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A car pulled up to the window and Eli stood up. It was a big order: five drinks, each one different, including a strawberry cheesecake cappuccino, which is a hassle to make. Eli started on a low-fat, almond latte while I handled the cash register. We worked well together. Eli was fast and efficient, and I double-checked everything, made sure the lids were on tight and cleaned up afterward. After our customer left, Eli sat back down at his computer while I rinsed out the steamer cups.

“So he e-mailed you?” I asked.

“Yeah, but it’s brief.” Eli read aloud from the message Trent had sent: “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. They’re checking my alibi. Not to worry, it’s all good. No proof, no crime.” Eli started to say something else, but stopped. I knew he was holding back, but I wasn’t going to push it.

“I wonder what his alibi is.”

Eli yawned. “He was out of town visiting relatives.”

“So you do know more than you’re telling me.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Why does everyone assume it was someone from our school?”

“Who else would do that to the building?” I wiped the counter and made sure we had enough medium-sized cups. I knew we’d be getting an after-work rush in a half hour, and nearly everyone ordered a medium.

I glanced at Eli, who was still typing away at his computer. I wanted to remind him to do the inventory, but I also knew he would get it done and I didn’t want to sound like a nag. If Eli was anything, it was reliable. And adorable, in a way. When we first began working together over the summer, I thought he was potential boyfriend material, but the timing was off. He had just started dating Reva, a junior who came around all the time to gaze at him and glare at me, and I was just breaking up with Kevin Cleaver, a senior I had dated for a total of three months.

Kevin and I had dated casually because we both knew he was leaving for college at the end of the summer. He took me to the prom, where we danced and laughed and ate chicken Marsala. We had fun, and I thought we would keep seeing each other until August, when he left for school.

Then, a month before he was supposed to leave, he announced that he’d been “hooking up” with a college girl he met at a party. It was the first time anyone had broken up with me. Kevin just stood there, his hands shoved into his pockets, and shrugged. “We both knew this wasn’t a long-term thing, right?” he asked, and I nodded and said something like “Yeah, sure, no big deal.” But I was crushed. It actually surprised me that I was so hurt. I mean, I knew it was a temporary thing, but still. I guess it was the fact that I had been so easily replaced. I thought I had mattered to him at least a little, and when I realized I hadn’t, I felt even worse.

“You look tired,” I said to Eli. He had dark circles beneath his eyes and he kept yawning.

“I need to get back on schedule,” he said, not taking his eyes off the computer. “I stayed up too late over break. Ben was in town and he never sleeps.”

Eli’s brother Ben went to college out West somewhere, where he was an undeclared senior. According to Eli, Ben changed his major every semester and would be in school at least another three years.

Eli looked at me. “So, what did you think of it?”

“Think of what?” I was debating whether or not to bring another bottle of almond syrup out of the back room. We were getting low.

“The gorillas. What did you think of the gorillas?”

“I think someone wasted an awful lot of time and effort. I mean, they’re just going to be removed.”

“But what did you think about the actual gorillas? Did you like them? Hate them? Anything?”

I considered it. My first thought had been that someone—most likely Trent—was going to be in a lot of trouble. But I also thought that the gorillas had been very well done. Beautiful, almost.

Eli would probably think I was crazy if I called them beautiful, so instead I said, “We debated it in history. You know, whether it was art or just vandalism.”

“And?” Eli seemed pretty intent on the topic.

“And the class was fairly divided.”

“Which side were you on?”

I knew what he wanted me to say. Despite his claims that he didn’t know anything, Eli was almost certainly covering for Trent.

“I haven’t decided,” I said finally.

Eli stood up and stretched. “Well, let me know when you do,” he said. “I’m going to do the inventory. If you get a chance, check out the article on my computer.”

After he went back to the storage room, I sat down and picked up the laptop. The screen showed the front page of a newspaper from Tennessee. Mt. Juliet Encounters Gorilla it read. It was about a town near Nashville where a four-foot high gorilla had been painted onto the wall of an abandoned building. There was a small black-and-white picture of the building. I pulled out my camera and compared the pictures I had taken earlier in the morning to the one in the article. The gorilla was exactly the same as the ones on our school. Exactly. I checked the date of the article.

“Two days ago,” I murmured. Mt. Juliet was at least a four-hour drive from Cleary, maybe more. Was that where Trent’s relatives lived? If so, it was a bad alibi. And why paint the same picture in both towns? The police would be able to connect him to both places and he’d really be in trouble. If Trent’s relatives did live in Mt. Juliet, it wouldn’t make any sense that Eli would want me to read the article. He would be pointing the finger at his best friend. I was confused.

