Tagged. Mara Purnhagen

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