Snyder, Zilpha Keatley (3 page)

All of a sudden she said, “Could you help me get these darn things off? I must not have put them on the right place or something. When I look down to read I can’t even see the words.”

So Melanie scratched the ends of the eyelashes loose with her longest fingernail, and then April

pulled them the rest of the way off. They were on pretty tight, and she said, “Ouch!” several times and a couple of other words that Melanie wasn’t allowed to say.

“- -!” said April, looking in the mirror. “I think I pulled out most of my real ones. Does it look like it to you?”

“I don’t think so,” Melanie said. “I still see some. Is this the first time you’ve worn them? The false ones, I mean?”

April put back on her haughty face. “Of course not. Nearly everybody wears them in Hollywood. My mother wears them all the time. It’s just that these are new ones, and they must be a different kind.”

April put her eyelashes away carefully in her big bag and they went back to looking at books. Melanie showed her some of her favorites, and April picked out a couple to borrow. It was then that April took a very special book off the shelf.

It was a very dull-looking old geography book that no one would be interested in. That was why Melanie used it to hide something very special and secret. As April opened the book some cutout paper people fell out on the floor.

“What are those?” April asked.

“Just some old things of mine,” Melanie said, holding out her hand for the book, but April kept on turning the pages and finding more bunches of paper

people.

“Do you really still play with paper dolls?” April asked in just the tone of voice that Melanie had feared she would use. Not just because she was April, either. It was the tone of voice that nearly anyone would use about a sixth grade girl who still played with ordinary paper dolls.

“But they’re not really paper dolls,” Melanie said, “and I don’t really play with them. Not like moving them around and dressing them up and everything. They’re just sort of a record for a game I play. I make up a family and then I find people who look like them in magazines and catalogues. Just so I’ll remember them better. I have fourteen families now. See they all have their names and ages written on the back. I make up stuff about their personalities and what they do. Sometimes I write it down like a story, but usually I just make it up.”

April’s scornful look was dissolving. “Like what?”

“Well,” Melanie said, “this is the Brewster family. Mr. Brewster is a detective. I had to cut him out of the newspaper because he was the only man I could find who looked like a detective. Don’t you think he does?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Well anyway, he just-that is, I just made up about how he solved this very hard mystery and

caught some dangerous criminals. And then the criminals escaped and were going to get revenge on Mr. Brewster. So the whole family had to go into hiding and wear disguises and everything.”

April spread the Brewsters out on the floor. Her eyes were shining and without the eyelashes they were pretty, wide and blue. “Have they caught the criminals yet?” she asked. Melanie shook her head. “Well, how about if the kids catch them. They could just happen to find out where the criminals were hiding?”

“Neat!” Melanie said. “Maybe Ted,” she pointed to the smallest paper Brewster, “could come home and tell the other kids how he thinks he saw one of the criminals, going into a certain house.”

“And then,” April interrupted, “the girls could go to the house pretending to sell Girl Scout cookies, to see if it really was the crooks.”

From the Girl-Scout-cookies caper, the game moved into even more exciting escapades, and when Mrs. Ross came in to say that Marshall was down for his nap and that she was leaving for the university where she was taking a summer course for school-teachers, the criminals were just escaping, taking one of the Brewster children with them as a hostage. An hour later, when Marshall came in sleepy-eyed and dragging Security, several of the other paper families had been brought into the plot. Marshall seemed

content to sit and listen, so the game went on with daring adventures, narrow escapes, tragic illnesses and even a romance or two. At last, right in the middle of a shipwreck on a desert island, April noticed the time and said she’d have to go home so she’d be there when Caroline got back from work.

As they walked to the door Melanie said, “Do you want to play some more tomorrow?”

April was adjusting her fur stole around her shoulders for the trip upstairs. “Oh, I guess so,” she said with a sudden return to haughtiness.

But Melanie was beginning to understand about April’s frozen spells, and how to thaw her out. You just had to let her know she couldn’t make you stop liking her that easily. “None of my friends know how to play imagining games the way you do,” Melanie said. “Some of them can do it a little bit but they mostly don’t have any very good ideas. And a lot of them only like ball games or other things that are already made up. But I like imagining games better than anything.”

April was being very busy trying to get her stole to stay on because the clasp was a little bit broken. All at once she pulled it off, wadded it all up and tucked it under her arm. She looked right straight at Melanie and said, “You know what? I never did call them that before, but imagining games are just about

all I ever play because most of the time I never have anybody to play with.”

She started off up the hall. Then she turned around and walked backward waving her fur stole around her head like a lasso. “You’ve got lots of good ideas, too,” she yelled.

The Egypt Girls

ALL THROUGH THE MONTH OF AUGUST, MELANIE AND

April were together almost every day. They played the paper-families game and other games both in the Ross’s apartment and in Caroline’s. They took Marshall for walks and to the park while Mrs. Ross was gone to her class, and almost every day they went to the library. It was in the library in August that the seeds were planted that grew into in September in the Professor’s deserted yard.

It all started when April found a new book about Egypt, an especially interesting one about the life of a young pharoah. She passed it on to Melanie, and with it a lot of her interest in all sorts of ancient stuff. Melanie was soon as fascinated by the valley of the Nile as April had been. Before long, with the help of a sympathetic librarian, they had found and read

just about everything the library had to offer on Egypt-both fact and fiction.

They read about Egypt in the library during the day, and at home in the evening, and in bed late at night when they were supposed to be asleep. Then in the mornings while they helped each other with their chores they discussed the things they had found out. In a very short time they had accumulated all sorts of fascinating facts about tombs and temples, pharoahs and pyramids, mummies and monoliths, and dozens of other exotic topics. They decided that the Egyptians couldn’t have been more interesting if they had done it on purpose. Everything, from their love of beauty and mystery, to their fascinating habit of getting married when they were only eleven years old, made good stuff to talk about. By the end of the month, April and Melanie were beginning work on their own alphabet of hieroglyphic for writing secret messages, and at the library they were beginning to be called the Egypt Girls.