Eli came back from the stockroom just as cars began lining up for the after-work rush. I wasn’t sure what to say to him, but fortunately we were so busy making drinks that neither one of us had time to talk. Finally, just before six, we began to close up for the day.

“So what did you think of the article?” Eli asked.

“Well, it’s obviously the same guy,” I said, handing him my camera. He clicked through the images I’d taken that morning.

“These are good,” he said. He paused at a shot I’d taken of the crowd. “This one’s really good.”

I looked over his shoulder. The picture on the screen showed one of my crowd shots. A group of freshmen boys had just moved in front of me, blocking my view of the wall. One of the boys was holding something in his cupped hands, and the others looked down at what he held, smiling. I didn’t get a look at what was in the boy’s hands, and just after I took the picture, they walked away.

“The gorillas aren’t even in that one,” I pointed out.

“I know, but it’s still a good shot. Very clear. Plus, it’s not staged. There’s something real there.”

“I guess.”

Eli turned off the camera and handed it back to me. “You should take more pictures like that.”

“I think people would notice if I stood around taking pictures of them.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You could try to, you know, stay out of the way.”

Something I tried to do every day, I thought. But taking pictures of unsuspecting students seemed like an odd thing to do if you weren’t on the yearbook staff.

“Think about it,” Eli said.

“Um, okay.”

I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to say. Eli and I cleaned up and locked the doors. Brady was waiting for him 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 in time for class on Thursday morning, which was exactly where Trent was.

Dad knew about it, and an online search for “gorilla graffiti” would lead someone to several articles, but most people didn’t know or didn’t care. Trent seemed happy enough to take credit for the prank at our school, and everyone seemed happy enough to give it to him. His adoring league of freshmen followers quickly squashed any rumors that he wasn’t responsible for the popular artwork. Still, something felt off to me, although I wasn’t sure what it was. I guess part of me hoped that Cleary did have a resident graffiti artist. The mural had caused a commotion and shattered our boring routine, if only for a little while.

On Friday, the gorilla mural at school changed. Someone had added to it. “This is art” was stenciled in the right-hand corner of the wall. One of the gorillas was now holding a paintbrush while another grasped a spray-paint can. Again, it looked professional. And again, it caused an uproar.

“It’s just stupid,” Tiffany Werner proclaimed during our first period debate. “I mean, they’re going to sandblast it this weekend, right? So what’s the point of adding to it? It’s a desperate cry for attention.”

I was reminded of the quote I had used in my paper defining art. I had written that it wasn’t art if it did not endure. At the time, I’d believed it. I mean, all truly great art had endured, right? How old was the Mona Lisa?

Lan raised her hand, and Mr. Gildea nodded at her. “If he wants attention, then why has the artist remained anonymous?” she asked. “What if he doesn’t want anything but for us to look at it, to enjoy it? Isn’t that what art is for?”

I knew Lan was just disagreeing with Tiffany for the sake of disagreeing with her. Lan had come to school on Tuesday wearing her favorite orchid pin, the one made with hundreds of little stones in different shades of ivory and red. Tiffany noticed it and stopped in front of Lan’s desk before class began.

“Are those real rubies?” she demanded in front of everyone.

“Of course,” Lan said, making sure to look Tiffany directly in the eye.

Tiffany just smirked. “I’ll bet,” she said before walking away. Lan was furious and since then had been looking for any reason at all to make Tiffany look bad in public. So far, she had achieved only minor success.

Brady Barber agreed with Lan’s opinion about the graffiti artist, and the debate was soon picking up speed—and volume. Mr. Gildea finally had to quiet everyone down and tell us to open our books. We were already behind, he said, but we could debate for ten minutes every morning as long as we remained civil with one another.

“Debate is probably the best learning experience you’ll ever have,” he said. “Second best, of course, will be learning about the Carthaginians. Turn to page sixteen.”

I was relieved to finally get off the topic of the school gorillas. It was getting a little crazy. The local paper had featured a picture of the mural on its front page, and of course our student newspaper dedicated two whole pages to it, interviewing nearly everyone. I’d heard that some kids were planning to protest the sandblasting, scheduled for Saturday, but figured it was just another one of Trent’s crazy ideas. He had a real knack for self-promotion.

I was still thinking about it when I arrived at work. I was expecting to find Bonnie, but Eli was there, working on his math homework.

“Bonnie’s not here?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, she left you something,” he said.

A tall cup of caramel latte sat on the counter. I smiled and took a sip. “You know, I have these five days a week, and I’m telling you, they just keep getting better.”

“You keep drinking those and you’re going to become a caramel latte,” Eli muttered. He was furiously erasing a problem in his notebook. I was about to offer him some help when I heard the toilet flush.

