot with “Old Fart” written on the windshield.”

A surprised giggle escaped Allie, but Gina curled her lip, condescension on her face. “Stupid stuff. Stupid pranks. Juvenile things.”

Allie let out a real laugh now. “Well, sure, but what does that have to do with me? I mean, I’m flattered you think I have that great of a sense of humor, but…”

Gina bared her teeth and flipped her phone around, showing another photo. There, walking away from a Model T parked in a parking spot, was Allie, blurry but unmistakable. “My friend on the police force thinks this is petty vandalism. But see, what he doesn’t know is that this picture in particular was taken when your parents thought you were completely incapable of escaping the house. They’d locked you in your room. They’d taken away the car keys. But look here in the background. A white sedan. Just like the one in the pictures you carry around with you.” There was a wild gleam in Gina’s eyes, an obsession revealed. She made no attempt to cover it up anymore. She would have what this girl had, one way or another, she would use it in a worthwhile way, not frittering away power in silly pranks. “Don’t lie to me. What can you do with those photographs?”

Allie shrugged and leaned back in her chair, legs crossed, foot bobbing. “There’s a million white sedans in the world. I’m sure you’re confused about what my parents thought I was doing. Or they were confused. They are frequently confused. And just to be clear—I never write ‘Old Fart’ on that Model T—though,” she giggled again, “I wish I had.”

“Listen here, you little twerp!” Gina slapped her hands on the table and stood up. “I’m done playing nice. I sit here and I listen to pampered little jerks whine about their problems day in and day out when half of my problems would just be solved with some cash! Whatever capability you have, I need it.”

Allie was expressionless. “Tough for you.”

Gina bared her teeth and hissed, “If you don’t tell me what you can do right now, and then do it for me, I’m calling the police. I have your face right here, as evidence. They won’t care that your parents say you were at home. You’ll be looking at jail time, girl.”

Allie met her gaze for a long, silent moment, and then her expression dropped into flat and bored. She sighed heavily. “Okay, well, if you’re going to be like that…give me the photos and I’ll see what I can do.”

Gina held out the photos, her hands trembling, her eyes fixed on Allie, the possessor of—magic? Gina wasn’t completely sure, but she knew she wanted it.  Allie reached for the photo with her right hand, as her left whipped out from under the table and clicked a pair of handcuffs around Gina’s wrist. She then attached the other cuff to the heavy mahogany desk, picked up Gina’s phone, and slipped it into her pocket. Gina yanked at the cuffs and shrieked, “What are you doing? Get these off me right now!”

But Allie held up the History of Human Psychotherapy, open to the page with a picture of handcuffs. “Props for figuring out that I could do…something. But maybe you should have figured out exactly what it was before you tried to exploit it?”

“Let me go!” Gina howled, and jerked around against the handcuffs some more.

 Allie waited for a pause and said: “You can shut up now, your receptionist isn’t out there—Anyway, when I touch pictures, they come into being.” She gave her a small, tight smile. “Unfortunately for you, you’re not the first person who figured out what I can do and then tried to abuse me. I’ve learned to be careful. It’s led to some habits my parents find concerning, but I find useful.”

Gina took a wild swipe at her with her free hand and got nowhere near her. She snarled and lunged again, anyway, then threw herself against the cuffs in the opposite direction, thrashing against them and knocking books and papers everywhere. “Help! Help! Assault!”

Allie stood well back and watched this with her arms crossed. “By the way, I also disabled all your cameras yesterday. And you were the one who gave your receptionist an extra long lunch, so kind of you. She seemed surprised when she told me out in the waiting room. I understand you were trying to protect yourself in case I made a scene, but it’s worked out  fortunately for you anyway, because now nobody is here to witness you making a scene.  You’re a grown woman, calm down already.”

Gina snarled and yanked at the handcuffs one more time before subsiding, panting, red-faced and furious. Allie pulled a magazine out of her purse and began calmly thumbing through it. “Found this in the waiting room,” she explained, as she touched the picture and a bottle of cologne materialized in her hand. “Magazines are wonderful collections of useful stuff.” She spritzed it once into the air, dropped it into her purse. Then she flipped through the pages again, pulled out a single rose, and placed it on the far edge of the desk, out of Gina’s reach.

“There.” She smiled. “Just try and see if anybody believes you about me when you get found locked to your desk with a rose and the smell of men’s cologne in the room.”  She looked Gina up and down. “And looking mighty disheveled. What have you been up to, you naughty thing?”

She picked up the stack of pictures, thumbed through it, and grinned at Gina. “Guess I’ll change out the car now, too. Maybe I’ll pick something more fun than an Impala this time. Byeee.”

And she sauntered out the door, shutting it behind her with a click.  

Allie was correct. Nobody believed Gina’s story. Even worse, the person who rescued her from her embarrassing situation was not the receptionist, but one of her highest paying clients, who walked into the office and made all the assumptions Allie had intended for him to make. Gina protested her innocence and told her receptionist to file a police report. Unfortunately for her, just last week she’d found the receptionist flirting with a male patient. In the lecture on unprofessional conduct that she’d given Ms. Smyth she’d used words like “floozy” and “pathetically desperate.”  So Ms. Smyth, feeling justifiably self-righteous, simply “forgot” to file the report. 

Nobody ever caught the vandal-prankster that the local police had photographed either. Two distraught parents filed a missing persons report on a seventeen-year-old girl matching the one in the pictures, but the police never found her.

Years later, an FBI agent investigating some unusual circumstances obtained those photos and began to make connections between his own case and the long-forgotten prankster. But that’s a story for another time.