The camera shutters flickered, pinning the moment into place before it slipped away. The playback screen loaded for a moment and then glowed with a cool, digital light as the image came into focus. In the little square frame she smiled her warm, fluid smile, a smile that touched her pale eyes and wrinkled her nose. She gazed off at some unknown spectacle, not yet trying to be beautiful but succeeding all the same. And she was beautiful, my cousin, composed of light and color and a fierce desperation that the camera could not capture.  

She snuck up behind me, squeezing her narrow arms around my waist and locking me into place.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, fixing her eyes on the screen.

“Ohhhhh, taking pictures of me!” she said without waiting for my response. With the playful grin of a pixie, she pushed away from me and flung her arms into a stereotypical model’s pose.

“Ella, what on earth are you doing?” I laughed.

“I’m posing!” she announced. “Take more pictures of me!”

“Okay, okay, I’m working on it.”

“Faster!”

I rolled my eyes, both amused and annoyed by her impatience. The note of bossiness sounded foreign in her high, young voice, as if she were using someone else’s words instead of her own. In fact, everything about Ella seemed foreign to me: her long braids, her quick wit, her eager expression. It had been four years since I’d last seen her; four years ago, she had been a baby, a gangly little five-year-old who was nervous for kindergarten and had chocolate pudding smeared on her chin.

She laughed with me as I snapped her picture over and over. Like a butterfly, she flitted here and there, one moment on the sofa, the next by the front door. With a brilliant, nearly tangible energy, she bounced from wall to wall, posing with a bright, earnest expression on her face, her movements like quicksilver. The camera bulb flashed in quick, sporadic blinks, freezing my cousin’s delicate image against the warm lights of my grandparents’ living room. This was her first time in their new house. They had moved there five years ago.

Ella was bored of the camera within minutes. Before I could ask her what she wanted to do, she took my hand in her iron grasp and pulled me into the guest room. There, she pulled out an organized container lined with Barbie dolls and a neat stack of pink and purple mini dresses.

With a look of deep, unwavering concentration, my little cousin sifted through the dolls, all the while explaining the game we would play. The dolls would be in high school, she said, which in her hopeful eyes was a glamorous place teeming with high fashion and cute boyfriends. Our dolls were identical twin sisters who did everything together. And, of course, we were ridiculously rich. According to her flawless logic, we were so rich that we didn’t have to pay for anything.

“And these,” Ella concluded, picking up two dolls with tangled hair and frumpy outfits, “are the mean girls.” Her face creased into a scowl. “They are so mean that they push us onto the ground when they see us. And they’re jealous of us because we’re so pretty and they’re so ugly. And they tell us that they hate us.”

I cringed. The harshness of her voice, the hardness of her frown, and the ease with which these words came to her made me uncomfortable.

“That sounds horrible,” I said to her. “They wouldn’t do all that to us, would they? Even if they are mean.”

“Oh, yes, they would,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “They’re very, very, very mean.” She paused pensively, her small frame leaning against my own. “Their names are Ursula and Cruella and our names are Rapunzel and Belle.” She looked up at me with wide, bright eyes.

“Do you like that name? Belle? ‘Cause you can pick your name if you want,” she said, her voice soft and concerned. I smiled and shook my head.

“Okay,” she said, turning back to the dolls. Then, as an afterthought, she turned back to me. “There are mean people at my school. My best friend Emma is one of them. She and Rachel called me weird and said they didn’t want to be my friends anymore.”

I imagined her at school in the thick, sticky heat of her hometown, being pushed around by two little girls wearing Abercrombie t-shirts and glittery headbands. I imagined them calling my bright, glowing, beautiful cousin ‘weird’ and pushing her into the sawdust and running away. I imagined her sitting up, her sympathy melting away as the world gradually became divided into black and white, princesses against villains, nice girls against mean ones.

“Are there mean people at your school?” she asked. 

‘Of course,’ I thought.

“No,” I said.

“Really?” She sounded so relieved.

“Really,” I lied, wrapping my arm around her skinny shoulders. From the other room, someone called her name. The click of high heels echoed in the hall until my aunt appeared in the doorframe.

“Ella, I’ve been calling you. We gotta go, sweetie.” Her hand sat impatiently on her slender hip; her expression was one of exhaustion. Ella’s face melted into a look of profound disappointment at her words. Slowly, wordlessly, she tucked the dolls back into the box and snapped the plastic lid on. She held my hand tightly as we walked to the door, only letting go to crush my waist on one last hug. My family lingered in vague conversation for a minute, promising to call often and wishing that they could visit more. Then, tentatively, Ella released me, walked to the car, and waved goodbye with a thin, pale hand.

And then she was gone. I crept back into the house, shivering from the chilly darkness, and lifted the camera from its case. I pulled up the playback of pictures from earlier this evening and sifted through them, deleting the blurry ones, admiring the quality of others. I kept every one of Ella. It was strange, looking at the photos that were unable to capture her strength and her delicacy, her happiness and anger, her overflowing energy. The camera could do nothing to contain her, to save her forever, and neither could I.