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with her first camera, when she was fourteen, that the world was safer when she looked at it through a lens. She could capture the stark, lush, harsh, kind beauty in any single instant. If ugliness managed to intrude, she could Photoshop it out and create perfection. Ilena Gomez, her preggers margarita doll, had called her photos haunting and majestic, a compliment that had lingered for weeks in Jessy’s heart. Still did.
    Even so, she hadn’t picked up the camera in a month. There wasn’t a lens long enough to distance her from the mess of her life.
    After pulling on a pair of sandals with thick rubber soles, she picked up the bag, retrieved the battery that was always in the charger nearby, then her purse, and left the apartment. When she pulled out of the alley a few minutes later, she headed north. She didn’t know where she was going, but out of town sounded good.
    The Oklahoma countryside always seemed peaceful, except when storm clouds hurtled across the sky, and even those had incredible beauty. In her four years there, Jessy had gotten only one photo of a tornado, but she hoped for another chance someday, preferably an impressive one that formed quickly and broke apart just as quickly without doing any damage.
    Not today, though. She just wanted to feel the camera in her hands, to look around her with that protective distance in place, to enjoy the sun and breathe the fresh air, and to hopefully get rid of a bit of the ugliness inside her.
    Seeing a pasture with cattle ahead, she slowed and turned onto the dirt road that fronted it. A few hundred feet down, she parked at the side of the road, right wheels close to the bar ditch, took out the camera, and crunched over gravel on her way to the pasture fence. The boards, though worn gray with weather and time, held securely under her weight, so she climbed to the top, balancing carefully as she focused the lens on the nearest cow. Deep red and white, it chewed lazily, methodically, its huge eyes watching her with disinterest.
    â€œI’m just another two-legged oddity in your world, aren’t I?” Jessy murmured, snapping off pictures, close up and from a distance, cows and babies, trees and fence and sandstone boulders and sky. Something unwound in her gut, so slowly that it took her a while to realize it was tension seeping away. She’d missed this feeling of capturing a perfect moment in time, of preserving the scene, of creating something that would long outlast her. She’d needed it, needed something that wouldn’t leave her feeling ashamed as so much of her life did.
    Traffic passed on the highway, but she ignored it as she turned to face the opposite direction. The field across the road was overgrown, enclosed with rusty barbwire that sagged between ancient wooden posts. Though it had once been cleared, red cedars were taking over again, along with sumac seedlings that would provide gorgeous splashes of color come fall. Wildflowers grew in patches: Indian paintbrush, black-eyed Susan, purple coneflower. Clumps of iris spread in straight lines about thirty feet from the road, bearing a few blooms among the spent flowers that had already faded.
    Jessy crossed the road again, racking up pictures from every angle. She was crouched next to the ditch, lens directed to the irises, when fine vibrations transmitted from the ground to the soles of her feet. A pickup truck was coming down the road, a dust cloud trailing behind it like a balloon bobbing after a toddler. She glanced at the dust, then the camera, and stood, folding her arms against her chest and over the camera to protect it.
    The driver stopped well short of the stop sign, waited a beat, then eased forward until the truck was even with her. Oklahomans were friendly, she reminded herself. A quick hello-how-are-you-doing, and he would leave her in nondusty peace.
    Then she saw him, and peace was the last thing on her mind.
    Memories assailed her—a sunny afternoon, the