in the parking lot. He waved at me. “Hey, Kate!”
I could see Reva in the backseat of Brady’s car. She looked at me, scowled and then smiled wide when Eli opened the door. Eli turned to me just before getting in the car. “You okay with a ride?”
“My dad’s coming,” I said.
“We’d better get out of here, then. Brady’s tags are expired.” He smiled so I would know he was joking and got in the backseat next to Reva. I watched them leave, still trying to figure out not only why Eli had shown me the article possibly connecting Trent to two separate acts of vandalism, but why he had seemed so intense about me taking more pictures. Did he think I was actually good at it, or was he just trying to get me off the topic of the gorillas?
Minutes later, Dad pulled his police cruiser into the parking lot and I got into the front seat.
“How was your day?” he asked.
“It was very strange,” I replied.
LAN WAS MORE THAN A LITTLE disappointed that I didn’t have any real news about Trent. “But he’s definitely coming to school tomorrow?” she asked for the tenth time.
“Definitely,” I assured her. I was talking to her on my cell phone while I searched the Internet for “gorilla graffiti,” in the upstairs office. My parents wouldn’t let me have a computer in my room. They said anything I needed to search for could be done in public, which was just their way of saying that they didn’t want me looking at naked people online.
I wanted to read through the Tennessee newspaper article again. I felt like I was missing something. Lan moved off the topic of Trent and on to Mr. Gildea’s class.
“No one else assigned a paper on the first day back,” she complained. “What am I supposed to write?”
“It sounds fairly easy, Lan. Just do a Web search. You can write three hundred words about art in ten minutes.”
“No, you can write three hundred words in ten minutes. It’ll take me hours.”
Mom called me downstairs for dinner and I told Lan I had to go.
“By the way, did you hear about Tiffany’s party?” she asked before I could hang up.
“She’s always having a party.” Every time her parents took a weekend “holiday,” Tiffany threw some kind of wild celebration for half the school.
“This is different. It’s her birthday party, and apparently she’s going all out. As in, bigger than homecoming and prom put together.”
“Well, I’m sure it will be lovely. Gotta go.”
I had never been invited to one of Tiffany’s parties, and I didn’t think she was going to start putting me on the guest list now. I guessed it would be nice to see what all the fuss was about, but at the same time, I knew I’d feel completely out of place with Tiffany’s crowd.
My parents were already sitting at the dining-room table when I walked in.
“How’s Lan?” Mom asked as she scooped steaming vegetables onto her plate.
I took my seat and dug into a bowl of pasta salad. “Good. She’s freaking out about a history paper we have due tomorrow.”
“A paper on the first day back? Good,” Dad said. He approved of hard work, strict teachers and rigid rules. Dinner, for example, was nonnegotiable in our house. We ate dinner together six days a week, with only Friday as an exception. My parents kept strange hours and dinner was the one time we were all together.
Sometimes Dad was called out in the middle of the night, and Mom worked at Cleary Confections, the local bakery, and usually got up around four in the morning, which I considered inhumane. Mom was in charge of cakes. Birthday, wedding, graduation—she made them all, from plain yellow with chocolate frosting to a six-tiered red velvet monstrosity decorated to look like a volcano. She said baking was her “creative outlet,” and she loved it. She came home smelling like buttercream icing and devising new ways to shape gum paste into flowers.
“I heard you had an exciting morning at school,” Mom commented. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to Dad or to me.
“You mean the graffiti? It wasn’t that big a deal.”
Dad looked at me. “Not a big deal? Do you have any idea how much money it’s going to cost to sandblast that stuff off the wall?” He shook his head. “No one respects public property anymore.”
“It was on the news at lunchtime,” Mom said. “It’s certainly interesting. Not your typical graffiti. It seemed more, I don’t know, professional?” She looked at Dad like he might be able to supply the appropriate word.
“Well, it just might be,” he admitted. He told us that Trent’s alibi was a good one, that he was out of state visiting his grandmother that day. He got home around eleven, a fact established by a gas receipt, and went to bed at midnight, which was confirmed by his parents.
“And we think the vandalism occurred around 1:00 a.m.,” Dad said. “He could’ve left after they thought he went to bed, but his folks let us search his car, and we didn’t find anything. No paint, nothing. So Trent may be innocent.”
Unless his parents were covering for him, I thought. Why would he be visiting his grandmother in another state the night before school began? I didn’t say anything about the article I’d read, but I didn’t have to. Dad had seen it, as well.
“This same thing happened in Tennessee just a few days ago. We think it was some guy traveling through town, looking to stir up a little trouble.”
Mom reached for her glass of wine. “Well, it certainly is strange.”
Dad shrugged. “It’s probably a one-time thing. This guy tagged the town and moved on. Some other town will get those gorillas next.”
“Tagged?” Mom asked.
“It’s what they call it now.”
After dinner I went to my room to work on my history paper. I had looked up some definitions of art and tried to find a clever way to use them. The problem, I discovered, was that no one could come up with one single definition for art. It didn’t have to be beautiful if it was considered “significant.” But who decided what was significant?
I figured I could spend hours on the question and still not come up with an answer, so I decided to use a quote from Hippocrates because I knew Mr. Gildea liked the Greeks. “Vita brevis, ars loriga,” I typed at the top of the page. Then I included the translation: “Life is short, art endures.” I argued that the gorillas on the school wall weren’t really art because, in the end, they would not endure. They would be removed within the month, and if they had truly been art, wouldn’t someone want to keep them around longer? I knew it wasn’t the most solid argument, but I figured the ancient Greek quote would earn me some points and besides, weren’t all teachers supposed to be opposed to defacing school property? Mr. Gildea would like it, I was sure.
I put away my schoolwork and got ready for bed. I couldn’t stop thinking about the wall. I was sure Trent was behind it, but maybe someone was helping him. Maybe Brady and Reva were working with Trent, not just covering for him, but painting, as well. I told myself to stop coming up with conspiracy theories and get some sleep, but I couldn’t seem to turn off my brain. As I was drifting off, another thought occurred to me: what if Eli was helping Trent?
3
DAD WAS ONLY PARTLY RIGHT about the graffiti leaving town. The gorillas did appear in another state, on the side of an abandoned restaurant in Beulah, Arkansas, a small town east of Little Rock. This time, two gorillas were pictured, and the thought bubble above their heads read “We love vegetarians.” It appeared three days after our school had been “decorated.” Suddenly it did not seem possible that Trent had been involved. There was just no way to drive all the way to Arkansas Wednesday after school, paint a building and be back