“I thought you said Bonnie left?”

“She did.”

The bathroom door opened and Reva Abbott sauntered out. There were two things I always noticed about Reva: her heels and her nails. She wore tall, spiky heels that made a sharp clipping sound against the floor. I tried wearing high heels to school once, but my feet were killing me before the end of second period. I didn’t know how Reva did it. Also, she had the longest nails I’d ever seen on a girl. They were like talons, and she painted them in bright, unusual colors like turquoise or orange. That day they were deep purple, like an eggplant.

Reva stopped when she saw me, gave me a thin smile and turned to Eli.

“I’m leaving,” she said. Eli barely looked up from his work. Reva bent down and whispered something into his ear, her dark nails tickling the back of his neck. I turned away, flustered by the intimacy of it.

I stared out the window, watching cars and warming my hands around the steaming cup of latte. When a blue SUV sped past, I immediately thought of Kevin. He had driven a similar car. After prom we had spent some time in the backseat. Nothing too heavy, just a little making out while Black Sabbath played in the CD player. Kevin was really into classic rock.

“Sorry about that.”

I was pulled from my thoughts by Eli. When I turned around, I was surprised to see that Reva was gone. I hadn’t heard her leave.

“Oh, no problem.”

“She gave me a ride,” Eli explained.

“Right. You don’t have a car.”

I didn’t have a car, either, mainly because of my dad. He said he’d seen too much to let a teenager behind the wheel. “When you’re eighteen, we’ll talk,” he’d promised. When I complained to Mom that it was completely unfair, she sided with Dad. “We just need to know that you can be responsible,” she said, which was infuriating, because when had I ever not been responsible? I did well in school, went to work and came home every night for dinner. Most parents would consider me their dream child. My parents saw me as one tenuous step away from a tragic life of wild teenage debauchery.

“This summer,” Eli said. “That is, my parents said they’d get me a car if I pass math.” He ripped a page from his notebook and wadded it into a sharp ball. “So maybe I won’t be getting a car,” he said with a bitter laugh.

“What are you working on?”

“Precalculus.”

“You are so lucky you know me,” I joked as I sat down next to him. “Because I just happen to be a precalc expert.”

“Lucky me,” Eli agreed, although he sounded less than enthusiastic. A car pulled up to the window and Eli automatically got up while I read over his book. After he had finished with the order, Eli slumped into the chair and sighed. “It’s no use,” he informed me. “I can’t learn this stuff. Trust me. My brain cannot process numbers.”

I wondered if Eli’s dark mood was due more to Reva’s brief visit than from problems with precalculus. I sensed there were problems between them. Eli always seemed to pull away from her, to be uncomfortable with her, in a way. Or maybe he was just embarrassed by public displays of affection. He was one of those guys, I thought, that liked to stay in the background, someone who didn’t like or need the glow of the spotlight.

Reva, on the other hand, was more outspoken. She wore heavy red lipstick and always smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. On the rare occasions I had heard her laugh, she was loud. I got the impression that she wanted people to look in her direction and see her with one arm draped across Eli.

I wasn’t sure why Reva disliked me, but Lan had a theory. “She’s the possessive type. She’s suspicious of any girl within a mile of him, and you work next to him every day.”

“So? It doesn’t mean I want to date him,” I argued.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lan had replied. “You’re a threat.”

It was laughable to me that anyone would see me as a threat, but I knew Lan had a point. I thought about this as I leaned over to help Eli with a calculus problem. He smelled very clean, like soap and mint mouthwash. I suddenly felt self-conscious and hoped that I smelled okay, too.

We went through Eli’s assignment slowly, getting up every few minutes to serve a customer. Eli struggled with some of the problems, and I tried to break it down for him as best I could. I was very aware of his breathing, which made it difficult for me to concentrate. At one point, I realized that we were breathing in rhythm with one another, and it was all I could think about.

It took us about an hour to get through his homework, but he seemed a little more positive once we finished.

“Thanks,” he said as he put away his book. “That helped. Maybe I can pass this class.”

“Of course you can,” I said, then felt immediately stupid. I hoped I didn’t sound like his mother.

A car pulled up, its bass pumping so hard that the windows rattled.

“You guys sell burgers?” someone yelled. I was about to snap that no, we certainly did not sell fast food when Eli leaned out the window to slap hands with the driver. It was Trent Adams. Eli told him to come on in, so Trent parked his car and came around to the back.

If you saw Trent walking down the street you might assume that he played basketball. He was long and skinny and kept his dark blond hair buzzed. I could see why Lan, like half the girls at our school, found him so attractive.