But in between all the good times, both April and Melanie were spending some bad moments worrying about the beginning of school. April was worried because she knew from experience-lots of it-that it isn’t easy to face a new class in a new school. She didn’t admit it, not even to Melanie, but she was having nightmares about the first day of school. There were classroom nightmares, and schoolyard nightmares and principal’s office nightmares; but there was another kind, too, that had to do with an empty mailbox. In the whole month of August she had had only one very short postcard from Dorothea.

Melanie was worried, too, but in a different way. School had always been easy for Melanie; and even though she wasn’t the kind who got elected class president, she’d always had plenty of friends. But now there was April to think about.

April was the most exciting friend that Melanie had ever had. No one else knew about so many fascinating things, or could think up such marvelous things to do. With April, a walk to the library could become an exploration of a forbidden land, or a shiny pebble on the sidewalk could be a magic token from an invisible power. When April got that imagining gleam in her eye there was no telling what was going to happen next. Just about any interesting subject you could mention, April was sure to know a lot of weird and wonderful facts about it. And if she didn’t, you could always count on her to make up a few, just to keep things going.

There was only one thing that April didn’t seem to know much about-that was getting along with people. Most people, anyhow. With Melanie, April was herself, new and different from anyone, wild and daring and terribly brave. But with other people she was often quite different. With other kids she usually

put on her Hollywood act, terribly grownup and bored with everything. And with most grownups April’s eyes got narrow and you couldn’t believe a word she said.

Melanie had gone to Wilson School all her life, and she knew what it was like. There were all different kinds of kids at Wilson; kids who looked and talked and acted all sorts of ways. Wilson was used to that. But there were some things that Wilson kids just wouldn’t stand for, and Melanie was afraid that April’s Hollywood act was one of them.

And Melanie wasn’t entirely just guessing about how her schoolmates would react to April. A couple of times when April and Melanie had been at the library or in the park they’d run into some of the Wilson kids that Melanie knew; and you could see right away that April wasn’t making the right kind of impression. And it was going to be worse at school, where every kid would feel duty bound to do his part in trimming the new kid down to size. Melanie had a feeling that April wasn’t going to trim easily.

The thing that worried Melanie the most was the eyelashes. April was still wearing them a lot of the time. She’d gotten so she didn’t wear them to the library because she still had trouble reading through them, but even if she hadn’t had them on all day she always put them on when it was time for her grandmother to come home. Once Melanie asked her why.

“She doesn’t like for me to wear them,” April said.

Melanie thought about that for a minute. Then she said, “You don’t like your grandmother very much, do you?”

April just shrugged but her eyes got narrow.

“I don’t see why,” Melanie said. “She seems pretty nice to me.”

“She doesn’t like my mother,” April said. “She doesn’t even think that Dorothea’s going to send for me to come home pretty soon.”

“Did she say so?”

“No, but she thinks it. I can tell.”

Then, just at the beginning of September, with school only a few days away, came that exciting day when began. April and Melanie and Marshall were on their way home through the alley when, by the sheerest luck, Melanie noticed the loose plank. It had moved stiffly, that first time, with a reluctant rusty yelp and they peeked through into the hidden and deserted yard. It was fascinating-so weed-grown and forgotten and secret, but then came the most unbelievably wonderful part of all.

There she was, waiting for them in the shed, Nefertiti, the beautiful queen of ancient Egypt, like a magical omen, or, as April put it, “a beautiful messenger from out of the ancient past.” There had to be something terribly out-of-ordinary about it. Why, it had only been a few days before that they had read

all about her and admired a picture of her lovely sculptured head. And there it was, almost like magic. Very much like magic, in fact-and that’s the way was, from the very beginning.

But even didn’t stop the beginning of school from arriving with all its problems. So, when April lost one of her eyelashes that first day in Egypt, Melanie couldn’t help feeling a little relieved, although she wouldn’t have said so. But then, there it was on Security-and the problem was just as complicated as ever. It was the next morning that Melanie finally got up nerve enough to talk to April about it.

April was helping Melanie dry the dishes so they’d be ready to leave for Egypt sooner. “Are you going to wear your eyelashes to school?” Melanie asked with careful casualness.

But April turned quickly, and with her face all shut up the way it was with other people. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t think anybody else at Wilson wears them.”

April’s chin went up and her lips thinned. “Am I supposed to care what the kids at a little old place like Wilson School wear?”

Melanie could see that she wasn’t going to get anywhere so she let the subject drop. But before the dishes were finished she had started making a drastic

plan. April just couldn’t wear those eyelashes to school on the first day. She was going to be hard enough to integrate even without them.

As soon as Melanie had finished her chores they were free to head for Egypt. Since it was Saturday Melanie’s parents were both at home, but Mr. Ross always had to study and he was only too glad for the girls to get Marshall out from underfoot. Just outside the apartment door April stopped with her finger to her lips.

“Shh,” she warned, “we must proceed with caution. We may be being watched.”

“Who’s watching?” Marshall said, looking around.

“The enemies of Egypt. Who were those worst enemies, Melanie?”

“The Syrians,” Melanie whispered.

“Yeah, they’re the ones. The Syrians. Their spies are everywhere.”

With elaborate caution they made their way out of the back door of the Casa Rosada and down the alley. They went the wrong way first and took evasive action through a garage and around a stack of garbage pails. Then they crawled through a piece of cement pipe and started to make a run for it; but they had to go back for Marshall who was still in the pipe, all tangled up in Security’s legs. When they finally arrived at the fence they were out of breath.